The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
Reflections on The Revolution in France
Fans are interesting things. Rush fans just can't comprehend why the rest of the world doesn't like Rush. REM fans consider the rest of the world beneath their refined dignities to notice. Kate Bush fans love the rest of the world, and the world loves them, but spend long nights plotting to knife one another in the back.
"Gradenza"
My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths...
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.
From the GNU Manifesto
"First," said Opus, reading from the government manual, "Gather shovels. Second, quickly and without panic, take refuge in countryside... Dig shallow trenches. Lie down in trenches, cover self with wooden door or like object and await blast. After shock wave passes, emerge and go to nearest emergency Civil Defense Center and fill out emergency change of address forms."
Bloom Country Babylon
Never be fatalistic about the inevitability of nuclear war or the destruction of our environment. There are ways to avoid the holocaust and to make the world a cleaner place. We must never cease to search for them.
Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
Boffin: A Puffin, a bird with a mournful cry, got crossed with a Baffin, a mercifully obsolete Fleet Air Arm aircraft. Their offspring was a Boffin, a bird of astonishingly queer appearance, bursting with weird and sometimes inopportune ideas, but possessed of staggering inventiveness, analytical powers and persistence. Its ideas, like its eggs, were conical and unbreakable. You push the unwanted ones away, and they just roll back.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
But then... it used to be so simple, once upon a time.
Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition.
Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like "Hurrah, I've discovered Boyle's Third Law." And everyone knew where they stood. But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself -- partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.
Witches Abroad
Barney turned his little squinty blue eyes on me. "We go to the garrick now and become warbs," he said. "The hell we do!" I thought to myself quickly.
"The Black Magic of Barney Haller", in The Thurber Carnival
They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
World Of Wonders
When you search a database, you browse through recent material, often covering no more than the last ten years. Cutting off the past in this way streamlines the search. But a musing cut off from historical roots loses the fertile exposure to false starts, abandoned pathways, and unheard-of avenues. An exclusive focus on the recent past curtails our mental musings, and a narrow awareness sacrifices the intuitive mind.
"Logic and Intuition", in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality
At their potlatch ceremonies these people would compete with each other in burning and destroying their money and valuable possessions, and accordingly their ideal was the man who would perhaps seem to us a paranoid megalomaniac or possibly an industrial magnate.
On the Kwakiutl tribe, Techniques of Persuasion
Although I know her soft body / I cannot sound out her heart; / Yet we have but to make a few lines on a chart / And the distance of the farthest stars / In the sky can be measured.
The spreadsheet matrix is a creative prison bound by A1 and Z1000. Walls. A psychological prison. Unlike the Black Death, nobody sees this malady. There will be no cure. Soon it will be too late.
No God is sane. How could it be? To be a Man is so much less taxing, and most men are mad. Consider the God. How much more deranged the Gods must be, merely to exist. There can be no doubt: consider the Universe and the patterns without reason upon which it is run. God is mad. The God of Music is mad. The Timegod is punctual, but he is mad. And the Machine God is mad.
"Ernest and the Machine God"
Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers.
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
"Eleonora"
We must also have a special care to know the right ministring of a compound, and how to find out the just proportion of weight therein; for the goodness of the operations of things, consists chiefly in the due proportion and measure of them: And unless the mixtion be every way perfect, it availeth little in working.
Natural Magick
It was very strange that I, who knew the whole extent of space and time, and counted the wandering stars like sheep, overlooking none, that I who was the most awakened of all beings, I, the glory which myriads in all ages had given their lives to establish, and myriads had worshipped, should now look about me with the same overpowering awe, the same abashed and tongue-tied worship as that which human travellers in the desert feel under the stars.
Star Maker
The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
The Standardization of Error
All the evils of publishing can be traced to one source -- copyright.
Quoted by Kildare Dobbs in The Living Name
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I can speak French but I cannot understand it.
The skeptic may be pardoned for thinking that hypertext encourages irrelevance. What the user can end up with is little more than a series of footnotes, marginalia, and "see also" references -- items that have historically been relegated to second-class citizenship in the good old book format, with the added benefit of not having to stare at a lousy screen display to read them... Indeed, when you boil it down to its rudiments, hypertext seems to make one major claim: it makes computers work almost as well as books.
Testing? That's scheduled for first thing after 3.0 ships. Quality is job Floating Point Error; Execution Terminated.
On applications for Microsoft Windows, in comp.os.unix.advocacy.
God has made Canada one of those nations which cannot be conquered and cannot be destroyed, except by itself.
"Canada's Best Service for British Ideals"
To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.
The Imperial Animal, with Robin Fox
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say "elevator", we say "lift"; they say "drapes", we say "curtains"; they say "president", we say "seriously deranged git".