Quotes - Part Twenty-Five

 

403.                   The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

--Eden Philpotts

404.                   Trust the overthinker who tells you they love you.  They have, most assuredly, thought of every reason not to.

--L.K. Pilgrim

405.                   “Armageddon” got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist.

--Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy

406.                   For the Discovery Institute to accuse a pro-evolution board member of the Texas Board of Education of having her religion bias her actions is like Jeffrey Dahmer telling you to be a vegetarian.

--Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy

407.                   You don’t actually have to be able to understand the lyrics, you’ve just got to feel like you could if you wanted to.

--Chuck Plotkin (Producer for Bruce Springsteen)

408.                   The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

--Plutarch

409.                   Tell me every terrible thing you ever did, and let me love you anyway,

--Edgar Allan Poe

410.                   The goodness of a true pun is in direct ratio of its intolerability.

--Edgar Allan Poe

411.                   If you have a digital watch, which way is clockwise?

--Police Scanner

412.               Not my circus.  Not my monkeys.

--Polish proverb

413.               Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection.

--Stephen Porges

414.               Setting the AI reactions for a giant spiderbot is pretty easy… hate, hate, hate, hate.

--Steve Powers

415.               My mom said she learned how to swim. Someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. That’s how she learned how to swim. I said, “Mom, they weren’t trying to teach you how to swim.”

--Paula Poundstone

416.               Two French Admirals were berating a US Naval Attaché, “Why must we speak to you in English. Why don’t you have to learn French instead of our having to learn English?”

To which the Attaché replied, “Maybe because we arranged it so you didn’t have to learn German?”

--Jerry Pournelle, Friday April 4, 2003

417.               “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, but that dude that’s yell-singing is replaced by Animal from The Muppets.

--@poutinesmoothie

418.               We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last 100 years and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.

--Secretary of State Colin Powell

419.               The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal.  Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

-- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

420.               All fungi are edible.  Some fungi are only edible once.

--Terry Pratchett

421.               Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self.

--Terry Pratchett, Snuff

422.               Everything I know I learned at the public library; school taught me to spit.

--Terry Pratchett

423.               I’m not the world’s greatest expert, but I would have thought the wizards, witches, trolls… would have given her a clue.

--Terry Pratchett, mocking J.K. Rowling’s claim that she did not write fantasy

424.               It is better to build a seismograph than to worship the volcano.

--Terry Pratchett

425.               It is hard to convey five-dimensional ideas in a language evolved to scream defiance at the monkeys in the next tree.

--Terry Pratchett

426.               It was so much easier to blame it on Them.  It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us.  If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault.  If it was Us, what did that make Me?  After all, I’m one of Us.  I must be.  I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them.  No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them.  We’re always one of Us.  It’s Them that do the bad things.

--Terry Pratchett

427.               Never trust an engineer who is laughing.

--Terry Pratchett

428               Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…

--Terry Pratchett

429.               People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time.

--Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

430.               The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.  Take boots, for example.  He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances.  A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars.  But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.  Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.  But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years.  A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.  This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

431.               Satire is meant to ridicule power.  If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.

--Terry Pratchett