"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
- Herbert Spencer

"What about the computer?"
"No computer, boss, not even a Game Boy."
"He didn't have a TV, DiNozzo."
"Game Boys are handheld, Kate. You're thinking of XBoxes, Ps2's- "
"I'm thinking of kicking some ass!"

"It's a vampire!"
"In a parcel!"
"In our living room!"
"- Hate mail!"
"What do we do?"
"Only pop music can save us now!"

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

- Robert Heinlein, gods rest his saintly soul

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

"For this was the other thing that Elric knew; that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance. This knowledge gave Elric his strength- his profound anger at injustice and inequality- his belief, now that he had visited Tanelorn, that it was possible to live in harmony with mortals of all persuasions and remain vital and engaged with the world. These things he would neither sell nor offer for sale, and, in refusing to give himself up wholly to Chaos, it meant he bore his weight of crimes upon his own conscience and must live, night and day, with the knowledge of what and whom he had killed and ruined. This, he guessed, was a weight that Gaynor had been unable to bear. For his part, he would rather bear the weight of his own guilt than the weight Gaynor had chosen."

- "The Revenge of the Rose, " Michael Moorcock

"Hangman Chang, the sinister bony-fingered menace from the East."
"Nathan Blaze...The twat."

- Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible, "Frenzy of Tongs"

"“He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.”

- C.S. Lewis

Quotes...

I like quote sites. They're mostly text-based, and thus work well on dialup.

"It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust."
-Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
-Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Critic as Artist, part 2, 1891

"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Essays, First Series: Prudence, 1841

"Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses."
- K'ung Fu-Tse (551 BC - 479 BC)

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

"And a youth said, "Speak to us of Friendship."

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

And he is your board and your fireside.

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."

And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed."

- Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet, " chapter 19

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
-Thomas Paine

This Machine Kills Fascists

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow."

-Woody Guthrie

More reasons to love the Wolfe books

"Confound it. Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life."

"If I offend by being curt, very well. Anyone has the privilege of offending who is willing to bear the odium."

- Nero Wolfe

And people ask me why I like this one better than "On The Road"

"Those afternoons, those lazy afternoons, when I used to sit, or lie down, on Desolation Peak, sometimes on the alpine grass, hundreds of miles of snowcovered grass all around, looming Mount Hozomeen on my north, vast snowy Jack to the south, the encharmed picture of the lake below to the west and the snowy hump of Mount Baker beyond, and to the east the rilled and ridged monstrosities humping to the Cascade Ridge, and after that first time suddenly realizing "It's me that changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void!" and so that every time I thought of the void I'd be looking at Mt. Hozomeen (because chair and bed and meadowgrass faced north) until I realized "Hozomeen is the Void- at least Hozomeen is the void to my eyes"- Stark naked rock, pinnacles, and thousand feet high protruding from immense timbered shoulders, and the green pointy-fir snake of my own (Starvation) Ridge wriggling to it, to its awful vaulty blue smokebody rock, and the "clouds of hope" lazing in Canada beyond with their tittlefaces and parallel lumps and sneers and grins and lamby banks and puffs of snout and mews of crack saying "Hoi! Hoi, Earth!"- the very top tittermost peak abominables of Hozomeen made of black rock and only when storms blew I don't see them and all they do is return tooth for tooth to storm an imperturbable surl for cloudburst mist- Hozomeen that does not crack like cabin rigging in the winds, that when seen from upsidedown (when I'd do my headstand in the yard) is just a hanging bubble in the illimitable ocean of space-
Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most beautiful mountain I ever seen, like a tiger sometimes with stripes, sunwashed rills and shadow crags wriggling lines in the Bright Daylight, vertical furrows and bumps and Boo! crevasse, boom, sheer magnificent Prudential mountain, nobody's even heard of it, and it's only 8,000 feet high, but what a horror when I first saw that void the first night of my staying on Desolation Peak waking up from deep fogs of 20 hours to a starlit night suddenly loomed by Hozomeen with his two sharp points, right in my window black- the Void, every time I'd think of the Void I'd see Hozomeen and understand- Over 70 days I had to stare at it."

- Jack Kerouac, "Desolation Angels"

Speaking of Lost Girls-

"One of the things that we remarked upon after finishing the book was what a profoundly '60s agenda Lost Girls was actually carrying out, even though it was coming out in 2006. If you look at the elements of Lost Girls, it's got Victorian children's fantasy characters like Alice in Wonderland, who was very big during the '60s. That Lewis Carroll imagery was very popular. You've got flowers everywhere. It's dripping with art nouveau, which of course was something that was also true of the psychedelic era. Its basic message is very pro-erotic. It has a fairly relaxed attitude to drugs, which was also true of much of the '60s. Its basic message is, "Make love not war." I've remarked to Melinda that if we'd just thought of that before we started on the book we could have just bought ourselves one of those badge-making machines and saved ourselves the trouble of spending 17 years doing a 240-page, lavishly illustrated book. We've tried to explain why sex is a normal, healthy human urge. The sexual imagination is a normal part of healthy human life. Actually, going to some foreign hellhole and getting killed or killing people who are just the same as you other than an accident of geography -- that is not natural. Yes, they're things we've been doing a long time, but it doesn't mean they're natural and it doesn't mean that they're right."

-Alan Moore

"I'm here to kick your ass!"
"You are out of luck- our species has evolved beyond the need for asses!"

- Fry and the Brain

"Do I look like a reasonable chap or a peppermint nightmare?"
"Er...The first one?"
"Wrong."

- Howard Moon and the Hitcher, "The Mighty Boosh" (season three - 'Eels')

"Sapphic vampiricism- the love that dare not spell its name."

- Dr. Terrible, 'Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible'

"Dude, I set myself on fire in a new and exciting way!"

- My kid brother, on the joys of strike-anywhere matches.

"I once beat up a guy with my crutches."

- My kid brother, on the dangers of prednisone