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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

A rose is a rose is a rose.  Just ask Jean Marsh, known to millions of
PBS viewers in the '70s as Rose, the maid on the LWT export "Upstairs,
Downstairs."  Though Marsh has since gone on to other projects, ... it's
with Rose she's forever identified.  So much so that she even likes to
joke about having one named after her, a distinction not without its
drawbacks.  "I was very flattered when I heard about it, but when I looked
up the official description, it said, `Jean Marsh: pale peach, not very
good in beds; better up against a wall.'  I want to tell you that's not
true.  I'm very good in beds as well."
"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though
ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak,
mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.  Of all divers,
thou has dived the deepest.  That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has
moved amid the world's foundations.  Where unrecorded names and navies rust,
and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate
earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful
water-land, there was thy most familiar home.  Thou hast been where bell or
diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers
would give their lives to lay them down.  Thou saw'st the locked lovers when
leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting
wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.  Thou saw'st the
murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell
into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed
on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would
have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.  O head! thou has
seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
syllable is thine!"
                -- H. Melville, "Moby Dick"
I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20
years ago.  When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors
would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they
all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"

Years later, I went back to the same hotel.  I noticed the room keys had
been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.

There was a computer in every doorknob.
        -- Danny Hillis
        There once was a man who went to a computer trade show.  Each day as
he entered, the man told the guard at the door:
        "I am a great thief, renowned for my feats of shoplifting.  Be
forewarned, for this trade show shall not escape unplundered."
        This speech disturbed the guard greatly, because there were millions
of dollars of computer equipment inside, so he watched the man carefully.
But the man merely wandered from booth to booth, humming quietly to himself.
        When the man left, the guard took him aside and searched his clothes,
but nothing was to be found.
        On the next day of the trade show, the man returned and chided the
guard saying: "I escaped with a vast booty yesterday, but today will be even
better."  So the guard watched him ever more closely, but to no avail.
        On the final day of the trade show, the guard could restrain his
curiosity no longer. "Sir Thief," he said, "I am so perplexed, I cannot live
in peace.  Please enlighten me.  What is it that you are stealing?"
        The man smiled.  "I am stealing ideas," he said.
                -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
...difference of opinion is advantageious in religion.  The several sects
perform the office of a common censor morum over each other.  Is uniformity
attainable?  Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned;
yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia"
"If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go
to hell."
-- Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88
Is uniformity attainable?  Millions of innocent men, women, and
children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt,
tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards
uniformity.  What has been the effect of coercion?  To make one half
of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
                -- Thomas Jefferson
Bizoos, n.:
        The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a basketball.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
spagmumps, n.:
        Any of the millions of Styrofoam wads that accompany mail-order items.
                -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
It's hard to think of you as the end result of millions of years of evolution.
Soldiers who wish to be a hero
Are practically zero,
But those who wish to be civilians,
They run into the millions.
You will inherit millions of dollars.
Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history,
dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive man
picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and
whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire.

What inner force drove this first athlete?  Your guess is as good as
mine.  Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.
                -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
This telethon isn't just about helping disenfranchised geeks. We're
also here for the betterment of mankind through our research into finding
a Cure for Windows.

Each day, millions of man-hours are wasted due to design flaws in
Microsoft Windows. Each day, millions of dollars are sent by business and
individuals like yourself into a huge black hole known as "Microsoft" for
exorbitantly priced software products that should be free.

But don't worry. We've almost found a Cure for Windows. Geeks worldwide
have toiled endlessly for the past eight years working on a replacement
operating system called Linux. It's almost ready. Now we need to convince
the world to use our creation and eliminate the virus known as Windows.

   -- Excerpt from Eric S. Raymond's speech during the Geek Grok '99
      telethon held in Silicon Valley
Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#3)

BRYANT DUMBELL: It's time for Round One: The Flying CompactDiscus.

JOHN SPLADDEN: That's right, Bryant. Each team member will hurl one CD-ROM
and receive points for both the distance thrown and whether the disc is
still readable afterwards.

DUMBELL: First up is Mad Hatter's Alan Cox. He struts, he winds up, and
there it goes! Look at the trajectory on that baby... Now it's time for
the Portalback's Anonymous Coward #521 to throw. This guy was voted as the
best CompactDiscus thrower in the league by popular vote on Slashdot.

SPLADDEN: Indeed, AnonCow has got some powerful muscles. No brain though.
Did you know that he dropped out of college to join the Andover.Net team?

DUMBELL: Yeah, what a tough decision to make. It's now becoming quite
common for nerd superstars to ditch college and move to Silicon Valley and
receive Big League stock options. Still, AnonCow was out for several games
this season due to a Carpal Tunnel flareup. I hope he isn't squandering
his millions... he might be forced to retire early.
Brief History Of Linux (#11)
Birth of Gates and the Anti-Gates

October 28, 1955 saw the birth of William H. Gates, who would rise above
his humble beginnings as the son of Seattle's most powerful millionaire
lawyer and become the World's Richest Man(tm). A classic American
rags-to-riches story (with "rags" referring to the dollar bills that the
Gates family used for toilet paper), Bill Gates is now regarded as the
world's most respected businessman by millions of clueless people that
have obviously never touched a Windows machine.

Nature is all about balance. The birth of Gates in 1955 tipped the cosmic
scales toward evil, but the birth of Linus Torvalds in 1969 finally
balanced them out. Linus' destiny as the savior of Unix and the slayer of
money-breathing Redmond dragons was sealed when, just mere hours after his
birth, the Unix epoch began January 1st, 1970. While the baseline for Unix
timekeeping might be arbitrary, we here at Humorix like to thank the its
proximity of Linus' birth is no coincidence.
Brief History Of Linux (#26)

On the surface, Transmeta was a secretive startup that hired Linus
Torvalds in 1996 as their Alpha Geek to help develop some kind of
microprocessor. Linus, everyone found out later, was actually hired as
part of a low-budget yet high-yield publicity stunt. While other dotcoms
were burning millions on glitzy marketing campaigns nobody remembers and
Superbowl ads displayed while jocks went to the bathroom, Transmeta was
spending only pocket change on marketing. Most of that pocket change went
towards hosting the Transmeta website (the one that wasn't there yet)
which, incidentally, contained more original content and received more
visitors than the typical dotcom portal.

Microsoft relies on vaporware and certain ahem stipends given to
journalists in order to generate buzz and hype for new products, but
Transmeta only needed Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Personality Cult
of Linus to build up its buzz. When the secret was finally unveiled, the
Slashdot crowd was all excited about low-power mobile processors and
code-morphing algorithms -- for a couple days. Then everyone yawned and
went back to playing Quake. It's still not entirely clear when Transmeta
is actually supposed to start selling something.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a
rainy Sunday afternoon.
                -- Susan Ertz
                        Pittsburgh driver's test

(9) Roads are salted in order to

        (a) kill grass.
        (b) melt snow.
        (c) help the economy.
        (d) prevent potholes.

The correct answer is (c). Road salting employs thousands of persons
directly, and millions more indirectly, for example, salt miners and
rustproofers.  Most important, salting reduces the life spans of cars,
thus stimulating the car and steel industries.
It's very glamorous to raise millions of dollars, until it's time for the
venture capitalist to suck your eyeballs out.
                -- Peter Kennedy, chairman of Kraft & Kennedy.
One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could
manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be
installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips.  Let's say your
congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how
the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet.  Just when he
got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would
inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the
plane door.  It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman
proposed a law.  ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be
designated as Cuticle Inspection Month?  And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.")
This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public
would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen.  The problem
is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500
members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil,
are already too large to fit on normal aircraft.
                -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"
HEY KIDS!  ANN LANDERS SAYS:
        Be sure it's true, when you say "I love you".  It's a sin to
        tell a lie.  Millions of hearts have been broken, just because
        these words were spoken.
How do you explain Wayne Newton's POWER over millions?  It's th' MOUSTACHE
...  Have you ever noticed th' way it radiates SINCERITY, HONESTY & WARMTH?
It's a MOUSTACHE you want to take HOME and introduce to NANCY SINATRA!
[From an announcement of a congress of the International Ontopsychology
Association, in Rome]:

The Ontopsychological school, availing itself of new research criteria and
of a new telematic epistemology, maintains that social modes do not spring
from dialectics of territory or of class, or of consumer goods, or of means
of power, but rather from dynamic latencies capillarized in millions of
individuals in system functions which, once they have reached the event
maturation, burst forth in catastrophic phenomenology engaging a suitable
stereotype protagonist or duty marionette (general, president, political
party, etc.) to consummate the act of social schizophrenia in mass genocide.
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2023
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