Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
In the Old West a wagon train is crossing the plains. As night falls the wagon train forms a circle, and a campfire is lit in the middle. After everyone has gone to sleep two lone cavalry officers stand watch over the camp. After several hours of quiet, they hear war drums starting from a nearby Indian village they had passed during the day. The drums get louder and louder. Finally one soldier turns to the other and says, "I don't like the sound of those drums." Suddenly, they hear a cry come from the Indian camp: "IT'S NOT OUR REGULAR DRUMMER." | |
Join in the new game that's sweeping the country. It's called "Bureaucracy". Everybody stands in a circle. The first person to do anything loses. | |
Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work ... I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension: they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. -- Frederick Douglass | |
Those who have had no share in the good fortunes of the mighty Often have a share in their misfortunes. -- Bertolt Brecht, "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" | |
hacker, n.: Originally, any person with a knack for coercing stubborn inanimate things; hence, a person with a happy knack, later contracted by the mythical philosopher Frisbee Frobenius to the common usage, 'hack'. In olden times, upon completion of some particularly atrocious body of coding that happened to work well, culpable programmers would gather in a small circle around a first edition of Knuth's Best Volume I by candlelight, and proceed to get very drunk while sporadically rending the following ditty: Hacker's Fight Song He's a Hack! He's a Hack! He's a guy with the happy knack! Never bungles, never shirks, Always gets his stuff to work! All take a drink (important!) | |
When asked the definition of "pi": The Mathematician: Pi is the number expressing the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. The Physicist: Pi is 3.1415927, plus or minus 0.000000005. The Engineer: Pi is about 3. | |
Does a one-legged duck swim in a circle? | |
Q: How do you play religious roulette? A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first. | |
Q: What do you call 15 blondes in a circle? A: A dope ring. Q: Why do blondes put their hair in ponytails? A: To cover up the valve stem. | |
I used to be such a sweet sweet thing, 'til they got a hold of me, I opened doors for little old ladies, I helped the blind to see, I got no friends 'cause they read the papers, they can't be seen, With me, and I'm feelin' real shot down, And I'm, uh, feelin' mean, No more, Mr. Nice Guy, No more, Mr. Clean, No more, Mr. Nice Guy, They say "He's sick, he's obscene". My dog bit me on the leg today, my cat clawed my eyes, Ma's been thrown out of the social circle, and Dad has to hide, I went to church, incognito, when everybody rose, The reverend Smithy, he recognized me, And punched me in the nose, he said, (chorus) He said "You're sick, you're obscene". -- Alice Cooper, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" | |
"So here's a picture of reality: (picture of circle with lots of sqiggles in it) As we all know, reality is a mess." -- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
There comes a time to stop being angry. -- A Small Circle of Friends | |
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. -- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Circle" | |
The horizon of many people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call this their point of view. -- Albert Einstein |