Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in." So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked. -- Dave Barry, "Pornography" | |
Naked children have never played in _o_u_r fountains, and I.M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66. -- "Learning from Las Vegas", Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour | |
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. -- Mark Twain | |
The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt. -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost" | |
Eudaemonic research proceeded with the casual mania peculiar to this part of the world. Nude sunbathing on the back deck was combined with phone calls to Advanced Kinetics in Costa Mesa, American Laser Systems in Goleta, Automation Industries in Danbury, Connecticut, Arenberg Ultrasonics in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and Hewlett Packard in Sunnyvale, California, where Norman Packard's cousin, David, presided as chairman of the board. The trick was to make these calls at noon, in the hope that out-to-lunch executives would return them at their own expense. Eudaemonic Enterprises, for all they knew, might be a fast-growing computer company branching out of the Silicon Valley. Sniffing the possibility of high-volume sales, these executives little suspected that they were talking on the other end of the line to a naked physicist crazed over roulette. -- Thomas Bass, "The Eudaemonic Pie" | |
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills. -- Minna Antrim, "Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions" | |
And the crowd was stilled. One elderly man, wondering at the sudden silence, turned to the Child and asked him to repeat what he had said. Wide-eyed, the Child raised his voice and said once again, "Why, the Emperor has no clothes! He is naked!" - "The Emperor's New Clothes" | |
...this is an awesome sight. The entire rebel resistance buried under six million hardbound copies of "The Naked Lunch." - The Firesign Theater | |
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. - Mark Twain | |
"We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea -- organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation." -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Steart | |
"Violence accomplishes nothing." What a contemptible lie! Raw, naked violence has settled more issues throughout history than any other method ever employed. Perhaps the city fathers of Carthage could debate the issue, with Hitler and Alexander as judges? | |
Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike. Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning Christmas tree. The piano is missing. You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level 4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog. | |
Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to. The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
The astronomer Francesco Sizi, a contemporary of Galileo, argues that Jupiter can have no satellites: There are seven windows in the head, two nostrils, two ears, two eyes, and a mouth; so in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From which and many other similar phenomena of nature such as the seven metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. [...] Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth and therefore would be useless and therefore do not exist. | |
To write a sonnet you must ruthlessly strip down your words to naked, willing flesh. Then bind them to a metaphor or three, and take by force a satisfying mesh. Arrange them to your will, each foot in place. You are the master here, and they the slaves. Now whip them to maintain a constant pace and rhythm as they stand in even staves. A word that strikes no pleasure? Cast it out! What use are words that drive not to the heart? A lazy phrase? Discard it, shrug off doubt, and choose more docile words to take its part. A well-trained sonnet lives to entertain, by making love directly to the brain. | |
Most bacteria have the decency to be microscopic. Epulopiscium fishelsoni is not among them. The newly identified one-celled macro-microorganism is a full .5 mm long, large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Described in the current Nature, "It is a million times as massive as a typical bacterium."-Time, page 25, March 29, 1993 | |
And the crowd was stilled. One elderly man, wondering at the sudden silence, turned to the Child and asked him to repeat what he had said. Wide-eyed, the Child raised his voice and said once again, "Why, the Emperor has no clothes! He is naked!" -- "The Emperor's New Clothes" | |
If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way. | |
"Go on, girl! You'll never get a better chance to buy Jif at this price. *Carpe diem*, babe!" -- "The Naked Consumer", Erik Larson | |
My ritual differs slightly. What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower stall. Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of while he showers. Then I hop right back into the stall because our dog, Earnest, who has been alone in the basement all night building up powerful dog emotions, has come bounding and quivering into the bathroom and wants to greet me with 60 or 70 thousand playful nips, any one of which -- bear in mind that I am naked and, without my contact lenses, essentially blind -- could result in the kind of injury where you have to learn a whole new part if you want to sing the "Messiah," if you get my drift. Then I hop right back out, because Robert, with that uncanny sixth sense some children have -- you cannot teach it; they either have it or they don't -- has chosen exactly that moment to flush one of the toilets. Perhaps several of them. -- Dave Barry | |
<Joy> Flinny: black crontab magic kinda stuff :) <knghtbrd> Joy: does that mean people get to dance naked around bonfires chanting strange things and waving their arms about in a silly manner? <rcw> knghtbrd: what do you *think* people do at novare? | |
<Knghtbrd> Internet censorship. Because your children need to be protected from naked women, medical procedures, diverse cultures, and violent video games. <knghtbrd> (but information on building bombs, stealing cable, and manufacturing drugs is okay...) | |
#define FALSE 0 /* This is the naked Truth */ #define TRUE 1 /* and this is the Light */ -- mailto.c |