% He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. --Robertson Davies Adam Hirsch % Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind. --E.B. White Adam Hirsch % The reverse side also has a reverse side. - Japanese proverb Adam Hirsch % A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. Adam Hirsch - Herman Melville % An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out. Adam Hirsch - Will Rogers % Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. - Charlotte Perkins Gilman Adam Hirsch % The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. -- H.L. Mencken % "He treats reality like it's out to get him." - Jon Stewart, on George W. Bush. Adam Hirsch % Look, life isn't fair. We're all stuck with physical, mental, and chemical traits we'd rather not have, but the idea is to make the most of what you've got, not to be stymied by the ways you've gotten shortchanged. --Jamie Buffalino Adam Hirsch % I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. Adam Hirsch -- Thomas Jefferson % You can't have art without resistance in the materials. -- William Morris Adam Hirsch % Socialist writer and textile artist William Morris said, "You can't have art without resistance in the materials." Blessed and burdened with the most malleable medium in human history, we are overwhelmed by a surfeit of dross, battered by chatter. -- Paul Ford % I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. Adam Hirsch -- Mahatma Gandhi % We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Adam Hirsch % Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. -Paul Graham Adam Hirsch % If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. -- Thomas Jefferson Adam Hirsch % We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. -- Arthur Schopenhauer Adam Hirsch % Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. -- Henri Poincare Adam Hirsch % Adam I deplore ... the putrid state into which our newspapers have Hirsch passed ... It is, however, an evil for which there is no remedy; our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and adam@baz.org that cannot be limited without being lost. -- Thomas Jefferson % There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. Adam Hirsch -- P.J. O'Rourke % The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country. -- Judge Learned Hand Adam Hirsch % The First Amendment presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all. -- Judge Learned Hand % It is still in the lap of the gods whether a society can succeed which is based on 'civil liberties and human rights' conceived as I have tried to describe them; but of one thing at least we may be sure: the alternatives that have so far appeared have been immeasurably worse. -- Judge Learned Hand Adam Hirsch % Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. -- Charles Kuralt Adam Hirsch % For two years I have refused to answer idle questions like... 'With which of your characters do you identify?' For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously. -Umberto Eco Adam Hirsch % Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. -- Robert Frost Adam Hirsch % For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. - John F. Kennedy % All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. -- James Thurber Adam Hirsch % It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking. - X. Marcel Boulestin Adam Hirsch % The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. ... Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. -- T. H. White, The Once and Future King % Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. - H.L. Mencken Adam Hirsch % My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. - Mark Twain Adam Hirsch % "Disney world under martial law." -- Kurt Vonnegut, on the 1972 Republican Party Adam Hirsch % Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies: 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' -- Kurt Vonnegut Adam Hirsch % Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. -- Peter Ustinov Adam Hirsch % Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain Adam Hirsch % When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. -- Mark Twain Adam Hirsch % ...the license to make mistakes becomes more limited with the passage of the years, so he who wants to take advantage of it must not wait too long. Adam Hirsch -- Primo Levi % Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. -- Lily Tomlin Adam Hirsch % Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Adam Hirsch -- Mark Twain % The Right Reverend Zoweee Wow, on most romantic relationships on TV: I'm not saying love isn't great. I'm saying it's rarely so ponderously worded. Adam Hirsch % The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. Adam Hirsch -- Flannery O'Connor % If you can do what you want to do in this world and say what you want to say and make enough of a living to support your family, then you are successful. Adam Hirsch -- David Simon % Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. - Ben Hecht Adam Hirsch % Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have. -Ed Bradley Adam Hirsch % I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life. -- George Burns Adam Hirsch % I may further say that I have not observed men's honesty to increase with their riches. - Thomas Jefferson Adam Hirsch % It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. --William G. McAdoo Adam Hirsch % Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty. -- Leo Rosten Adam Hirsch % The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it. -Patrick Young Adam Hirsch % The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. -- Anatole France Adam Hirsch % A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. -- Henry Fielding Adam Hirsch % I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot. -- Steve Martin Adam Hirsch % God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open. -- Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan Adam Hirsch % Wanting to reform the world without discovering ones true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes. -- Sri Ramana Maharshi Adam Hirsch % It's only in our minds that we are separate from the rest of the world. Adam Hirsch - Gay Luce % Adam Hirsch The problem is not that we have too many fools; it's adam@baz.org that the lightning isn't distributed right. -Mark Twain % I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh % Driving in Boston is a little like being sold by your family to the owners of a brothel; you've got to learn to FIGHT to survive... - Tracy Weber-Tierney Adam Hirsch % People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. -AJ Liebling Adam Hirsch % Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. -J.K. Galbraith Adam Hirsch % Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. -- W.H. Auden Adam Hirsch % The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. Adam Hirsch -- William James % Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be. -- Jim Horning. Adam Hirsch % People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. - Soren Kierkegaard Adam Hirsch % I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed. -- Frank Deford Adam Hirsch % Everybody gets so much information all day Adam Hirsch long that they lose their common sense. -- Gertrude Stein % Libertarianism is just taking the enlightenment Adam Hirsch out of "enlightened self interest." -anon % When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained. -Edward R. Murrow Adam Hirsch % Memories are interpretations, not truth. -- Iain M. Banks Adam Hirsch % Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. Adam Hirsch - Walker Evans % There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality. -- Vint Cerf Adam Hirsch % And sleeping is a gateway drug / To being awake, being awake, being awake again -- TMBG Adam Hirsch % Ninety percent of everything is crap. --Theodore Sturgeon Adam Hirsch % If someone wants a sheep, then that means that he exists. Adam Hirsch -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery % I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. -James Baldwin Adam Hirsch % Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. -- Joan Didion Adam Hirsch % The administration says the American people want tax cuts. Well, duh. The American people also want drive-through nickel beer night. The American people want to lose weight by eating ice cream. The American people love the Home Shopping Network because it's commercial-free. --Will Durst % For like a week I'd been suffering from such deep seated self-doubt that I hadn't been able to pick up so much as a bar of soap without thinking, "I'm not going to do this right." -- Chris Onstad, in _Achewood_ Adam Hirsch % It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. -Martin Luther King, Jr Adam Hirsch % We're here to eat the ice cream that is, not the ice cream that could be. Adam Hirsch -- Jeff Yaus % Ecology is the science of understanding consequences. -Frank Herbert Adam Hirsch % War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. --Antoine De Saint-Exupery % Why do you have to be a nonconformist, like everyone else? -- James Thurber Adam Hirsch % Hell, if you understood everything I said, you'd be me. -- Miles Davis Adam Hirsch % Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. -E. DeGeneres % You can tell you have successfully created God in your own image when it turns out that He or She hates all the same people you do. -Anne Lamott Adam Hirsch % Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better. Adam Hirsch -- Laurie Anderson % We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are. -Sartre Adam Hirsch % It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. -- Carl Sagan Adam Hirsch % Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful. - William Morris Adam Hirsch % My will veers between the point at which one is reduced to the sole desire for death and the intention of conquering the world by sword and fire. -- Cesar Vallejo % Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation. -- George Bernard Shaw % I love my country so much, man / like an exasperating friend. -- Mike Doughty Adam Hirsch % We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. -- Tom Stoppard Adam Hirsch % A central component of my spiritual life is that I don't force myself to be beholden to what I believed God was yesterday. -- Mike Doughty Adam Hirsch % Your ego is like your liver. We evolved with egos because we need them to survive. The problem is once you start letting your ego run the joint. It's like letting your spleen be in charge. -- David Johansen Adam Hirsch % Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit. -- Aristotle Adam Hirsch % The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. --David Brinkley Adam Hirsch % Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Mahatma Gandhi % Business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching. -- Thomas Frank, on "anti-consumerist" advertising Adam Hirsch % Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns. - David Sedaris Adam Hirsch % Perhaps it is a handicap, in writing about the relationship between men and women, to be conclusive. To be aghast and muddled and fascinated is at least a good start. - Rosemary Dinnage Adam Hirsch % The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues. -- Elizabeth Taylor Adam Hirsch % What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? -- Henry David Thoreau % The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. -- Edwin Schlossberg % We came here to say to all of you that apathy isn't it. We can do something. OK, so Flower Power didn't work. So what. We start again. - John Lennon Adam Hirsch % Sometimes you just need to step back an order of magnitude and look at the thing with a cold, detached eye. Life looks a lot simpler when viewed from above. We all look like ants going either towards sugar or away from danger. We ain't so complicated. -- Roast Beef, http://www.achewood.com/ Adam Hirsch % We prove ourselves citizens of a democracy not by our winning of elections but by our agreeing to lose elections. -- Lewis H. Lapham Adam Hirsch % I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent. --Thomas Paine % The heat! It comes round corners at you like an animal with windmill arms. As I enter my bedroom, it stuns, thuds, throttles, spins me round by my soaking hair, lays me flat as a mat and bat-blind on my boiled and steaming bed. We keep oozing from the ice-cream counters to the chemist's. Cold beer is bottled God. -- Dylan Thomas % We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming. -- Don Delillo % You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. Adam Hirsch -- Max Beerbohm % I am the king of the Romans and above grammar. - Emperor Sigismund I, at the Council of Constance (1414), on being corrected on a grammatical error by a prelate. Adam Hirsch % Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Adam Hirsch - Anton Chekhov % The pleasures of the table - that lovely old-fashioned phrase - depict food as an art form, as a delightful part of civilized life. In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal. -- Julia Child Adam Hirsch % The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered. - Samuel Butler Adam Hirsch % Adam Hirsch Whenever [Julia Child] was asked what her guilty pleasures adam@baz.org were, she responded: 'I don't have any guilt.' % If you know what to do and you can do it, it's not a real emergency. Adam Hirsch -- Jay Scott % The future is already here; it's just not very evenly distributed. -- William Gibson % Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than the freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set. - Adlai Stevenson Adam Hirsch % I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. -- Umberto Eco % The influence of each human being on others Adam Hirsch in this life is a kind of immortality. - John Quincy Adams % You know, most the people I've known in this business, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, were good people, honest people, and they did what they thought was right. And I hope that I'll live long enough to see American politics return to vigorous debates where we argue who's right and wrong, not who's good and bad. -- Bill Clinton % There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know. --Ambrose Bierce Adam Hirsch % Adam Hirsch Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose adam@baz.org with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs. web.baz.org -- P.J. O'Rourke % Adam Hirsch History repeats itself the way pi repeats itself: adam@baz.org The same digits come up over and over, but there web.baz.org doesn't seem to be any pattern to them. -- Jay Scott % Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values those were the people we called the enemy. -- Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, 6/4/2004 Adam Hirsch % It seems to me that we humans sometimes forget that we are animals too; in the best sense -- the pure sense of the forest where our first memories were made. And there are as many kinds of us as there are of them: solitary, gregarious, monogamous; the beach master with his harem; those who meet once and move on; the hunters; the vegetarians. --Christopher Walken % All marriages are mixed marriages. -- Chantal Saperstein % Video Golf is just about the whitest thing the world's got going. --Maggie Berry Adam Hirsch % Adam Hirsch Being able to "think outside the box" presupposes you were adam@baz.org at some point able to think inside it. -- Bob Lutz % It's not because you've said something terribly funny; it's because you've reminded them of something very bright in adam@baz.org their lives, because you're so passionate about telling them this tiny thing. It's a girl you love, it's fly-tying, it's a banjo -- all the things that make you want to dance. -- Billy Connolly % Adam Hirsch I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis adam@baz.org and I don't deserve that either. -- Jack Benny % Life is a zoo in a jungle. -- Peter De Vries % I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. - Martin Luther King, Jr. Adam Hirsch % Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now. -- Marcel Proust Adam Hirsch % adam@baz.org Barring that natural expression of villainy which we Adam Hirsch all have, the man looked honest enough. -- Mark Twain % adam@baz.org | The people I distrust most are those who want to improve Adam Hirsch | our lives but have only one course of action. -- Frank Herbert % adam@ | The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future baz.org | is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. -- Robertson Davies % The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. -- Martin Luther King, Jr % If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty. -- Japanese Proverb Adam Hirsch % Whoever does not laugh at my funeral might as well join me. -- Jay Scott Adam Hirsch % I hate writing. I love having written. -- Dorothy Parker Adam Hirsch % Violence solves plenty of things, but they're the wrong things. -- Jay Scott Adam Hirsch % Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable. - Sidney J. Harris Adam Hirsch % You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. -- James Thurber Adam Hirsch % History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. -- Mark Twain Adam Hirsch % I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm. --James Thurber % The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. Adam Hirsch -- Harlan Ellison % The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. They also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Adam Hirsch -- Carl Sagan % You only live once, but if you work it right once is enough. --Joe E. Lewis Adam Hirsch % As someone who works in public radio, I work in a medium that's less popular than jousting, a sport that's been dead for 600 years -- Ira Glass Adam Hirsch % If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence. - Luis Bunuel Adam Hirsch % In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer Adam Hirsch % Sentimentality about children's welfare comes and goes, apparently: highest when there's the chance to moralize about adult behavior, lowest when it comes to resource allocation. --Laura Kipnis Adam Hirsch % "Information superhighway" anagrams to "I'm on a huge wispy rhino fart," which when you think about it seems pretty apt, really. Adam Hirsch % There is a phenomenon in politics -- and the left isn't any more exempt from it than the right -- of cognitive dissonance, in which you bend the world, you hypnotize yourself into seeing the world in such a way as to make it unnecessary for you to rethink your first premises. --Todd Gitlin % Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. - Evelyn Waugh % We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. - Carlos Castaneda Adam Hirsch % Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments! What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding. - John Adams Adam Hirsch % The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know... adam@ Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough. So baz.org questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather. -John Adams % Truth and relationships don't make life better... Truth and relationships make life *possible*. --Craig Wright Adam Hirsch % Yes, people can contrive misleading statistics. That's nothing compared with their ability to script tailored anecdotes. Think of it this way: An anecdote is just a statistic with a sample size of one. You can "prove" anything at all that way. - Bob Lewis % Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. - Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi" Adam Hirsch % When they say 'Paris is for lovers' what they mean is 'Paris is for kids who like to stop and block the sidewalk and suck face.' -Jesse Vincent Adam Hirsch % It's been a feverish time in the garden too; all the plants are producing flowers and thus becoming for a time not-plants. I do know that the flowers are functional and that I should read nothing into their vivid madness, but it's hard to maintain firm rationality in the face of a yellow rhododendron in full bloom. It's the great warm arbitrariness of spring, and it never gets old. Adam Hirsch -Jon Carroll % The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. - Hunter S. Thompson Adam Hirsch % I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see. - John Burroughs Adam Hirsch % After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi. -P.J. O'Rourke Adam Hirsch % I think of myself as transcending the naughty/nice dichotomy. -Regis Donovan Adam Hirsch % Watch as I solve this complicated kernel issue by setting fire to the data center. - the Right Rev. Zoweee Wow % ... the only hope for rock'n'roll, aside from everybody playing nothing but shrieking atonal noise through arbitor distorters, is women. Balls are what ruined both rock and politics in the first place, and I demand the world be turned over to the female sex immediately. - Lester Bangs % I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and the against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you. - Frances Wright Adam Hirsch % What is love, anyway, aside from a liquor-fueled period of psychosis counteracted with a lifetime's worth of received romantic notions and a tingling sensation in the pants? -Carina Chocano Adam Hirsch % Stop complaining about how you don't have a life. You "live" a life, you don't "have" a life. If you really want to live a more balanced life, start looking at the choices you are making. You are not in prison. - Barbara Moses Adam Hirsch % To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war. --Ralph Bunche % |War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, adam@ |it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live baz.org|together in peace by killing each other's children. -- Jimmy Carter % your car could go straight upwards. - astronomer Fred Hoyle % While clothes with pictures and/or writing on them are not entirely an invention of the modern age, they are an unpleasant indication of the general state of things ... I mean, be realistic. If people don't want to listen to you what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater? - Fran Leibowitz % No sentiment is so vapid that a catchy beat and an underdressed singer can't sell it by the millions. - World Magazine, 9/7/2002 Adam Hirsch % You can get rid of a lot of anger by putting your packets of crackers in a plastic bag and throwing them on the floor repeatedly, until they reach the required state of crumb. - Clarissa Wright, from her clam chowder recipe Adam Hirsch % I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do. - Helen Keller % The louder you laugh and the farther apart you plant your feet, the more respect you'll get. Take up space because it's not a school dance. - Erika Lopez, "Flaming Iguanas" % | what we say to each other when we're being uncool. -Lester Bangs % You can always win an election by setting up some phony crime issue, and then when your opponent doesn't sign on, you have a 30-second attack ad that says, "My opponent is soft on crime because he doesn't want to kill everyone." -Bill Maher % If you think putting up the Ten Commandments is going to stop violence, then you probably also think 'Employees Must Wash Hands' is keeping the urine out of your Happy Meal. - Jon Stewart Adam Hirsch % No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why. - Mignon McLaughlin Adam Hirsch % Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. - Dave Barry Adam Hirsch % Zen means becoming independent. That is the Buddha's teaching. Many people, however, become attached to teachers, attached to ideas, attached to words. It can be a kind of sickness. - Zen Master Wu Bong Adam Hirsch % On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not all the time. - George Orwell Adam Hirsch % adam@ I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any baz.org difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing. - Umberto Eco % We're never as good as our myths, but surely it says something that our myths are good. -James Lileks % and snow predicted for May First. I'd be tempted to say there is no God, but there surely is, and it's Loki. -James Lileks % Every time I start to think that people are about as dumb as they can be, it's like their idiot scientists invent some new kind of stupid. -anon % Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. --Henry Miller % It is worth reminding ourselves that the life of a democracy may also depend on the good and honorable use of language and not on the scurvy manipulation of such words as 'evil' and 'love' by intellectual striplings of the caliber of our president. -- Norman Mailer, on George W. Bush % The longer I live the more I realize I don't know what I'm talking about. - David Letterman % We have forgotten that our only goal is to live and that we live each day and that at every hour of the day we are reaching our true goal if we are living ... The days are fruits and our role is to eat them. - Jean Giono % Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. - Barry Lopez % To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. -Theodore Roosevelt % There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans ... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. -Theodore Roosevelt % People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. - Ken Kesey % "Marge, don't discourage the boy. Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals. Except the weasels." -Homer Simpson % There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. - Tennessee Williams % The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me. - W.H. Auden % I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and then not until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier. -- Mark Twain % While I usually come down on the side of intuition, I must point out that every novice programmer has a multitude of bad habits that must be beat out of him or her. Our abhorrence of violence (which was beat into us by our culture) should not deter us from beating civility into those who need it. -- Larry Wall % It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: You must start somewhere, and have some roots ... -- J.R.R. Tolkien, in "The Return of the King" % Because people are most aware of the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part of their mind should be amenable to the pressure of argument and will. Not so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out of three. Much of one's mind does not take orders. -- Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, "A General Theory of Love" % Called up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms regional office and asked, "What wine goes best with an M-16?" The guy who answered did his best to be helpful: "That depends. What are you smoking?" --unknown % The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. --Einstein % You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are the echo and aftereffect of your experiences: as when your room trembles after a carriage goes past. I, however, am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. --Nietzche % To fall into habit is to cease to be. -- Miguel de Unamuno % Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one. -- Voltaire % . When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that adam@baz.org . something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he Adam Hirsch . states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke % You can have anything you want. You just can't have everything you want. -- Peter McWilliams % Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some. - French playwright Jean Anouilh % The night wind with the big dark curves of the night sky in it, the night wind gets inside of me and understands all of my secrets. -- Carl Sandburg % What I am I am, and say not. Adam Hirsch Being is the great explainer. - Henry Thoreau % War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. - Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) % Prayer: Whatever happens. Whatever /what is/ is is what I want. Only that. But that. -Galway Kinnell % There will come a time when you will think everything is finished. That will be the beginning. - Louis L'Amour % "'What chance do I have?'... *Life* is your chance, Arthur; grab it! Squeeze the milk of life into your dirty glass and drink it warm!" -- The Tick % A lost child crying stumbling over the dark fields Adam Hirsch catching fireflies -- Ryusui % We all like to use jargon, because it makes us sound like steely-eyed square-jawed heroes in technothrillers. 'Power down that microwave emitter, honey. I've interfaced with the Davanni's pizza uplink, and have acquired a clerk; we should be eventuating supper by 2000 hours.' -- James Lileks % Think out your plan like a woman of action, then act out your plan like a woman of thought. -Carmen Sandiego % "Irony" is renaming the national airport after the President who fired all the air traffic controllers. -Samantha Matthews % Be devoted to the unification of the diverse aspects of yourself. The quality of time you spend with someone far outweighs the quantity. -Tom Waits % So, the person who hits the one chord with vigour and commitment can be as musical as a person who has access to ten thousand chords and plays too many of them; they're all wrong. -- Robert Fripp % Time can but make it easier to be wise Adam Hirsch Though now it seems impossible, and so Patience is all that you have need of. -- Yeats % The more I practice, the luckier I get. -- Lee Trevino % The universe consists almost entirely of nothing, and yet attics overflow. - J.P. Scott % Everything in life is either sexual or political... take your pick. - Harold Ramis % Too late. Why am I so stupid? I can design you a structure to withstand hundred-foot waves for thirty years or more and make it as sturdy and safe as any other designer could for the weight and the budget, but I can't see my hand in front of my face when it comes to doing sensible things with my own life. -- Iain Banks, "The Bridge" % "Tempeh burgers. Why do vegetarians spend so much time trying to make vegetables taste like meat? Do monks buy a lot of inflatable sex dolls?" -- Kyle Baker, "Why I Hate Saturn" % My body has a mind of its own, but fortunately my mind has a body of its own. - J.P. Scott % Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes our lives less miserable so that we might be more kind -- well, then, let's have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories. We are a sorry tribe of beasts. We need all the help we can get. -G. Maguire % Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. << Seize today, and put as little trust as you can in the morrow. >> - Horace % Perfect does not mean perfect actions in a perfect world, but appropriate actions in an imperfect one. - R. H. Blyth % Voyages are accomplished inwardly, and the most hazardous ones, needless to say, are made without moving from the spot. -Henry Miller Adam Hirsch % If I own a cow, the cow owns me. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson Adam Hirsch % Every word is true, but I can't say the same for the sentences. - J.P. Scott Adam Hirsch % the statue made me high / the statue made me high the truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie --They Might Be Giants % To wish to meet an author personally because you have admired his work is as unwise as to want to meet a goose because you like pate de foie gras. - Arthur Koestler % Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is to you. -- Emerson Adam Hirsch % We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. -- Marcel Proust % A flash of lightning -- into the gloom, the heron's cry. -Basho % Adam Hirsch Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, adam@baz.org it is time to pause and reflect. -- Mark Twain % When you boil rice, regard the cooking pot as your own head. --Zen saying Adam Hirsch % You become what you think about all day long. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Adam Hirsch % Kiss / the mouth / that tells you, "here, / here is the world." -Galway Kinnell % Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. -anon % Forget for this moment the smog and the cars and the restaurants and the skating and remember only this -- a kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true. - Steve Martin % Ecstasy had initially seemed a fraudulent description for the drug, as far as Simon was concerned. The first couple of times he had taken it he'd said to Sarah, "If this is ecstasy, then a -Will Self, drug which produces mild pique could justifiably be called 'rage'." Great_Apes % Lose your mind and come to your senses. -Fritz Perls % Zen is like soap. First you wash with it, and then you wash off the soap. -Yamaoka Tesshu % People would rather sleep their way through life than stay awake for it. -- Edward Albee % One word -- to a wise man. One lash -- to a bright horse. - Zen saying % There is only the marvelous and nothing but the marvelous. -- Henry Miller % When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, "This is certainly not like we thought it was." -- Rumi % With any band, with any person, if you really wanted to pry, you can always find dirt. People don't pry hard enough and you think, 'Well, geez, maybe we should get some kind of press officer to try and stir something up, make us look more exciting.' -- Barenaked Ladies' Steven Page % "Panic. Followed by more panic." -- Tom Waits on theater % I didn't go to the clubs, so my whole knowledge of this music is through the radio, and there is no real sort of reason to take an Ecstasy in front of the radio and go mental. -- Paul Van Dyk on enjoying electronica without Ecstasy % Parents, when they raise their kids right, they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Maybe it's just because I'm in control of myself, but none of his lyrics make me go out and do anything. -- Missy Elliott on Eminem % I've always wanted to smash a guitar over someone's head. You just can't do that with a piano. -- Elton John % I like to hear crazy rumors. Didn't I die in a car accident? My mom called me about that one -- she was really concerned. And then there was the time I raped someone. My mom also called me about that: 'I'm so disappointed in you!' But she doesn't call me about them anymore. I banned her from the Internet. -- Rivers Cuomo % The e-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail. -Stephen Fry % Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are. -Jean Anouilh % Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. -Henry Miller % In this world we have to burn complete, resolve ourselves fully, each one in the flames and the resolution appropriate to him. --Juan Ramon Jimenez % My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand. -Shakespeare % Know all things to be like this: As a magician makes illusions of horses, oxen, carts, and other things, Nothing is as it appears. -The Buddha % To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. -Jose Ortega y Gasset % Just washed, How chill The white leeks! -Basho % What we play is life. - Louis Armstrong % Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way, the point of the angle is always towards ourselves. - Shunryu Suzuki % The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. -- Einstein % Adam Hirsch We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. adam@baz.org We are one flesh, but separated like stars. - Henry Miller % We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- H. L. Mencken % I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't the guts to bite people themselves. -- George Bernard Shaw % Never turn your back on reality. It surrounds you. -Stanislaw J. Lec % Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it; keep cool, but care. -- Thomas Pynchon % There may be some things better than sex, and some things may be worse. But there is nothing exactly like it. -- W. C. Fields % It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it. -- G. K. Chesterton % What is life without beauty? And what is beauty but an endless struggle against chaos and bad jokes? -- Bette Midler % Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience; this is the ideal life. -- Mark Twain % Any person who can't explain their work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan. -- Irving Langmuir % Time goes, you say? Ah, no. Alas, time stays. We go. - Henry Austin Dobson % It will never replace a good piece of ass, but the mind is a wonderful thing. -- Dennis Lamour % In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. -- Mencken % . Loading mercury with a pitchfork . your truck is almost full. The neighbors . take a certain pride in you. They http://web.baz.org/~adam/ . stand around watching. - Richard Brautigan % One of the sturdiest precepts in the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. -Michael Chabon, _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_ % Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did. -C. S. Lewis % Adam Hirsch . Recently spotted bumper sticker: adam@baz.org . WWJD? http://web.baz.org/~adam/ . JWRTFM % Q: Why do we treat those we love so badly? A: Who else would put up with it? -- Matt Groening % A rabbi whose congregation doesn't want to drive him out of town isn't a rabbi. -- Talmudic saying % Starting to think that all the world's problems can be solved adam@baz.org with either oyster sauce or backing vocals. -- Brian Eno Adam Hirsch % Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations. -- Brian Eno % The Greek Underworld kicks ass. It's like "Six Flags Over Psychotic Depression," and Cerberus is the Ultra Twister. -- L. Fitzgerald Sjöberg % Must be the central problem of politics -- Do you paint simplistic pictures that make people act (and leave them with too simple a view of the world) or do you paint bafflingly shaded and contingent scenes that leave people paralysed by indecision? -- Brian Eno % "What do you say to a man who's killed a lion with his bare hands and is sleeping with your wife?" - Derek Mason, asked about his wife's affair with a Masai warrior % And I'm thinking, man, if you live in a world where this cartoon with ancient woodcuts of naked people discussing campaign finance reform is the worst thing from the outside world that you run across, you're certainly not living in the same reality that I am. -- Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow) % Assuming ascension, assumption, assent all of our nonsense is finally non-sent with honorable mention for whatever we meant i am your contents and i am content -- Fyodor Visotsky, "afterglow" % The best things in life aren't things. - Art Buchwald % "You keep cereal in your desk? That's the coolest thing I've ever seen!" "Yeah, well, you're young." -- Brian Michael Bendis, in _Powers_ % adam . The most incomprehensible thing about @baz.org . the world is that it is incomprehensible. -- Albert Einstein % To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow adam@baz.org is the way to control him. - Shunryu Suzuki Adam Hirsch % I kept hanging the moon Adam Hirsch On the pine tree and taking it off, adam@baz.org Gazing at it the while. -Hokushi http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % People like us, who believe in physics, know that . Adam Hirsch the distinction between past, present, and future . adam@baz.org is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. -Einstein . web.baz.org/~adam/ % I hear the unblown flute Adam Hirsch In the deep summer shadows adam@baz.org Of the Temple of Suma. -Basho http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % "Does anyone have a question?" asked Lin-chi. "If so, let him ask it now. But the instant you open your mouth you are already way off." -zen story % English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street. - E.B. White % Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the entire journey that way. - E.L. Doctorow % you've pierced this / and branded that / you've done the drugs / you've done your friends / you've done the friends of other friends / so why not try some amputation? / you can feel so stupid when it's over / -- "Cut Off Your Head", by Jim Infantino % "I've been asked if I ever get the DTs. I don't know; it's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DTs begin." - W.C. Fields % Some people will never learn anything because they understand everything too soon. -- Alexander Pope % There is no reality except in action. -- Sartre % For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference. -- Albert Camus % For millenia mankind has believed that nothing can come out of nothing. Today we can argue that everything has come out of nothing. Nobody has to pay for the universe. It is the ultimate free lunch. - Paul Davies % All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; to one life before we can enter another. - Anatole France % The basic condition of human life is happiness. --The Dalai Lama % A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life. -Hal Borland % Anything we fully do is an alone journey. -- Natalie Goldberg % The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. -William James % I've always said that 'xlock -swarm' is an accurate simulation of the plight of even a moderately atractive female at any tech industry convention. % Adam Hirsch Sometimes I would almost rather have adam@baz.org people take away years of my life http://web.baz.org/~adam/ than take away a moment. -- Pearl Bailey % Nor love thy life nor hate but what thou liv'st live well. -- John Milton % Adam Hirsch . There's no difference between fate and free will. adam@baz.org . Here I am; put here, come here. No difference. Same thing. -- Grant Morrison, in "The Invisibles" #1 % I've got a song about busting up a Starbucks. It's an anti-anti-WTO song. It's essentially a pro-Starbucks song. I saw this picture of a guy sticking his foot through a plate-glass window in a Starbucks in Seattle, and he was wearing a Nike. -M. Doughty % Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys. -- Andre Gide Adam Hirsch % How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a person is to *become* -- to *be* at last, and to die in the fullness of their being. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery Adam Hirsch % This world, after all our sciences, is still a miracle: wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whover will think of it. Adam Hirsch -- Thomas Carlyle % "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Adam Hirsch - Mary Oliver % Ani maybe you don't like your job / maybe you didn't get enough sleep DiFranco: well nobody likes their job / and nobody got enough sleep maybe you just had / the worst day of your life but you know there's no escape and no excuse / so just suck up and be nice be nice be nice be nice be nice be nice be nice % Dictum ad tuam matrem. adam@baz.org % Scalding coffee from a freezing cup. At the rim no telling Which is which. -- Lou Hartman % i imagine that yes is the only living thing -- e.e. cummings % Reality is the leading cause of stress among those who are in touch with it. -- Jane Wagner % Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. - William Blake % Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. -- Rumi % "Silence!" commanded the lecturing monk. "Very bad to make disturbance in the Zendo! Time and place for everything!" Anger wasn't good for his English. "Shouting is for outside, New York City full of shouting! Not in Zendo." "Knock knock Zendo!" I shouted. "Monk monk goose!" -- Jonathan Lethem % In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill Adam Hirsch only the best, none of the weak or deformed. adam@baz.org Don't run away from this dying. Whoever's not killed for love is dead meat. -- Jelaluddin Rumi % How we live our days is, of course, how we live our lives. - Annie Dillard adam@baz.org> % A: "Bob, I found some mistakes here..." Adam Hirsch B: "Remember, mistakes are just opportunities." adam@baz.org A: "Okay, I found some opportunities here in your network diagram, then." % A sword cannot cut itself. Desire cannot overcome itself. Self cannot understand itself. The Way cannot be followed by trying. -- zen aphorism % Life is painful, suffering is optional. -- Sylvia Boorstein % adam@baz.org . The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some . great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again. Adam Hirsch . --Samuel Beckett % It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, . adam@baz.org and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. -- Agnes Repplier . Adam Hirsch % When all else fails, pour a pint of Guinness in the gas tank, advance the spark 20 degrees, cry "God Save the Queen!", and pull the starter knob. - MG "Series MGA" Workshop Manual % In ancient times they said a thing was holy if it made you hold your tongue. We said a thing was holy if it made it you laugh. That's all. Adam Hirsch -- John Crowley, in _Engine Summer_ % The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end. - Douglas Adams % Deciding to go public because you're worried the money train is leaving the station is to management what deciding to have a baby because you're afraid your boyfriend is going to leave you is to romance. -- www.suck.com Adam Hirsch % And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? ... Am I wrong?" And you may tell yourself, "My God! What have I done?" -- Talking Heads % MOTHER NATURE BATS LAST -- seen on a bumper sticker % Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower % Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. -- Epictetus Adam Hirsch % I discovered on Saturday that I find strip joints more surreal than erotic. Sure, there's an aesthetic appeal as regards the women in question, but it was more like the appeal of being in a museum. Well, okay, a really disturbed museum where the art keeps asking you for twenties, and where the patrons observe the exhibits *really intensely*. -- J.A.Y. % adam@baz.org . I arise in the morning torn between a desire to Adam Hirsch . improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. http://web.baz.org/~adam/ . This makes it hard to plan the day. -- E.B. White % As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. -- Dick Cavett % It is difficult to produce a television documentary . adam@baz.org that is both incisive and probing when every twelve . Adam Hirsch minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits . singing about toilet paper. -- Rod Serling . http://web.baz.org/ % Inegalitarianism and exclusiveness are not cool. 'First' world a @ . opulence is not cool. A culture that keeps hyping people to consume d b o is not cool. America(tm) is not cool. And the people who fall for a a r the hype are the worst kind of uncool: they're suckers. -- Kalle Lasn m z g % adam@ . The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and baz.org . looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining adam . your own goals. It's like the writer who keeps getting up and hirsch . staightening out the pictures in the room. -- Chrissie Hynde % If the home is to become a non-stop movie house, God help the home. -Orson Welles Adam Hirsch % Overheard on irc: are we having fun yet? I don't think so. I've had fun before, and it wasn't like this. % | -- where I played myself. Then I star in a French film called | Will someone please cast me as an axe murderer? - Elvis Costello % Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. -- David Foster Wallace % Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage. -Lewis Hyde Adam Hirsch % adam . And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our @baz.org . pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying adam . is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is hirsch . based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying." -DFW % Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex a @ . officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, d b o spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the a a r world's only known species of bovine carnviore. - David Foster Wallace m z g % After absorbing so much about it from the media, actually visiting Los Angeles in person produces a curious feeling of relief at finding a place that actually confirms your stereotyped preconceptions instead of confounding them and making you loathe your own ignorance and susceptibility to media stereotype. Adam Hirsch -- David Foster Wallace % It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon. Which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to. Adam Hirsch -- Franklin P. Jones % Mankind in general occupies the position between the angels and the French. Adam Hirsch -Mark Twain % Technically, Windows is an `operating system,' which means that it supplies your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, stop operating. -- Dave Barry Adam Hirsch % If I regret anything at all, it's the way we wasted our time and skills. All the false alleys, and bogus friends, the misapplication of our energies. All the delusions we had about who we were. - John Le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim % Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. -- W. Somerset Maugham % It is very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees. -- Oscar Wilde Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % The seven phases of a project: 1. Exultation | 5. Punishment of the innocent 2. Confusion | 6. Distinction for the uninvolved 3. Disenchantment | 7. Burying the bodies and scattering the ashes 4. Search for the guilty -- From Gregory Benford, "Timescape" Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Just because no one understands you doesn't make you an artist. --unknown Adam Hirsch % We're all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made. -- Vice President Dan Quayle Adam Hirsch % Professionals tend to fire on the same synapses all the time ... I think it's crucial that you enjoy yourself along the way. I was encouraged to read that a drink a day lessens overall mortality. And I have also declared chocolate a vegetable. - Susan Love, surgery professor at UCLA % No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. - P. J. O'Rourke % I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly. It depends upon the character of those who handle it. - Jane Austen, _Emma_ Adam Hirsch % Schmendiman: Remember, the shortest distance between two points is a foot and a half. No pun intended. Freddy: No pun achieved. - Steve Martin, _Picasso at the Lapin Agile_ % Suzanne: See, men are always talking about their things. Like it's not them. Gaston: What things? Suzanne: The things between their legs. Gaston: Ah, yes. Louie. -Steve Martin, _Picasso at the Lapin Agile_ % First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure. -Douglas Adams % The man who doesn't relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and Adam Hirsch standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist adam@baz.org and trained nurse, a little later on. - Elbert Hubbard % Fate is not an eagle; it creeps like a rat. -- Elizabeth Bowen Adam Hirsch % If you can't change your fate, change your attitude. -- Amy Tan Adam Hirsch % If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is this good news? -- Robert Anthony Adam Hirsch % Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house -- in adam the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living hirsch room he's rolling around with some bare-ass girl, in the library adam@baz.org he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up. -- Arthur Miller % We are the protagonists and the authors of our own drama. adam It is up to us; there is no-one left to blame. Neither the hirsch "system," nor our leaders, nor our parents. We can't go out adam@baz.org and hang the first amoeba. -- Rebecca McClen Novick % Every damn thing is your own fault, if you're any good. -- Hemingway Adam Hirsch % There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no-one else has a right to blame us. -- Oscar Wilde Adam Hirsch % I am not afraid ... I was born to do this. -- Joan of Arc Adam Hirsch % I'm an acknowledged Beavis and Butt-Head addict. I think I may have the largest Beavis and Butt-Head memorabilia collection on the East Coast. -- Patrick Stewart % In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, of course, there is. % Q: How many nuclear engineers does it take to change a light bulb ? A: Seven; One to install the new bulb, and six to determine what to do with the old one for the next 10,000 years. % It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. - Thomas Jefferson % I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudo-science. And in addition, to whatever measure this Adam Hirsch term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. -Carl Sagan % Adam Hirsch Falling in love makes smoking pot all day look like the ultimate in restraint. - Dave Sim, author of Cerebus. % The computer can't tell you the emotional story. Adam Hirsch It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows. -F. Zappa % [Mark Kingwell]: Do you ever watch television? [Umberto Eco]: When I need it. I use my car when I need it. I watch television when I need it. I navigate on the Internet when I need it. When I don't, I drink scotch, which is far, far better. - from an interview in the Globe and Mail % Q. What animal would you be if you could be an animal? . adam@baz.org A. You already are an animal. . Adam Hirsch -- Douglas Coupland, in _Microserfs_ . web.baz.org % When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest. - Douglas Coupland, in _Generation X_ % Before you start saying yuppies don't exist: they do. ... Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like an underfed Chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in, or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the violet filaments of a bug barbecue: a weird abuse of nature. - Douglas Coupland, in _Generation X_ % The love of meat prevents any real change. -- Douglas Coupland, in _Generation X_ % Adam Hirsch The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to adam@baz.org let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence. - Don DeLillo, in _White Noise_ % Lasher said to Murray, "We ought to have an official Day of the Dead. Like the Mexicans." "We do. It's called Super Bowl Week." - Don DeLillo, in _White Noise_ % It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there. - Don DeLillo, in _White Noise_ % Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country. - Don DeLillo, in _White Noise_ % Adam "What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario contingencies?" Hirsch "Cause a person to die." "Speak English, for God's sake. I despise this modern jargon." - Don DeLillo, in _White Noise_ % Men are stupid; women are crazy. -- Matt Groening, from _Love is Hell_ Adam Hirsch % Do not be excessively annoying. Do not be excessively annoyed. -- Fidonet discussion policy % When someone is impatient and says, "I haven't got all day," I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day? - G. Carlin % The phrase 'surgical strike' might be more acceptable if it were common practice to Adam Hirsch perform surgery with high explosives. -- George Carlin % Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice? -- Isaac Bashevis Singer Adam Hirsch % Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so that it will stay split. - Raymond Chandler, in a letter to the _Atlantic Monthly_, January 1947 % Somewhere nearby was a gravestone that said Adam Hirsch "Let Him Who Is With Oxen Cast The First Stone." -- Garrison Keillor, _Wobegon Boy_ % So often one gets a guilty feeling from freak shows, as if one had paid cousin Walt a nickel to eat dogfood. -- Garrison Keillor, _Wobegon Boy_ Adam Hirsch % "And to hunt during mating season ... I said to Byron, How would you feel if you had been courting me and getting excited and then you got a whiff of stale beer and saw an unshaven man with a bright-orange cap pointing a gun at you and then there was a blast of flame and everything went black? Byron said it was every man's dream to die exactly that way." --G.K., _Wobegon Boy_ Adam Hirsch % What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once meant the most to Adam Hirsch us are wrapped in parentheses. -John Irving % The ground on which the ball bounces is another bouncing ball. -D. Schwartz Adam Hirsch % Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past. -Anne Lamont Adam Hirsch % Cheese that is required by law to append the word _food_ to its title does not go well with wine or fruit. -- Fran Lebowitz Adam Hirsch % Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks of a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands. The real art is getting them clean again. - Honore de Balzac Adam Hirsch % As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out. Adam Hirsch - Alice Walker % The first thing I did when I made the decision to kill myself was to stop dieting. Let them dig a wider hole. -Gail Parent % Go into the kitchen to shake the chef's hand. If he is thin, have second thoughts about eating there; if he is thin and sad, flee. - Ferand Point % Vivez sans temps mort! (Live without dead time!) -Situationist Internationale Adam Hirsch % I'll tell you something honestly about drugs. Honestly - and I know it's not a very popular idea. You don't hear it very often any more. But it is the truth: I had a great time doing drugs. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife, or kids. Laughed my ass off, and went about my day. -B. Hicks Adam Hirsch % There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, speed and forgetting. -Milan Kundera % All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. - Mark Twain Adam Hirsch % 'There goes a jazz tune,' Larry McCaslin thought to himself, and followed her into a bookshop, where neither of them looked at books. - Arundhati Roy, _The God of Small Things_ Adam Hirsch % Enough of Because! May he be damned for a dog! -Aleister Crowley % Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." % Microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally. Or, to be more technical, microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of. -P.J. O'Rourke \\ Adam Hirsch // http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Religion is like junior high school: It's there to lead you to your own spirituality. Then you're supposed to graduate. - RuPaul \\ Adam Hirsch // http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Adam Hirsch Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but rather coaxed downstairs a step at a time. adam@baz.org - Mark Twain % Adam Hirsch "He's got to be really careful now, because adam@baz.org there's a rattlesnake right under Jackie's pants." - Announcer on the Guiness Book of World Records TV Show % We are all killers. -Albert Camus adam@baz.org || http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having desperately fallen in love with an inch. - Alan Watts Adam Hirsch % I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Adam Hirsch % I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am. http://web.baz.org/~adam/ -- Sylvia Plath % The universe isn't run on the point system. And survival isn't what it's all about. Do what you're going to do; and with humor be aware that you might as well be doing the opposite. - R.K. Welsh Adam Hirsch % "A pier," Stephen said. "Yes, a disappointed bridge." -James Joyce Adam Hirsch % It is eternity now. I am in the middle of it. It is about me in the sunshine. -Richard Jeffries Adam Hirsch % Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He's caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn't want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg. -James Tate Adam Hirsch % No one worth possessing can be quite possessed. --Sara Teasdale Adam Hirsch % Great mother of big apples it is a pretty world. -Kenneth Patchen Adam Hirsch % "Full lumbar support. So good, you'll forget you have a lumbar." - promotional material from Air New Zealand Adam Hirsch % Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it. - Alfred North Whitehead Adam Hirsch % The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling. - Paula Poundstone Adam Hirsch % Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. -J. Watson Adam Hirsch % The pure in heart will avoid the struggles, detour the tar pits, blind their eyes to the sirens. The problem is that in avoiding the paths that contain the tar, you may never reach any destination; in avoiding temptation, you remain pure, but irrelevant. Life is tar pits and sirens. -Donald A. Norman Adam Hirsch % You've got to have something to eat and a Adam Hirsch little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday % I think I think; therefore, I think I am. -Ambrose Bierce Adam Hirsch % Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are easy to beat and fun to cheat. -Fran Lebowitz Adam Hirsch % I love mankind; it's people I can't stand. -Charles Schulz Adam Hirsch % Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car. -Laurence J. Peter Adam Hirsch % I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. -Woody Allen Adam Hirsch % Adam Hirsch They said dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren't careful, bits of you could rot and drop off. - Terry Pratchett % Though no two centuries are very much like each other, some hours perhaps are; moments are; critical moments nearly always are. Emotions are the same. We are the same. The person, not the day, is the lasting phenomenon. Adam Hirsch -Eudora Welty % The maxim for any love affair is "Play and pray, but on the whole do not pray when you are playing and do not play when you are praying." We cannot yet manage such simultaneities. -Charles Williams Adam Hirsch % All disciples are idiots. What were Tolstoy's followers? What are the Marxists? What are the Chassidim who wrangle and push to pick up the holy crumbs from the rabbi's banquet? What are those would-be artists who imitate Picasso or Chagall? They're a flock of sheep, and they're always driven by a dog. -Isaac Bashevis Singer % There will be less external discipline the more internal discipline there is. - Simone Weil Adam Hirsch % Man is afraid of things that cannot harm him, and he knows it, and . a @ . he craves things that cannot be of help to him, and he knows it; but . d b o in truth the one thing man is afraid of is within himself and the . a a r one thing he craves is within himself. - The Tales of Rabbi Nachman . m z g % The penalty that good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people worse than themselves. -Plato Adam Hirsch % I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an .adam@ underground laboratory, half-a-dozen atom smashers, and a beautiful . baz.org girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, .adam and I care not who writes the nation's laws. -S.J. Perelman . hirsch % We should all just smell well and enjoy ourselves more. -Cary Grant Adam Hirsch % adam . This person called up and said, "You've got to come and take this hirsch . seminar. It will completely change your life in just one weekend. adam@ . And I said, "Well, I don't want to completely change my life this baz.org . weekend. I've got a lot of things to do on Monday." -Rick Fields % Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to him and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, "I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it." -T. Powers % We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. -Viktor Frankl % The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. - F. Scott Fitzgerald % Be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes. -Thoreau Adam Hirsch % When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. -Tom Robbins Adam Hirsch % You walk on carrying on your shoulders a glass door to some house that's not been found. There's no handle. You can't insure it. Can't put it down. - W.S. Merwin. Adam Hirsch % Be happy. It's one way of being wise. - Colette Adam Hirsch % Suppose someone were to say, "Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful." - Ludwig Wittgenstein Adam Hirsch % Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent Of everything you do Adam Hirsch Is for yourself -- And there isn't one. -Wei Wu Wei % Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snow in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary. -Thoreau % I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring. -Edward Gorey % Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are -- objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?" % The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta. - eduardo galeano % I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature - the core me - essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five. Adam Hirsch -D. Coupland % Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounds like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy. - Douglas Coupland % On another channel there were pictures of a zoo in Miami, Florida, which had been whacked by a hurricane and there were pictures of ducks and tall elegant birds swimming in the wreckage except they didn't know it was wreckage. It was just the world. - Douglas Coupland % Connections had been made in my mind, however -- connections which are hard for me to sever even now, twenty years later: one, that McDonald's equals evil; two, that technology does not always equal progress. -D. Coupland Adam Hirsch % fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable. -Douglas Coupland, _Life_After_God_ % adam@baz.org If _I_ were a CEO announcing mass layoffs, Adam Hirsch I would say that I was FUNSIZING the corporation. http://web.baz.org/~adam/ - David Epstein % If the only prayer you say in your life is "Thank you," that would suffice. -- Meister Eckhart Adam Hirsch % | Ceci n'est pas une pipe Adam Hirsch % We are what we pretend to be, but we had better be very careful what we pretend. -- Kurt Vonnegut Adam Hirsch % You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats. -- Colonial American proverb Adam Hirsch % There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast. Adam Hirsch % adam@baz.org A child of _five_ would understand this. Adam Hirsch Send somebody to fetch me a child of five! http://web.baz.org/~adam/ - Groucho Marx, in _Duck_Soup_ % If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides. -Yiddish aphorism Adam Hirsch / adam@baz.org % Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. -Ashleigh Brilliant % Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -Douglas Adams, _Last Chance to See_ Adam Hirsch % but really, nobody can admin an NT box - | Adam Hirsch no matter how good you are, it'll still | adam@baz.org keep crashing, be insecure, and act weird. | I used to go out with someone like that. | % Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature. - Fran Lebowitz Adam Hirsch % Save the whales. Collect the whole set. adam@baz.org % We're drinking wine, but not through lips. We're sleeping it off, but not in bed. Rub the cup across your forehead. This day is outside living and dying. -Rumi, "Not A Day On Any Calendar" % It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. - Martin Luther King, 1968 Adam Hirsch % "One thing we know about Tibetan-Jewish relations," said Mr. Kamenetz: "The Dalai Lama likes matzoh." -New York Times, 4/10/98 Adam Hirsch % Everything I needed to know about life I learned from killing smarter people and eating their brains. Adam Hirsch % Error is the stuff of which the web of life is woven; and he who lives longest and wisest is only able to wear out the more of it. -T. Jefferson Adam Hirsch % I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him. - Booker T. Washington Adam Hirsch % We've never quite outgrown the idea that somewhere, there are people living in perfect harmony with nature and one another, and that we might do the same were it not for the corrupting influences of Western culture. - Melvin Konner, "Why the Reckless Survive" % Contrary to popular opinion, facts are not established by popular opinion. - Don Watson, ISPE Adam Hirsch % I can spit water between my two front teeth... I'm a WHALE! -S. Cimmet Adam Hirsch % I like text adventures. My favorites are 'unix' and 'emacs'. - Russ Nelson Adam Hirsch % "Just remember: no matter how good she looks, there's someone, somewhere, who's sick of her shit." -bathroom graffito % I wrote this poem about 15 years ago in Ireland. In those days, that country was so strict you used to have to smuggle condoms through the airport in bags of heroin. - Punk poet John Cooper Clarke Adam Hirsch % The issue isn't really whether one or two behaviors are 'over the line.' The issue is who gets to draw the line, and how, suspiciously, it keeps getting moved. -Nathan J. Mehl Adam Hirsch % There's so much comedy on television. adam@baz.org Does that cause comedy in the streets? - Dick Cavett Adam Hirsch % Nobody sees a flower, adam@baz.org really --- it is so small --- we haven't time, and to see takes time, Adam Hirsch like to have a friend takes time. - Georgia O'Keeffe % People have been trained to be stupid -- they need a word-checker to spell, they need a titular watch to tell time, and they need a goddamn PC to give them their sex and their community. - Harlan Ellison Adam Hirsch % The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. Adam Hirsch - J. Michael Straczynski % The history of the Universe has been summed up thusly: 'Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.' - John P. Wiley Jr., quoting Edward R. Harrison Adam Hirsch % Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies and gentlemen; the majority, in fact, weren't even mammals. - Robert Anton Wilson % For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo | a @ . is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the | d b o emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to | a a r fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. - Milan Kundera | m z g % Anybody can become angry - that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everyone's power and is not easy. - Aristotle % Captain Kirk and I both want the same thing: the whole-hearted a @ . devotion of a naive alien. And if certain things stand in our way -- d b o Klingons for Kirk, reality for me -- well, we just have to suck in our a a r guts, set the phasers on Stun, and hope for the best. - Ian Shoales m z g % Style. Beauty. Grace. That's what matters. If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. - Terry Pratchett, _Lords and Ladies_ Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % It's a good idea not to live your life just to Adam Hirsch please others. You don't please yourself and you adam@baz.org end up not pleasing anyone else. But if you please yourself, maybe you'll please someone else. - Groucho Marx % The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots. Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org - P. Ginsparg % Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers and nobody thinks of complaining. - Jef Raskin Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % meliorism \MEE-lee-uh-riz-um\ (noun) Adam Hirsch : the belief that the world tends to become better and that humans can aid its betterment adam@baz.org % If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. - Antoine de Saint Exupery Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. - H.L. Mencken Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Adam Hirsch You can visualize a hundred cats. Beyond that, you can't. Two hundred, five hundred, it all looks the same. adam@baz.org - Jack Wright, Guinness Book record holder for the owner of the most cats at one time (689) % Sleep is death without the responsibility. - Fran Leibowitz Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. - Frederick Douglass Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. - Lynda Barry Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org % 'Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,' he added, 'and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.' - Salman Rushdie, "The Satanic Verses" % Manhood used to be an opportunity for achievement. Adam Hirsch Look at St. Francis, Mozart, Michelangelo, adam@baz.org Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi. But now people treat it as a problem to be solved. - Garrison Keillor % In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him. -George Orwell Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. - C.S. Lewis Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % I had hoped ... to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in _Mother Night_ % Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others. - Groucho Marx % Route 66 is a giant chute down which everything loose in this country is sliding into Southern California. - Frank Lloyd Wright Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % the future's so hot \/ I've gotta use tongs Adam Hirsch /\ adam@baz.org % Self-blame constitutes an exquisite form of self-praise. No matter how severe the adjectives, the conversation remains fixed on oneself. For the last 40 years, all the best people have complained of neurotic disorders. - Lewis Lapham, in _Money and Class in America_ % I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. - Jon Stewart Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % a @ . If life were fair, the acquisition of a large bosom or a massive d b o inheritance would have no bearing on your ability to attract the a a r opposite sex, and Dan Quayle would be making a living asking m z g runny-nosed children, "Do you want fries with that?" - John Cleese % Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure. - Charles Darwin, _On The Origin of Species_ Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % Not one shred of evidence exists that life is serious. adam@baz.org - Joseph Campbell http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % adam@baz.org One test is worth a thousand expert opinions. http://web.baz.org/~adam/ - Bill Nye the Science Guy % When a dog runs at you, whistle for him. - Henry David Thoreau Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org <> http://web.baz.org/~adam/ % We are victims of one common superstition - the superstition that we understand the changes that are daily taking place in the world because we read about them and know what they are. - Mark Twain, from "About All Kinds of Ships" % In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. - Mark Twain % Don't tell me about God and guns. I've read the Bible. I know God didn't carry a gun and don't tell me it was ancient times and guns didn't exist. He was God. I think He could have invented one had He wanted to. - Dennis Miller % "THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department." - Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa" % Before Rebbe Zusia died, he said: ----------------- "When I shall face the celestial tribunal, I shall not be asked why I was not Abraham, Jacob, or Moses. I shall be asked why I was not Zusia." ------------------------------ -Elie Wiesel, SOULS ON FIRE % Cooking is a sacred activity. It is an act of lovemaking. Our society is spiritually malnourished because we have abandoned the kitchen. - novelist Laura Esquivel, author of _Like Water for Chocolate_ % "Well, no, I don't. What is the matter with you?" - David Letterman, asked in a Playboy interview whether he wanted to talk about his sex life. % A Canadian is just an unarmed American with health insurance. -John Wing Jr. Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org % Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. - J. R. R. Tolkein Adam Hirsch <> adam@baz.org % I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. - Steven Wright Adam Hirsch % "Sometimes you just have to look reality in the eye and deny it." - Garrison Keillor % "I went out to the kitchen to make coffee, yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men." - Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's THE LONG GOODBYE % There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more. - Woody Allen % All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates. - Woody Allen % One learns to itch where one can scratch. - Ernest Bramah % "People in this country have lost the habit of debating questions. TV does it for them. People hold opinions, but the opinions are not derived from either thought or discussion." - writer Saul Bellow % "Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance." - Jon Franklin % "Those that give up their freedom in the name of security deserve neither." - Benjamin Franklin % you don't have to take it from me \ but I know of what I speak