Quotes, etc.

A little gossip, a little chat,
a little idle talk of this and that.
If no one listens, then it's just as well;
at least I won't get caught in any lies I tell!

--- Man of La Mancha

". . . it is far easier to analyze . . . than to synthesize . . . ."
--- Edward O. Wilson, Consilience

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
--- Arthur C. Clarke

"Magic is product without process." (paraphrase)
--- John Brunner, The Traveler in Black

"98% of everything is crud."
--- Theodore Sturgeon, responding to criticism that "98% of science fiction is crud."

"Life is change."
--- Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation" (and probably others)

Lyrics of Jefferson Airplane's "Crown of Creation" are largely quoted from John Wyndham's science fiction novel (novella?) Re-birth.

Jethro Tull's popular tune "Bouree" is a rhythmically altered version of the Bouree movement from J. S. Bach's Lute Suite no. 1.

The film Apocalypse Now retells Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, set in Vietnam rather than Africa.

"History never repeats itself. Man always does."
--- Voltaire

"War . . . is a planned and cooperative form of theft."
--- Jacob Bronowski

In war, resolution;
in defeat, defiance;
in victory, magnanimity;
in peace, good will.

--- Winston Churchill

"We have met the enemy and he is us."
--- Walt Kelly, Pogo

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. 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. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn -- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics -- why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."

--- T. H. White, The Once and Future King

". . . life is for learning."
--- Joni Mitchell

"All learning is the result of inelastic collision."
--- Randall Garrett

"You can't do nothin' if you don't know nothin'."
--- U. S. Marine Corps aphorism

". . . the power to command frequently causes failure to think . . ."
--- Barbara Tuchman

"Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight."
--- Thomas Carlyle

"If you're not out of control, you're not racing!"
--- Parnelli Jones

"More accelerator, less brakes."
--- Juan Manuel Fangio, 1950's Grand Prix champion, explaining his winning technique.

"Win, blow, or poke a hole in the fence!"
--- racing motto

"Don't look back; something might be gaining!"
--- Satchel Paige

. . . all romantics meet the same fate someday,
cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe.

--- Joni Mitchell, "The Last Time I Saw Richard"

"Growing old but not up . . ."
--- Jimmy Buffet

You don't change your music to make it sell.
--- Glenn Phillips, guitarist extraordinaire, in an interview on WREK
(mid-to-late-1970's?)

He didn't, and it hasn't.
--- Chris Mills, sculptor, over beers at Lake Lanier
(mid-1990's)

Two from Piet Hein:

There is one art,
no more, no less:
to do all things
with artlessness.

[From memory; I may have divided the lines wrong.]

The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

Winning entry in Isaac Asimov's limerick contest:

The bustard's an exquisite fowl,
with minimal reason to growl.
It escapes what would be
illegitimacy
by grace of a fortunate vowel.

--- author unknown (sorry!)

Never-submitted entry for Isaac Asimov's double-dactyl contest:

Elegant-relevant
Sagan, astronomer,
pondering planets and
staring at stars,

humbugs those heros who
melodramatically
languish on Venus and
battle on Mars.

Winner -- I think -- of Isaac Asimov's double-dactyl contest:

Higgledy-piggledy
Werner K. Heisenberg
said that our knowledge of
atoms has gaps.

Einstein, distressed by this
discontinuity,
said that The Allmighty
does not shoot craps.

"Write drunk; edit sober."
--- [Jonathan Williams, I think, quoting someone; I haven't been able to find the page again.]

De gustibis non disputandum est.
(Taste is not a matter for dispute.)
--- Thomas Aquinas

De Heffalumpus semper disputandum est.
(You never can tell about Heffalumps.)
--- Winnie Il Pooh

Who are these people, and what do they have in common?

• Atticus Finch
• Puddin'head Wilson
• Gavin Stevens

The fourth (choral) movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony uses as its text Schiller's Ode to Joy. Instead of an ode to joy (freude), Schiller originally wrote an ode to freedom (freiheit?). Schiller altered his work to placate Imperial censors, who evidently were uncomfortable with such radical democratic notions.

. . . what we call the age of anxiety is in truth a transitional time, an uncertain moment in the adolescence of a species, when the superstitions and imaginary identifications of childhood are no longer enough but the larger comprehensions of maturity are yet unavailable. In such an awkward emotional age we lose faith in fathers, divine or domestic, and yearn for more suitable stars to steer by. We lose confidence. We feel ourselves children of inconspicuous circumstance, dry leaves tumbling before unimportant winds, victims of worlds not of our making, will-less trespassers on dubious pastures. Yet self-knowledge cannot be denied. Maturity must come.

--- Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative

"You can bullshit me and you can bullshit yourself, but you can't bullshit cast iron!"
--- Dan Hernandez, explaining a broken thermostat housing to the mechanic who broke it

". . . all structural failures may be considered due to a lack of redundancy . . ."
--- Mario Salvadori, Why Buildings Fall Down

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again with better knowledge."
--- Henry Ford

"Brevity does not make life meaningless, but forgetting does."
--- William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse

"Libraries . . . are not the enemies of books, but museums are the enemies of art."
--- Andrei Codrescu, The Devil Never Sleeps

"Nature . . . existed for eons before we arrived, didn't know we were coming, and doesn't give a damn about us."
--- Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages

Mis-Quotes

(I thought he said . . .)

"We will be a cannibal for our actions."

"Life is just Ebola cherries."

"Lucien, this guy with diamonds . . ."

"Widdle Darwin, it seems like Isis lowly Melton . . ."