Fortunes
A collection of various quotes/fortunes I thought were worth preserving.
You can find a fortune database generated from these fortunes in this site's Codeberg page.
Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters.
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A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining
and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-- Mark Twain
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You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
-- Lee Harvey Oswald
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An elderly man stands in line for hours at a Warsaw meat store (meat
is severely rationed). When the butcher comes out at the end of the day and
announces that there is no meat left, the man flies into a rage.
"What is this?" he shouts. "I fought against the Nazis, I worked hard
all my life, I've been a loyal citizen, and now you tell me I can't even buy a
piece of meat? This rotten system stinks!"
Suddenly a thuggish man in a black leather coat sidles up and murmurs
"Take it easy, comrade. Remember what would have happened if you had made an
outburst like that only a few years ago" -- and he points an imaginary gun to
this head and pulls the trigger.
The old man goes home, and his wife says, "So they're out of meat
again?"
"It's worse than that," he replies. "They're out of bullets."
-- making the rounds in Warsaw, 1987
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Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
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Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like
'Psychic Wins Lottery.'
-- Jay Leno
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Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the
party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith
agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part shall be removed
from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed
upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of
the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating
at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of
the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the
second part and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the
parties.
The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be
limited to, the following. The party of the first part shall, with or without
elevation at his option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder or any other
means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part and rotate the party
of the second part in a counter-clockwise direction, this point being tendered
non-negotiable. Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part
becomes fully detached from the receptacle, the party of the first part shall
have the option of disposing of the party of the second part in a manner
consistent with all relevant and applicable local, state and federal statutes.
Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part
shall have the option of beginning installation. Aforesaid installation shall
occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in
step one of this self-same document, being careful to note that the rotation
should occur in a clockwise direction, this point also being non-negotiable.
The above described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the
first part, by any or all agents authorized by him, the objective being to
produce the most possible revenue for the Partnership.
%%
It is true that if your paperboy throws your paper into the bushes for
five straight days it can be explained by Newton's Law of Gravity. But
it takes Murphy's law to explain why it is happening to you.
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Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not
original and the part that is original is not good.
-- Samuel Johnson
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It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-- Andrew Jackson
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Linux printing was designed and implemented by people working to preserve the
rainforest by making it utterly impossible to consume paper.
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Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister
-- Su Tung-p'o
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One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to
do and always a clever thing to say.
-- Will Durant
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Fortune's Guide to Freshman Notetaking:
WHEN THE PROFESSOR SAYS: YOU WRITE:
Probably the greatest quality of the poetry John Milton -- born 1608
of John Milton, who was born in 1608, is the
combination of beauty and power. Few have
excelled him in the use of the English language,
or for that matter, in lucidity of verse form,
'Paradise Lost' being said to be the greatest
single poem ever written."
Current historians have come to Most of the problems that now
doubt the complete advantageousness face the United States are
of some of Roosevelt's policies... directly traceable to the
bungling and greed of President
Roosevelt.
... it is possible that we simply do Professor Mitchell is a
not understand the Russian viewpoint... communist.
%%
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
-- Indian proverb
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Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
-- Albert Einstein
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Sturgeon's Law:
90% of everything is crud.
%%
Rhode's Law:
When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening,
circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly,
empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred,
induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically guessed, it will always
for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political advantage,
material gain, or personal comfort, or any combination of the above, or
none of the above, be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed,
proclaimed, and adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably,
universally, immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it
becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.
%%
Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism.
Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet.
The two definition immediately preceding are condensed from the works
of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject
with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human
knowledge.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
NOTICE.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
-- Mark Twain, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
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Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring.
%%
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one
instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every
program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.
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Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
%%
Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis:
If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review
and be implemented it wasn't worth doing.
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Love at first sight is one of the greatest labor-saving devices the
world has ever seen.
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A real person has two reasons for doing anything ... a good reason and
the real reason.
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The clever men at Oxford... Know all that there is to be knowed. But they none
of them know one half as much... As intelligent Mr. Toad!
-- Kenneth Grahame, "The Wind in the Willows"
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Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us
to pay income taxes, too?
-- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox
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Oliver's Law:
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need
it.
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He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry
attacks democracy itself.
-- William S. Paley, chairman of CBS
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Bore, n.:
A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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The other day, I overheard my older kids talking to my younger boy and they were
saying "don't ever, don’t EVER ask Dad to help you with your homework." They
said I made up a war once.
-- Tom Waits
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Telephone, n.:
An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making
a disagreeable person keep his distance.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
"There are languages where double negative is negative, languages where double
negative is positive, and languages where double positive is positive. However,
there is no language where double positive is negative."
Yeah. Right....
%%
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
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Leibowitz's Rule:
When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you
hold the hammer with both hands.
%%
Baruch's Observation:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
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Apologize, v.i.:
To lay the foundation for a future offence.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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Conservative, n.:
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the
Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Intellect is knowing Frankenstein wasn't the monster. Wisdom is knowing
Frankenstein was the monster.
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I was playing poker the other night ... with Tarot cards. I got a full
house and four people died.
-- Steven Wright
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No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a
camel -- anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform
effectively under such difficult conditions.
-- Laurence J. Peter
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To err is human, to forgive is Not Company Policy.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it
were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
-- H. L. Mencken
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A witty saying proves nothing.
-- Voltaire
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Burn's Hog Weighing Method:
(1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a
sawhorse.
(2) Put the hog on one end of the plank.
(3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again
perfectly balanced.
(4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks.
-- Robert Burns
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A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work
by being declared to work.
-- Anatol Holt
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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
-- Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick
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A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer
be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained
would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2
might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with
"i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12
or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz
ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
%%
Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The
reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of
thirty-five.
-- Joel Hildebrand
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Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen
at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
-- Herodotus
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I hate quotations.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three
men, two of them absent.
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Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none.
-- Doug Larson
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Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
(1) If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only
once.
(2) If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data
points.
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Second Law of Business Meetings:
If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you
will pick the wrong one.
Corollary:
If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it
wrong, anyway.
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What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.
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Cunningham's Law:
The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a
question; it's to post the wrong answer.
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Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
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Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid
back.
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Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than
we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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Main's Law:
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
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There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so
simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it
so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C.A.R. Hoare
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Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent
psychopath who knows where you live.
-- Martin Golding
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as
a criminal offense.
-- E.W. Dijkstra
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Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger
and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and
better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
-- Rick Cook
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[Crash programs] fail because they are based on the theory that, with
nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.
-- Wernher von Braun
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Every four seconds a woman has a baby. Our problem is to find this
woman and stop her.
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Egotist, n.:
A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
I get why people want to censor sites trafficking mainly in misinformation,
disinformation, absurd theories about how things work, blatantly erroneous
claims, and trolling by bad actors. But it's a free country, and people should
be able to read Hacker News if they want to.
-- Ceasy Muratori
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Maintainer's Motto:
If we can't fix it, it ain't broke.
%%
panic: can't find /
%%
RESTRICTIONS
Bugs you don't plan to fix. :-)
-- perlpodstyle
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Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.
-- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
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SCO csh still thinks true is false. Write to SCO today and tell them that next
year Configure ought to "rm /bin/csh" unless they fix their blasted shell. :-)
-- perl5 Configure script
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We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.
%%
NEWS FLASH!!
Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West
German pole-vault champion.
%%
Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
(1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
(2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the
first two laws.
%%
N: Phil Lewis
E: beans@bucket.ualr.edu
D: Promised to send money if I would put his name in the source tree.
S: PO Box 371
S: North Little Rock, Arkansas 72115
S: US
-- /usr/src/linux/CREDITS
%%
Retroemotions, statistical outliers, lunar excursions, Lorentz contraction,
extrasolar planets, atomic clocks, lucky bullets, Greek mythology, political
commentary, true crime, artificial intelligence, time travel, neofuturism, The
Prince, British SF of the 1970s, dwimmery, poetry, Pride and Prejudice and
Profit, English grammar, Perlish syntax, cleverness, satire, a better Turing
test, keywords, really smart comments, getting what you mean by saying what you
want, object orientation, multiple dispatch, type systems, constraint
programming, declarative programming, ancient puzzles, academic literature,
linguistic theft, misplacing operators, deconstructing philosophy, the seven
laws of "Best", the ABC of choice, closures and continuations, inception,
conception, deception, exceptions, the Code of Cthulhu, sorting topologically,
the world's most redundant goto, the feature lifecycle, retroexperimentation,
fjords, the Pareto Principle, sufficiently hard values of "easy", resurrecting
the future, rewriting the past, nominative debugging, casinos foresight vs
hindsight, green lights vs red flags, the 46 rules of bad behaviour, the gentle
art of novemdecimation, code recycling, the write-right rite-wright, type
compatibility, adding value to hash comparisons, the virtues of asymmetry, the
slightly less gentle art of septendecimvicesimation, keeping it quantum,
implicit disjunctions, explicit conjunctions, complicit injunctions, illicit
abjunctions, Kernighan's corollary, getting what you want by saying what you
mean, reimagining the past, reinterpreting the present, reinventing the future.
In other words, it’s just your typical Conway keynote.
%%
There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.
No artist ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
-- Jean Giradoux
%%
Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions:
We think that we may take judicial notice of the fact that the term "bitch"
may imply some feeling of endearment when applied to a female of the canine
species but that it is seldom, if ever, so used when applied to a female
of the human race. Coming as it did, reasonably close on the heels of two
revolver shots directed at the person of whom it was probably used, we think
it carries every reasonable implication of ill-will toward that person.
-- Smith v. Moran, 193 N.E. 2d 466.
%%
I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.
-- Tom Waits
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Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if
you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart
enough to debug it.
-- Brian Kernighan
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On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: 'Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come
out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that
could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
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I went to the zoo once and saw this thing they call an anteater. That was quite
enough for me.
-- Thomas Pynchon
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I hate my telephone. Please don't ask for my phone number.
-- Larry Wall
%%
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone;
my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my
telephone.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
Last Modified: 2025-02-04
I like work; it fascinates me; I can sit and look at it for hours.