Adages
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Quotes of the moment
- Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
- Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
- Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
From the quiet insightful Green Lantern theory comments
“Conan, what is best in life?”
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”
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Quote of the moment
From the comments of this post at Coming Anarchy
“generalizations are a willful display of ignorance”
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Funny notions
Funny convergences: I came across this
Blair’s Law – the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.
which was part of post that included Ku Klux Klan wins approval to protest Iraq war seemingly, though not explicitly, arguing that the war is bad for white people.
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Quotes of the moment
Samuel Goldwyn
“You’ve got to take the bitter with the sour.”
The secret to building half a product instead of a half-ass
product is saying no.Each time you say yes to a feature, you’re adopting a child. You
have to take your baby through a whole chain of events (e.g.
design, implementation, testing, etc.). And once that feature’s
out there, you’re stuck with it. -
Quote of the moment
This actually dovetails nicely with Bevelry’s adage “Look as busy as possible” theory of retail. From the 37 signals book “Getting Real”
If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know
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Quotes of the moment
From the comments of a vitriolic post about an Israeli flag being waved at some soccer game
This is why the entire Arab world can barely make a good washing machine and we send people into space for fun.
And via Jane Galt (original post about second languages)
I’m a poor programmer whose solution to execution failures is type louder and more slowly.
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Friday round up
- Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
- The physics and biology of Superman’s possible reproduction
- Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
- Why women have fat thighs.
- Amazing RC Plane Demo
- Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
- Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer- The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
- We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
- It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
- Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
- There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.
- To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
- An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
- Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
- Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
- I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
- It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
- Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
- The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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Quotes of the moment
The Duke of Wellington
For a great power there are no small wars
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
The fault was not decadence but the desire for holiness, the belief in sacrifice, and a willingness to serve as the butchered victim acceptable to God.
From the guide to Christianity for the secular
Christians are not easy to understand. To begin with, there are roughly 2,000 years of history to grasp, and certainly more denominations and subdivisions than that to take on board. For people who were raised secular, I imagine it’s like trying to understand an opera after coming in halfway before the end: the stage is crowded with people, two of them seem to be dead, a woman is wearing a hat with horns, and everyone is making a terrible racket.
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An odd quote
G.K. Chesterton:
There is more true simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape nuts on principle
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Line of the moment
From Thomas Sowell
“Intellectuals’ ability to think of people in the abstract is a dangerous talent in a world where people differ in all the ways that make them people.”