Manny > Manny's Quotes

“As the semantic engineer, your job is naming the parts and tightening nuts and bolts. I suggest you get back to your office and do that - right now!”
― John Sladek, The Steam-Driven Boy

“La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems

“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”
― Mae West

“Blond trollops who don go-go boots flop pompoms nonstop to do promos for floorshows. Wow! Hot blonds who doff cotton frocks show off soft bosoms. Hot to trot, two blonds who smooch now romp on cold wood floors for crowds of morons, most of whom hoot or howl: whoop, whoop”
― Christian Bök, Eunoia

“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!

Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'."

[Lobachevsky]”
― Tom Lehrer

“To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition.”
― Woody Allen

“Un soir qu'ils étaient couchés l'un près de l'autre, comme elle lui demandait d'inventer un poème qui commencerait par je connais un beau pays, il s'exécuta sur-le-champ. Je connais un beau pays Il est de l'or et d'églantine Tout le monde s'y sourit Ah quelle aventure fine Les tigres y sont poltrons Les agneaux ont fière mine À tous les vieux vagabonds Ariane donne des tartines. Alors, elle lui baisa le la main, et il eut honte de cette admiration.”
― Albert Cohen, Belle du Seigneur

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I had the good sense even then to realize patting oneself on the back is a waste of time. Besides, there are much better places to pat oneself if one must, indeed, pat.”
― W.B. Keckler

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt
two very different sons of zeus:
one, handsome strong and born to dare
--a fighter to his eyelashes--
the other,cunning ugly lame;
but as you'll shortly comprehend
a marvellous artificer

now Ugly was the husband of
(as happens every now and then
upon a merely human plane)
someone completely beautiful;
and Beautiful,who(truth to sing)
could never quite tell right from wrong,
took brother Fearless by the eyes
and did the deed of joy with him

then Cunning forged a web so subtle
air is comparatively crude;
an indestructible occult
supersnare of resistless metal:
and(stealing toward the blissful pair)
skilfully wafted over them-
selves this implacable unthing

next,our illustrious scientist
petitions the celestial host
to scrutinize his handiwork:
they(summoned by that savage yell
from shining realms of regions dark)
laugh long at Beautiful and Brave
--wildly who rage,vainly who strive;
and being finally released
flee one another like the pest

thus did immortal jealousy
quell divine generosity,
thus reason vanquished instinct and
matter became the slave of mind;
thus virtue triumphed over vice
and beauty bowed to ugliness
and logic thwarted life:and thus--
but look around you,friends and foes

my tragic tale concludes herewith:
soldier,beware of mrs smith”
― e.e. cummings

“The argument that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and had to be removed simply won't do. There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don't topple them, and, indeed, in earlier years we actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting Iran. The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and an unacceptable argument for regime change.”
― John Major

“The Ballad of Lucy Jordan
The morning sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
In a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban town
As she lay there 'neath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers
Till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.
So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly singing
Little nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.

Her husband, he's off to work and the kids are off to school,
And there are, oh, so many ways for her to spend the day.
She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers
Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair
So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singing
Pretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.

The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
On the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too loud
And she bowed and curtsied to the man who reached and offered her his hand,
And he led her down to the long white car that waited past the crowd.

At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found forever
As she rode along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair”
― Marianne Faithfull

“Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.”
― Jeffrey Robinson

“Toute grande oeuvre est soit une Iliade soit une Odysée, les odysées étant beaucoup plus nombreuse que les iliades: le Satiricon, La Divine Comédie, Pantagruel, Don Quichotte, et naturellement Ulysse (où l'on reconnaît d'ailleurs l'influence directe de Bouvard et Pécuchet) sont des odysées, c'est-à-dire des récits de temps pleins. Les iliades sont au contraire des recherches du temps perdu: devant Troie, sur une île déserte ou chez les Guermantes.”
― Raymond Queneau

“It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world. And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There's a technical name for it, I don't know if we can use it on television, it's called "bullshit." But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it's hot air. That's another name for the same phenomenon.”
― John R. Searle

“Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
― Blaise Pascal, De l'art de persuader

“I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark
When he made Pearl Harbor.
I miss you more than that movie missed the point
And that's an awful lot, girl.
And now, now you've gone away
And all I'm trying to say, is:
Pearl Harbor sucked and I miss you.

I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school
He was terrible in that film.
I need you like Cuba Gooding needed a bigger part
He's way better than Ben Affleck.
And now, all I can think about is your smile
and that shitty movie, too.
Pearl Harbor sucked and I miss you.
Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?
I guess Pearl Harbor sucked
just a little bit more than I miss you.”
― Trey Parker

“mr youse needn't be so spry
concernin questions arty

each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party

gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse

a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues”
― E.E. Cummings

“Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're the Doctor of my dreams
With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare
And your Machiavellian schemes
I know they say that you are very vain
And short and fat and pushy
But at least you're not insane
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
And wishing you were here

Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're so chubby and so neat
With your funny clothes and your squishy nose
You're like a German parakeet
All right so people say that you don't care
But you've got nicer legs than Hitler
And bigger tits than Cher
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
And wishing you were here”
― Monty Python

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
― Herbert Simon

“il étouffe - le monde se couche sur lui - et l’étouffe - il est prisonnier - coincé par ses promesses …

on lui demande des comptes …

En face de lui …

une machine à compter - une machine à écrire des lettres d’amour - une machine à souffrir - le saisit …

s’accroche à lui …

Pierre dis-moi la vérité”
― Jacques Prévert, Paroles

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
― Woody Allen

“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
― James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty

“I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it’s funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends.”
― Boris Gelfand

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
E'en in Australia art thou still more hot
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
(Since that's your winter it don't mean a lot)
Sometimes too bright the eye of heaven shines
And bushfires start through half of New South Wales
Just so, when I do see thy bosom's lines
A fire consumes me and my breathing fails

But thine eternal summer shall not fade
This is in no way due to global warming;
Nay, from thy breasts shall verses fair be made
So damn compulsive they are habit-forming
So long as men can read and eyes can see
So long lives this, thou 34DD

(Based on an idea by William Shakespeare. I'm sure he'd agree that I've improved it)”
― Manny Rayner