A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Assumptions are the things you don't know you're making.
Beware of small men, he had often told himself, because they are the movers and shakers of the world.
Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.
Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.
Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
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.
I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' appear.
Life is wasted on the living.
Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.
Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our future successes.
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Well, the hours are good, but now that you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.
Who is this god person anyway?
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Found 44 occurence(s) in 52,537 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
