Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.

"Rove's re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. F@ggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That's all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The "reality-based" folks are learning that Jesusland doesn't even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it's all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her clit pierced? Jesus is just f*cking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you'll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you'll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded ... all you have to do is die, and then it's SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service."
Ken Layne

Every bleed eventually stops.
A.Oshin

If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails.
First heard from A.Oshin

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain.

"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.."
Robin Williams

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.
Albert Einstein

"Loss of limb will not excuse you."
(Severus Snape)

Question it if it's free.

Satisfaction is the death of desire.

Say what you mean, mean what you say.

The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average guy can see better than he can think.

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

There are only 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.

Women can fake orgasms, men can fake the whole relationship.
(possibly by Sharon Stone)

Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years.
(Attributed to Prince Philip)

I've come to kick ass and chew bubblegum.. and I'm all out of gum.
(Duke Nukem)

If you can't dazzle them with your intelligence, baffle them with your bullshit.

Jesus is coming, look busy.

Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around.
(Calvin "Calvin and Hobbes")

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
Albert Einstein

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

The best method known for getting people extremely angry at you is simply to be right where they're wrong -- especially if you give them any opportunity to read a moral subtext into whatever they're wrong about. It's sometimes okay to be a tiny bit smarter than the people you work with, but it's always devastating to working relationships to be proven right if that makes people feel you are somehow morally better than they are.
(Paul Murphy, LinuxInsider)

"We laugh at honor but are shocked to find traitors in our midst." C.S. Lewis

Litany against fear.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." Frank Herbert, Dune

A wise man speaks because he has something to say. A fool speaks because he has to say something.

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscle.

There is no escape, we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with triffles,
victim of your folly.
(Frank Herbert, Dune)

By what you despise you are truly known.

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life -- we went soft, we lost our edge.

You're only as sharp as your knife.

The mind can go either direction under stress -- toward positive or toward negative.

There is in all things a pattern, that is part of our universe. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection.... The ultimate pattern contains it's own fixity. In such perfection all things move towards death.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully concious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

How often is it that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him?

Life - all life - is in the service of life.

The wise man molds himself -- the fool lives only to die.

There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

Go ahead! Make my day.

"Should you a rat to madness tease.. why, even a rat may plague you.." Samuel Coleridge.

Knowledge is a barrier that prevents learning.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

Freedom is a lonely state.

Specialists are not to be trusted. Specialists are masters of exclusion, experts in the narrow.

Observe that wealth is a tool of freedom but the persuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

Anything and anyone can fail... but brave good friends help.

Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly.

"It's mind over matter gentlemen, if you don't mind, it doesn't matter." BUD/S instructors saying.

Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.

"You can tell a horse, ask a donkey and negotiate with a mule." The Donkey Sanctuary.

"I shit you not.. " Sgt. Barnes

"Excuses are like assholes, everybody has one." O'Neill

Free your mind, your ass will follow.

Fanaticism is a sign of repressed doubt.

"Swearing in French... it's like wiping your ass with silk." Matrix II

FUD

"You know what I think? .... It doesn't even matter what I think." Norm 'Hoot' Gibson, Sgt. First Class, Delta Force.

"I'm a politician. Which means I'm a cheat and a liar and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops." Secretary Pelt, The hunt for Red October.

Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it's a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that's really chewing on us. (Jessica speaking to Thufir Hawat)

Often I must speak other than I think. That is called diplomacy.
(Stilgar)

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
(Law and Governance The Spacing Guild Manual)

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed,
the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
("The Mentat Mantra", Piter De Vries)

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
(*grin*)

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?
(A Guide to Trial and Error in Government, Bene Gesserit Archive)

There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening: first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day the man leaped to his feet with a light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: "It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!"
(Stories of the Hidden Wisdom from the Oral History of Rakis)

Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.
(Bashar Miles Teg)

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
(Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto))

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
(Mentat Fixe (adacto))

Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior.
(Duncan Idaho)

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
(Confucius)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
(A.Einstein)

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman? - Young India, 10/4/1930 (Mahatma Ghandi)

One morning the husband returns after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap.
Although not familiar with the lake, the wife decides to take the boat out.
She motors out a short distance, anchors, and reads her book.
Along comes a Game Warden in his boat. He pulls up alongside the woman and says,
"Good morning, Ma'am. What are you doing?"
"Reading a book," she replies, (thinking, "Isn't that obvious?")
"You're in a Restricted Fishing Area," he informs her.
"I'm sorry, officer, but I'm not fishing. I'm reading." "Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment.
I'll have to take you in and write you up." "If you do that, I'll have to charge you with sexual assault," says the woman. "But I haven't even touched you," says the game warden.
"That's true, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment."
"Have a nice day ma'am," and he left.

MORAL: Never argue with a woman who reads. It's likely she can also think.

Atheism: A non-prophet organization.

Few women admit their age. Few men act theirs.

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails...and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.(Or just live happy. It's just a booketh)
(Anonymous "curse" on book thieves from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain)

If it's worth fighting for...it's worth fighting dirty for.

I'm in shape. Round is a shape.

If you can't convince, confuse!

It's only funny until someone gets hurt... Then it's hilarious.

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Procrastinate later.

"Man is the only religious animal. In the holy task of smoothing his brother's path to heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard."
(Mark Twain)

Gods can't be Gods without the ones below them gazing upward.

Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired
Mark Twain

Nathan: Alice, please. Your dog, Alice. It and my appetite are mutually exclusive. Alice: Well, what's wrong with the dog? Nathan: Simple. He's been licking his asshole for the last three straight hours. I submit to you that there is nothing there worth more than an hour's attention. I should think that whatever he is attempting to dislodge is either gone for good, or there to stay. Wouldn't you agree? (The Long Kiss Goodnight)

"There is something about yourself that you don't know. Something that you will deny even exists until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the only reason you get up in the morning, the only reason you suffer the shitty boss, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. "Fear or revere me, but please think I'm special." We share an addiction. We're approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The "hip, hip, hoo-fucking-rah." Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Cos we're just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others."
Jack Green, Revolver