---------------------------------------------------------------------
"The joy of killing brings men together."
-- Adolf Hitler
(From "Hitler's Table Talk" by Martin Bormann;
English transl, 3rd Ed., Enigma Books, New York, 2000)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"...and from little sleep and much reading,
his brain dried up and he lost his wits."
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things couldn't be better -- unfortunately.
--P. Chernoff
-------------------------------------------------
Sleep knits up the ravel'd sleeve of care,
But often neglects the trousers.
--Woody Shakespeare
-------------------------------------------------
For a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
or what's a meta phor?
--P. Chernoff
-------------------------------------------------
God created the integers, but I think He left one out.
--Woody Kronecker
-------------------------------------------------
God created the null set and brackets; all the rest
is the work of Man.
--Kronecker (updated)
-------------------------------------------------
"The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average
Russian's readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the
arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians' predisposition
for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why
they led the field for many years in both chess and axe murders."
-- Marshall Brickman
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study
logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics."
-- Maimonides,
Guide to the Perplexed, I
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics,
than a dozen mediocre papers."
-- J. E. Littlewood
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy
except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
-- Gibbon
(as quoted by R. P. Feynman)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
A doctor, a lawyer and a mathematician were discussing the relative merits
of having a wife or a mistress.
The doctor said: "It's better to have a wife because the sense of security
lowers your stress and is good for your health."
The lawyer said: "Surely a mistress is better; if you have a wife and
want a divorce, you'll incur all sorts of legal problems."
The mathematician said: "You're both wrong. It's best to have both, so that
when your wife thinks you're with your mistress and your mistress thinks you're
with your wife --- you can do some mathematics."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
- Woody Allen
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us
make the most of." -- W. V. O. Quine
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human
affairs" -- G. Santayana
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every day it's the same thing--variety. I want something different."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is better never to have been born. But who among us has such luck?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"All my life I've wanted to be somebody; I guess I should've been more
specific." -- Lily Tomlin
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are all here on earth to help others. What I can't figure out is what the
others are here for." -- W. H. Auden
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you asked me to live in sin with you
--I didn't know you meant sloth.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...W.L.Duckworth once exuberantly exclaimed that if Neanderthal man entered a
bar in modern dress the majority would not notice him. One marvels at the
sort of person Duckworth drank with." - R. Miller
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ripping Yarns
"Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some
sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him..."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was little time to think deep thoughts, and less to write,
but now that he was doing responsible work he did not feel the
same urge for intellectual activity." - Olaf Stapledon, "Sirius"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to Man." -- AE Housman
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You know, it's at times like this...that I really wish I'd listened to
what my mother told me when I was young!"
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen!"
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Outside of a dog a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too
hard to read." -- Groucho Marx
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"NO LEFT TURN INTO CLOVERLEAF ALLEY EXCEPT FROM THE
MIDDLE LANE OF THE OUTER ROADWAY -- SUNDAYS AND
ALTERNATE HOLIDAYS EXCLUDED UNLESS CHURCH SERVICES
ARE IN PROGRESS" [former Killington, VT, road sign]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If Universities do not study useless subjects, who will?
- George Francis FitzGerald (1851-1901)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professorships would be nice, if it were not for the students.
-- Lord Rayleigh (1842 - 1919)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As for the translation, it preserves the flavour
of the original Russian so successfully that one is
hardly aware that one is reading English."
--From a book review by David Layzer,
NATURE, 21 April 1988, p. 743
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Witzelsucht (vit'sel-zoocht) [Ger.]
"A mental condition characteristic of frontal lobe lesions and marked by
the making of poor jokes and puns and the telling of pointless stories, at
which the patient himself is intensely amused."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The *evident* character of this defective cognition of which mathematics
is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on
the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore
of a kind that philosophy must spurn." -- G. W. F. Hegel
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must first be stupid
enough to want it." -- G.K. Chesterson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by
prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is
only one example of many in recent history."
-- American Bar Association task force on flag burning
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Few understand the works of Cummings,
And few James Joyce's mental slummings,
And few young Auden's coded chatter;
But then it is the few that matter.
-Dylan Thomas
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Millions long for immortality who
do not know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
---Susan Ertz
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A priest advised Voltaire on his death bed to renounce the
devil. Voltaire said, "This is no time to make new enemies".
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine:
This living, this living, this living,
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle --
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
-- Dorothy Parker
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
-- Dorothy Parker
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics.
I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics
leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all
there was to it.
-- Malcolm X
(Quoted in the American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 103 (1996), p. 916)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NAME in vain:
``Yahweh's the Name, and God is the game."
--P. Chernoff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Israel independence day:
Mah nishtanah hayom hazeh, mikol ha yomim?
Hayom hazeh, borah Elohim Midinat Yisrael!
(Why is this day different from all other days?
On this day, God created the State of Israel.)
--P. Chernoff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
BLASPHEMY
Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Holy Spirit you debase.
You claim that you're the Mom of God:
As for poor Joseph, in his face!
--P. Chernoff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
KADDISH SONG (briskly):
Yisgadol v'yiskadash, sh'may raboh. Awmein.
Kaddish, kaddish, kaddish, kaddish -- God gives me a pain!
--P. Chernoff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
True quotations from real sports people...
> > >
Chicago Cubs outfielder Andre Dawson on being a role model: "I
want all the kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want all the kids to
copulate me."
> > >
New Orleans Saint RB George Rogers when asked about the upcoming season:
"I want to rush for 1,000 or 1,500 yards, whichever comes first."
> > >
A senior basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh
boasted:
"I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes."
> > >
Bill Peterson, a Florida State football coach instructed his
team: "You guys line up alphabetically by height . . . and you guys pair up in
groups of three, then line up in a circle."
> > >
Shaquille O'Neal on whether he had visited the Parthenon during a
visit to Greece: "I can't really remember the names of the clubs that we
went to."
> > >
Lou Duva, veteran boxing trainer, on the Spartan training regime of
heavyweight Andrew Golota: "He's a guy who gets up at six o'clock in the
morning regardless of what time it is."
> > >
Chuck Nevitt, North Carolina State basketball player, explaining to
Coach Jim Valvano why he appeared nervous at a 1982 practice: "My
sister's expecting a baby, and I don't know if I'm going to be an
uncle or an aunt."
> > >
Shelby Metcalf, basketball coach at Texas A&M recounting what he told
a player who received four F's and one D: "Son, looks to me like you're
spending too much time on one subject." (1987)
> > >
Frank Layden, Utah Jazz president, on a former player: "I told him,
'Son, what is it with you. Is it ignorance or apathy?' He replied,
'Coach, I don't know and I don't care.'" (1991)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Famous dog quotations:
"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of
dogs."
-- Aldous Huxley
"A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three
times before lying down."
-- Robert Benchley
"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the
guts to bite people themselves."
-- August Strindberg
"No animal should ever jump up on the dining room furniture unless
absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation."
-- Fran Lebowitz
"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have
known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
-- James Thurber
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite
you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-- Mark Twain
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is
not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space
travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
-- Robert Heinlein
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.
-- Edwin Meese III
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are two kinds of truth: trivial truths, such as 2 + 2 = 4, and
profound truths, such as "God exists". The opposite of a profound truth
may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hand, n.:
A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and
commonly thrust into somebody's pocket.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's
a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work.
-- Gallagher
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Justice is incidental to law and order.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
For years a secret shame destroyed my peace --
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
-- Justin Richardson.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life is an acquired taste.
-- P. Chernoff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness,
the other to extinction. Let us pray we choose correctly.
-- Woody Allen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature, because, in the
last analysis, we are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.
-- Max Planck
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It must be admitted that even among intellectuals there are some really
intelligent people."
-M. Bulgakov, _The Master & Margaritta_
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
David M. Tate |
dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu | The guilty flee when no man pursueth; the
Motto: | innocent get hit in the head with a rock.
Gramen artificiosum odi |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The longer I live the more I see I am never wrong about anything, and that all
the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
-- George Bernard Shaw
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise;
When he closes his lips, he is counted prudent.
Proverbs 17:28
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two anecdotes told by H. Freudenthal in Math. Intelligencer 4 (2), 1982.
Erhard Schmidt (born 1876 in Estland) visited Tsarist Russia. The police
searched his luggage and confiscated a dangerous book. It mentioned
"Power of the masses" (actually: M\"achtigkeit der Menge) too often.
There went a fine book about set theory . . ..
When Schmidt told this to his friend Constantin Caratheodory (born 1873,
Berlin, Greek but originally a Turkish subject), Caratheodory said:
That's nothing to what happened to me on entering Turkey. I had an engineering
book confiscated by the Turkish police because it talked about a machine that
made fifty revolutions a minute.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Maschler One should observe two rules
Department of Mathematics in order to succeed in one's career:
The Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel 1. Never reveal to others everything
you know.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact that there seems to be a big gap in quality between
the works of Wittgenstein and most of his followers would
appear to indicate that there is much more to the method than
can be learnt from Wittgenstein's teaching."
Hao Wang in "From Mathematics to Philosophy"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not just the ups and downs that make life difficult. It's the jerks.
Alfred E. Neuman MAD # 293
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are sorry, but the number you have dialed is imaginary.
Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
David Grabiner, grabiner@zariski.harvard.edu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Levity is the soul of wit. [PRC, 12/91]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Suppose the world was only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less
to make it a good joke, instead of a bad one?" - George Bernard Shaw
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ich will meine mauer wieder haben!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
``Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded
by prejudice, not warped by interest, would declare, that taxes
were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to
carry on taxes."
--Thomas Paine, ``The Rights of Man" (1781)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things |
that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some |
of the grace of tragedy - Steven Weinberg |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness,
the other to extinction. Let us pray we choose correctly. -- Woody Allen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
When a fellow says, "It ain't the money but the principle of the
thing," it's the money.
-- Kim Hubbard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
-- Dorothy Parker
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune;
for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue
or mischief." - Francis Bacon
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let it go out and hang itself.
-C.D. Broad on common sense.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Victor Meldrew: "The police can use sperm now as
a way of fingerprinting people."
Mrs Warboys: "I don't see what was wrong with the old inkpads."
David Renwick, _One Foot in the Grave_
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If a great state has decided by law that twice two is five, it would be
foolish to allow mathematicians to testify." - Comment during the Scopes
Monkey Trial.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Man kann tun was man will, doch man kann nicht wollen was man will.
Schopenhauer
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
If I have seen less than other men, it is because I have walked
in the footsteps of giants.
--P. Chernoff
------------------------------------------------------------------------
An observation from one of my classmates, who attended Harvard for a
couple of years, but graduated from Berkeley: "I found Harvard a terribly
arrogant place; but while Harvard specializes in arrogance, Berkeley
specializes in red tape, and, on the whole, I fould the arrogance more
forgivable." (From Harvard Class of `63 "Joint Jottings", 1988)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deeep theology
God observes the fall of the tiniest sparrow
Then grinds the poor little birdie into the dust.
--P. Chernoff (9/10/01)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Masochism: love at first slight.
--P. Chernoff. 1/9/02
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm so confused, I don't know whether I'm ejaculating or urinating.
(That's "coming or going", in case you need a hint.)
--P. Chernoff, 1/30/02
------------------------------------------------------------------------
To paraphrase Will Rogers, I don't belong to any organized religion --
I'm a Jew.
--P. Chernoff, 2/6/02
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call your friendly local HMO. If you're not satisfied with your
PCP, they'll giv you some heroin.
--P. Chernoff, 2/7/02
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who steals my purse steals cash.
-- Bacon and Eggs
(Of course, Bacon wrote Shakespeare. But Shaxper *ate* bacon.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given
me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty, and
truth.
-- A. Einstein
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take it easy, but take it.
-- Studs Terkel
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Love
Love is money, Cheri."
-- Jacques Prevert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is better to be healthy and rich than sick and poor.
-- Larry Corwin
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
And what if you track down these men and kill them, what if you
killed all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds,
thousands would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can't
kill that fast. -- Paul Henreid (Casablanca).
(Too bad this was off by a very large factor.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The older I get, the more I admire and crave competence, just
simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology."
- H.L. Mencken
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics,
than a dozen medioces papers.
-- J.E. Littlewood
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking."
-- Antonio Machado
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------