Freebsd Fortunes

[In the 60's] there was madness in any direction, at any hour ...  You
could strike sparks anywhere.  There was a fantastic universal sense
that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning ...

And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we
didn't need that.  Our energy would simply `prevail'.  There was no
point in fighting -- on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum;
we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

In the beginning was the word.
But by the time the second word was added to it,
there was trouble.
For with it came syntax ...
                -- John Simon

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat
hacking at the PDP-6.  "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.  "I am
training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."  "Why is the
net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.  "I do not want it to have any
preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes.  "Why do you
close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.  "So the room will be
empty."  At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in
the proper order then why can't he?

In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is driven by the Grateful
Dead.
                -- Egyptian Book of the Dead

In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
                -- Alan Perlis

In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or
a loaf of bread.  However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it
to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by
forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy.  If you
stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit
punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong
enough to punch you.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has
shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.  Therefore ... in the
Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million
three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years
from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
... There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.
                -- Mark Twain

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to
drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at
discotheques.
                -- Art Linkletter

In those days he was wiser than he is now -- he used to frequently take
my advice.
                -- Winston Churchill