Freebsd Fortunes 2

"... bleakness... desolation... plastic forks..."
                -- Zippy the Pinhead

... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand.  Human
intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we
can tell.  If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now
seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their
world, not in their distorted perceptions.  Even the standard example of
ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once
you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen
would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
                -- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"

... C++ offers even more flexible control over the visibility of member
objects and member functions.  Specifically, members may be placed in the
public, private, or protected parts of a class.  Members declared in the
public parts are visible to all clients; members declared in the private
parts are fully encapsulated; and members declared in the protected parts
are visible only to the class itself and its subclasses.  C++ also supports
the notion of *friends*: cooperative classes that are permitted to see each
other's private parts.
                -- Grady Booch, "Object Oriented Design with Applications"

... computer hardware progress is so fast.  No other technology since
civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price
gain in 30 years.
                -- Fred Brooks

... difference of opinion is advantagious in religion.  The several sects
perform the office of a common censor morum over each other.  Is uniformity
attainable?  Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned;
yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
                -- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia"

<<<<< EVACUATION ROUTE <<<<<

... "fire" does not matter, "earth" and "air" and "water" do not matter.
"I" do not matter.  No word matters.  But man forgets reality and remembers
words.  The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him.
He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see
them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time.
Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he
knows them in the naming.
                -- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light"

"... gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
                -- Secretary of State Henry Stimson, on closing down
                   the Black Chamber, the precursor to the National
                   Security Agency.

        (Haley's comment.)

... if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does
on lust, this would be a better world.
                -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"