Freebsd Fortunes 2

A Scholar asked his Master, "Master, would you advise me of a proper
vocation?"
        The Master replied, "Some men can earn their keep with the power of
their minds.  Others must use their strong backs, legs and hands.  This is
the same in nature as it is with man.  Some animals acquire their food easily,
such as rabbits, hogs and goats.  Other animals must fiercely struggle for
their sustenance, like beavers, moles and ants.  So you see, the nature of
the vocation must fit the individual.
        "But I have no abilities, desires, or imagination, Master," the
scholar sobbed.
        Queried the Master... "Have you thought of becoming a salesperson?"

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually
die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
                -- Max Planck

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from
the vexation of thinking.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1831

A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness
of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor, and a thirst for a life giving
water which seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in consciousness
of this necessary reorganization of our lives.

It is difficult to believe that this state of mind can be produced by the
recognition of such facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the
ground.
                -- J.W.N. Sullivan

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep
him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are
worth committing.
                -- Samuel Butler

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
                -- Don Marquis

A Severe Strain on the Credulity
        As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the
multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt...
for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its
flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the
charges it then might have left.  Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in
Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not
know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to
lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
                -- New York Times Editorial, 1920

A sharper perspective on this matter is particularly important to feminist
thought today, because a major tendency in feminism has constructed the
problem of domination as a drama of female vulnerability victimized by male
aggression.  Even the more sophisticated feminist thinkers frequently shy
away from the analysis of submission, for fear that in admitting woman's
participation in the relationship of domination, the onus of responsibility
will appear to shift from men to women, and the moral victory from women to
men.  More generally, this has been a weakness of radical politics: to
idealize the oppressed, as if their politics and culture were untouched by
the system of domination, as if people did not participate in their own
submission.  To reduce domination to a simple relation of doer and done-to
is to substitute moral outrage for analysis.
                -- Jessica Benjamin, "The Bonds of Love"

A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.

A sine curve goes off to infinity, or at least the end of the blackboard.
                -- Prof. Steiner