Freebsd Fortunes 3

But I find the old notions somehow appealing.  Not that I want to go
back to them -- it is outrageous to have some outer authority tell you
what is proper use and abuse of your own faculties, and it is ludicrous
to hold reason higher than body or feeling.  Still there is something
true and profoundly sane about the belief that acts like murder or
theft or assault violate the doer as well as the done to.  We might
even, if we thought this way, have less crime.  The popular view of
crime, as far as I can deduce it from the movies and television, is
that it is a breaking of a rule by someone who thinks they can get away
with that; implicitly, everyone would like to break the rule, but not
everyone is arrogant enough to imagine they can get away with it.  It
therefore becomes very important for the rule upholders to bring such
arrogance down.
                -- Marilyn French, "The Woman's Room"

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"

But if you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable
nowdays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.
                -- Leslie Stephen, "Sketches from Cambridge"

But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
                -- Bruce Leverett,
                "Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"

But it does move!
                -- Galileo Galilei

But like the Good Book says... There's BIGGER DEALS to come!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy.
                -- Robert Burns, "To a Mouse", 1785

But, officer, he's not drunk, I just saw his fingers twitch!

But Officer, I stopped for the last one, and it was green!

But scientists, who ought to know
Assure us that it must be so.
Oh, let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about.
                -- Hilaire Belloc