Freebsd Fortunes 3

But has any little atom,
        While a-sittin' and a-splittin',
Ever stopped to think or CARE
        That E = m c**2 ?

"But Huey, you PROMISED!"
"Tell 'em I lied."

But I always fired into the nearest hill or, failing that, into blackness.
I meant no harm;  I just liked the explosions.  And I was careful never to
kill more than I could eat.
                -- Raoul Duke

But I don't like Spam!!!!

"But I don't want to go on the cart..."
"Oh, don't be such a baby!"
"But I'm feeling much better..."
"No you're not... in a moment you'll be stone dead!"
                -- Monty Python, "The Holy Grail"

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