Αφορισμοι

[DrBig]

This list was compiled as a last resort to sanity after a plethora of discussions with numerous people on various contemporary (and not) issues that, in their majority, lead absolutely nowhere. Then I realised that you need to be either a Wise man or Franklin to be taken seriously while you try to convey even the simplest of concepts:

"People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that
Benjamin Franklin said it first"

True, like all of the other wise words below which obviously are not my ideas and, to my surprise, were all quoted first by B. Franklin.

Enjoy.
.................................................................................................... .........................................


A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining
and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-- Mark Twain

A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
-- Bernie Greenberg.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- G. B. Shaw

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James

A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist"
"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a
sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane



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 student who changes the course of history is probably taking an
exam.
-- S. C. Johnson

"A witty saying proves nothing."
-- Voltaire

Acquaintance, n.:
A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well
enough to lend to.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of
every organism to live beyond its income.
-- Samuel Butler

"... all the modern inconveniences ..."
-- Mark Twain

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism
to decadence without touching civilization.
-- John O'Hara

Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no
government at all.
-- A. E. Housman

Angels we have heard on High
Tell us to go out and Buy.
-- Tom Leher

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
-- Aesop

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Baruch's Observation:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
-- Mark Twain

"Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence"
-- ‘Time Bandits’

Bore, n.:
A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Boy, n.:
A noise with dirt on it.

Bradley's Bromide:
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a
committee -- that will do them in.

Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more
easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone
Ranger have handled this?"

Brain, n.:
The apparatus with which we think that we think.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Canada Bill Jone's Motto:
It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.



Children are natural mimic who act like their parents despite every
effort to teach them good manners.
Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for. Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
-- Ogden Nash

Churchill's Commentary on Man:
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the
time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
-- Mark Twain


Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"


Commitment, n.:
Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs.
The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
-- Albert Einstein

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is
good for dandruff.
-- Peter de Vries

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking
Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
-- H. L. Mencken

Conway's Law:
In any organization there will always be one person who knows
what is going on.
This person must be fired.

Coronation, n.:
The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and
visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite
bomb.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.
-- A. E. Newman

Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder
aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-- Senator Soaper

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- G. B. Shaw

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by
Jackasses.
-- H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people
are right more than half of the time.
-- E. B. White

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to
speak it to?
-- Clarence Darrow

Fairy Tale, n.:
A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.

Faith, n:
That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be
untrue.

For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
-- R. Clopton

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
-- Olivier



Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.

Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem:

Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem
meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's
Theorem. To wit:

1. Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
2. Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break
even.
3. Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the
game.


God is Dead
-- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is Dead
-- God
Nietzsche is God
-- The Dead

God is real, unless declared integer.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the
elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying
other things.
-- Pablo Picasso

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board
-- Mark Twain

God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
-- Kronecker

God must love the Common Man; He made so many of them.

Gold, n.:
A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It
is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who
immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold
hasn't done anything to them.
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"


Got Mole problems?
Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23

Grabel's Law:
2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for large values of 2.

GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY (#21) -- July 30, 1917
On this day, New York City hotel detectives burst in and caught then-
Senator Warren G. Harding in bed with an underage girl. He bought them
off with a $20 bribe, and later remarked thankfully, "I thought I
wouldn't get out of that under $1000" Always one to learn from his
mistakes, in later years President Harding carried on his affairs in a
tiny closet in the White House Cabinet Room while Secret Service men
stood lookout.

H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach -- administrate.

[DrBig]

Hanlon's Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity.

He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry
attacks democracy itself.
-- William S. Paley, chairman of CBS

"He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both
eyes ..."

"He's just a politician trying to save both his faces ..."

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

"I drink to make other people interesting."
-- George Jean Nathan

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to
make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal

I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.
-- Art Leo

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to
die in.
-- George McGovern

Idiot, n.:
A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

If a President doesn't do it to his wife, he'll do it to his country.

If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied
harder.
-- Pope John Paul I

If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S Truman

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you
really make them think they'll hate you.
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
-- Maslow

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ink,n
A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and
water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote
intellectual crime.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three
benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never
to use either.
-- Mark Twain


It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both
incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by
twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
-- R. Serling

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal

‘I think Tony Blair is a good man’


Justice, n.:
A decision in your favor.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Katz' Law:
Man and nations will act rationally when all other
possibilities have been exhausted.

Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A.
-- Henry N. Camp

Interpreter, n.:
One who enables two persons of different languages to
understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to
the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"


Iron Law of Distribution:
Them that has, gets.


The Course of Progress:
Most things get steadily worse.

It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.

Jesus Saves,
Moses Invests,
But only Buddha pays Dividends.

Jone's Law:
The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone
to blame it on.

Jones's First Law:
Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of
endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an
obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the
importance of their original contribution.


Leibowitz's Rule:
When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you
hold the hammer with both hands.

Lie, n.:
A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one
discovered to date.

Lieberman's Law:
Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made
sense from things she found in gift shops.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up
to.

Maier's Law:
If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be
disposed of.
[Extension by Anonymous: "..or new ones be constructed]

Main's Law:
For every action there is an equal and opposite government
program.

Majority, n.:
That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Oscar Wilde

Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
-- Mark Twain

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the
only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
-- Wernher von Braun

Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else --
unless it is an enemy.
-- A. Einstein


Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
-- Voltaire

"Matrimony isn't a word, it's a sentence."

Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.
-- R. S. Barton

Mayor Vincent J. `Buddy' Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city
nativity scene removed:
"They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men
and a virgin in the whole organization."

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
-- Groucho Marx

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
-- Groucho Marx

Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.


NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Guiseppe? Everything he
says is wrong.
GUISEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says
will be right.
-- G. B. Shaw, "The Man of Destiny"

Never eat more than you can lift.
-- Miss Piggy

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
-- Salvor Hardin, "Foundation"

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with
substance.
-- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977

New members are urgently needed in the Society for Prevention of
Cruelty to Yourself. Apply within.

New York is real. The rest is done with mirrors.
-- The Grateful Dead

Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.

Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law:
A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.

[DrBig]

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
-- Andrew Young

Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
-- Trotsky

Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were
forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.
--W. C. Fields, "My Little Chickadee"

‘Only the ridiculous survive’
---In Paddington station

Paul's Law:
In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you
save.



Peace, n.:
In international affairs, a period of cheating between two
periods of fighting.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who
haven't what they want that they don't want it.
-- Ogden Nash

"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
-- Aelius Donatus

Pig,
An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race
by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is
inferior in scope, for it balks at pig.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"


Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.
If you do the things we say, then you'll soon rule the nation.
Kill your foes and enemies and then kill your relations.
Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.

[Nobody knows who said that, but unreliable sources link it with the Congress]


Positive, adj.:
Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.

Reisner's Rule of Conceptual Inertia:
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.

Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of
Western Civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

Reporter, n.:
A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a
tempest of words.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Rhode's Law:
When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening,
circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly,
empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied,
inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically
guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience,
expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal
comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above,
be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and
adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally,
immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes
advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.

Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
1. Never use an elevator in a building that has been hit by a nuclear
bomb; use the stairs.
2. When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit
the ground.
3. If you're on fire, avoid gasoline and other flammable materials.
4. Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to
psychological problems.
5. Food will be scarce; you will have to scavenge. Learn to recognize
foods that will be available after the bomb: mashed potatoes,
shredded wheat, tossed salad, ground beef, etc.
6. Put your hand over your mouth when you sneeze; internal organs will
be scarce in the post-nuclear age.
7. Try to be neat; fall only in designated piles.
8. Drive carefully in "Heavy Fallout" areas; people could be
staggering illegally.
9. Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more
sanitary due to limited circulation.
10. Accumulate mannequins now; spare parts will be in short supply on
D-Day.


Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer.
-- Swami X

Signs of crime: screaming or cries for help.
-- from the Brown Security Crime Prevention Pamphlet

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in
praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell

Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have


Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
-- Euripides

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards.
-- Aldous Huxley

The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper
-- Thomas Jefferson

The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion.
Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed
and color, but also on ability.
-- T. Lehrer

The best defense against logic is ignorance.
-- The Average American's moto

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-- Mark Twain

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit
longer."
-- Henry Kissinger

The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided
by the number of people in the group.

The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the
poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread.
-- Anatole France

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and
robbers there will be.
-- Lao Tsu

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable,
and praiseworthy ...
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature: that of
paying literary men by the quantity they do NOT write.

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
-- Mark Twain

This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of
the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were
largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper,
which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of
paper that were unhappy.
-- Douglas Adams

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy

Tussman's Law:
Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.

United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the
Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of
all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of
all the patriots of every persuasion.
Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the
world.
-- Isaac Asimov

Weiler's Law:
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it
himself.

Well, I would -- if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them
back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds,
or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive they
they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
-- President Ronald Reagan, on the MX missile

What good is having someone who can walk on water if you don't follow
in his footsteps?



What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind.
-- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875

"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the FOUNDING of a bank?"
-- Bertold Brecht

When a fellow says, "It ain't the money but the principle of the
thing," it's the money.
-- Kim Hubbard

When in doubt, do what the President does -- guess.
-- Mark Twain

"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."
-- Winston Curchill, On formal declarations of war

When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.
-- The Wall Street Journal

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
--Oscar Wilde

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last
you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his
Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
-- Mark Twain

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time
to reform.
-- Mark Twain

While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their
correctness never does.

Kurosama’s dream
Tonight I was dreaming the far eastern skies
torn by the trails of little flying crosses
flown by Christs with short twisting tails
carrying a message written by Moses

As I was watching those fast divine symbols
ascending like souls behind the horizon
my mind for a moment connected with Plato
and two words formed that felt like poisson

It seems I was dreaming the orange eastern skies
lit by the force of Wisdom-in-Practice
those two words were not 'Dollar' and 'Power'
the two words sounded like 'Infinite Justice'.
Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq again

"You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon
airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in
deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me
when I was young"
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen"
-- Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

[takis-kk]

Καλημέρα.

Εξαιρετική συλλογή για φροντιστήριο Αγγλικών.

Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
-- Trotsky

Αυτό με πείραξε.

:wave2:

[Ζεύκας]

φίλε γαμάτο κείμενο!

δεν διάβασα τι λέει αλλά γαμάτο! :bawl:

[konsttanttinos]

Αρχικά δημιουργήθηκε από Ζεύκας
φίλε γαμάτο κείμενο!

δεν διάβασα τι λέει αλλά γαμάτο! :bawl:


:rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:
Mια απο τα ιδια:beer: :lol: :lol:

[John Steed]

Σφηνάκια! :beer: :beer:

[Cpt. Haddock]

:a18:

[the who]

Αρχικά δημιουργήθηκε από Cpt. Haddock
:a18:

Τι μπραβο ρε?Κατορθωσες να διαβασεις ολο το αγγλικο σεντονι?Τα μπραβο πανε σε σενα τοτε Ηλια.:wave2:

[webassasin]

πλακα μας κανεις ρε φιλε?
αφου ασχοληθηκες να τα κανεις ολα κοπυ παστε, κανε κ μεταφραση.
στο 5ο ρητο βαρεθηκα και εκανα ρολλ για να δω τι σου ειπαν οι απο κατω.