pooh, heinlein and douglas adams

for today’s entertainment, here’s a bunch of quotes to muse on, taking from aoiko.net, a rather strange web site.

pooh, who felt more and more that he was somewhere else, got up slowly and began to look for himself.
taken from ‘the house at pooh corner (p.107)’

‘hallo, rabbit,’ he said, ‘is that you?’
‘let’s pretend it isn’t,’ said rabbit, ‘and see what happens.’
taken from ‘winnie-the-pooh (p102)’

history teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
abba eban, representative of israel in the ’40s and 50s, minister from the 60s on

you can’t change people with your fists; i’ve learnt that… they see something strange, something they don’t understand, and they get afraid… you show them the beauty of that strange thing, and they are no longer afraid because it has become part of them.
bruce lee

i really didn’t foresee the internet. but then, neither did the computer industry. not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.
douglas adams

never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
(this is hanlon’s razor – nobody knows who hanlon is, but some guess that it’s a corruption of ‘heinlein’, particularly as there is a similar sentiment in one of his stories… see here.

i used to think i was serving humanity… then i discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. so now i do what pleases jubal harshaw.
heinlein – jubal harshaw in ‘stranger in a strange land’

always listen to experts. they’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. then do it.
heinlein, taken from ‘time enough for love’, said by the character ‘lazarus long’

i fart in your general direction… your mother was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries.
monty python, taken from ‘monty python and the holy grail’, said by some frenchman in a castle to the obnoxious english knights

william roper: “so now you’d give the devil benefit of law!”
thomas more: “yes. what would you do? cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?”
william roper: “i’d cut down every law in england to do that.”
thomas more: “oh? and when the last law was down, and the devil turned round on you – where would you hide…the laws all being flat?”
robert bolt, taken from ‘a man for all seasons’

“slave is an ephebian word. in om we have no word for slave,” said vorbis.
“so i understand,” said the tyrant. “i imagine that fish have no word for water.”
terry parchett, from ‘small gods (p125)’

i want to be free, but my chains are broken.
taken from ‘zen grafitti’

wilson is going round the country stirring up apathy.
willie whitelaw

isabella mori
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