The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be correct.\n-- William of Occam
The following statement is not true.  The previous statement is true.
The Force is what holds everything together.  It has its dark side, and it has its light side.  It's sort of like cosmic duct tape.
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl."\n-- Dave Barry
The function of the expert is not to be more right than other people, but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons.\n-- Dr. David Butler, British psephologist
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.  The goal of nature is to build better mice.
The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood.  Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.\n-- John Maynard Keyes
"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different."\n-- Franco Spisani
The instruments of science do not in themselves discover truth.  And there are searchings that are not concluded by the coincidence of a pointer and a mark.\n-- Fred Saberhagen, "The Berserker Wars"
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets.\n-- L. Zadeh
The light of a hundred stars does not equal the light of the moon.
The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a soda can, when discarded will last forever ... and a $7,000 car which when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years.
The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us will go to the stars.
The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us, the Universe.
The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader.
The moon is made of green cheese.\n-- John Heywood
The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.
The more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."\n-- Isaac Asimov
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe.\n-- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.\n-- John Kenneth Galbraith
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.\n-- Albert Einstein
The only perfect science is hind-sight.
The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't.\n-- Ernest Rutherford
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.\n-- Niels Bohr
The perversity of nature is nowhere better demonstrated by the fact that, when exposed to the same atmosphere, bread becomes hard while crackers become soft.
The purpose of Physics 7A is to make the engineers realize that they're not perfect, and to make the rest of the people realize that they're not engineers.
The rate at which a disease spreads through a corn field is a precise measurement of the speed of blight.
The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.\n-- Jane Bryant Quinn
The Shuttle is now going five times the sound of speed.\n-- Dan Rather, first landing of Columbia
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking.\n-- William James
The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.
The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.\n-- Peer
The speed of anything depends on the flow of everything.
The spirit of Plato dies hard.  We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.\n-- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology.
The sum of the Universe is zero.
The test of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.\n-- Aldo Leopold
The tree of research must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of bean counters.\n-- Alan Kay
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility.  And vice versa.
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.\n-- Harlan Ellison
The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.
The universe does not have laws -- it has habits, and habits can be broken.
The universe is all a spin-off of the Big Bang.
The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the combination is locked up in the safe.\n-- Peter DeVries
The Universe is populated by stable things.\n-- Richard Dawkins
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.\n-- Sagan
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.\n-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"
The University of California Statistics Department; where mean is normal, and deviation standard.
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.\n-- E. Hubbard
The Wright Bothers weren't the first to fly.  They were just the first not to crash.
Theory is gray, but the golden tree of life is green.\n-- Goethe
There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly.
"There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain."\n-- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800
There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too.\n-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
There can be no twisted thought without a twisted molecule.\n-- R. W. Gerard
There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.\n-- Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.\n-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"
There is no royal road to geometry.\n-- Euclid
There was a writer in 'Life' magazine ... who claimed that rabbits have no memory, which is one of their defensive mechanisms.  If they recalled every close shave they had in the course of just an hour life would become insupportable.\n-- Kurt Vonnegut
There's a whole WORLD in a mud puddle!\n-- Doug Clifford
There's no future in time travel.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.\n-- John von Neumann
They don't know how the world is shaped.  And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it.  They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two.\n-- Emma Bull, "Bone Dance"
Things equal to nothing else are equal to each other.
This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks.
This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers.  The spark-gap is mightier than the pen.  Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly.\n-- Lancelot Hogben, Science for the Citizen, 1938
This is the theory that Jack built. This is the flaw that lay in the theory that Jack built. This is the palpable verbal haze that hid the flaw that lay in...
This isn't true in practice -- what we've missed out is Stradivarius's constant.  And then the aside: "For those of you who don't know, that's been called by others the fiddle factor..."\n-- From a 1B Electrical Engineering lecture.
This place just isn't big enough for all of us.  We've got to find a way off this planet.
This universe shipped by weight, not by volume.  Some expansion of the contents may have occurred during shipment.
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying... but nobody thought so.  This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.\n-- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"
Those who can, do; those who can't, simulate.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end.\n-- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"
Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.\n-- Bertrand Russell
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. Space is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen to you.
To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.\n-- Joseph Glanvill, 1661
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.\n-- Thomas Edison
Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?\n-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
Torque is cheap.
Two is not equal to three, even for large values of two.
Two percent of zero is almost nothing.
Two wrights don't make a rong, they make an airplane.  Or bicycles.
UFOs are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.\n-- P.D. Ouspensky
Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none.\n-- Doug Larson
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.  The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.  My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.\n-- Niels Bohr
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.\n-- Patrick Moynihan
We are sorry.  We cannot complete your call as dialed.  Please check the number and dial again or ask your operator for assistance. This is a recording.
We can defeat gravity.  The problem is the paperwork involved.
We can predict everything, except the future.
We cannot command nature except by obeying her.\n-- Sir Francis Bacon
"We don't care.  We don't have to.  We're the Phone Company."
We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.
We don't know who it was that discovered water, but we're pretty sure that it wasn't a fish.\n-- Marshall McLuhan
We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids?\n-- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.
We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world.  We will see it when we believe it.\n-- Saul Alinsky
We warn the reader in advance that the proof presented here depends on a clever but highly unmotivated trick.\n-- Howard Anton, "Elementary Linear Algebra"
We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.\n-- S.J. Gould
We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem -- how to run a sunbeam through a meter.
We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away.  The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away.  You could drive that in a week, but for some reason nobody's ever done it.\n-- Andy Rooney
Wernher von Braun settled for a V-2 when he coulda had a V-8.
"What I've done, of course, is total garbage."\n-- R. Willard, Pure Math 430a
What is algebra, exactly?  Is it one of those three-cornered things?\n-- J.M. Barrie
What is mind?  No matter.  What is matter?  Never mind.\n-- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.\n-- William Blake
What is research but a blind date with knowledge?\n-- Will Harvey
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.\n-- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928
What the deuce is it to me?  You say that we go around the sun.  If we went around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.\n-- Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet"
What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying.\n-- Nikita Khruschev
What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener.
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute -- and it's longer than any hour.  That's relativity.\n-- Albert Einstein
When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, the telephone people interrupted service for one minute in his honor.  They've been honoring him intermittently ever since, I believe.\n-- The Grab Bag
When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.
When speculation has done its worst, two plus two still equals four.\n-- S. Johnson
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical."\n-- Jon Carroll
When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly.\n-- Donald Douglas
When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.\n-- Amrom Katz
When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't know the answer either.\n-- Edgar R. Fiedler
Where are the calculations that go with a calculated risk?
WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE\nOh, dear, where can the matter be\nWhen it's converted to energy?\nThere is a slight loss of parity.\nJohnny's so long at the fair.
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.\n-- Christopher Morley
White dwarf seeks red giant for binary relationship.
Why do mathematicians insist on using words that already have another meaning?  "It is the complex case that is easier to deal with."  "If it doesn't happen at a corner, but at an edge, it nonetheless happens at a corner."
Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle?\n-- Alan Shepherd, the first man into space, Gemini program
With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?
With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.\n-- Ransom K. Ferm
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
Xerox does it again and again and again and ...
Xerox never comes up with anything original.
Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?
"Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context."
You are a taxi driver.  Your cab is yellow and black, and has been in use for only seven years.  One of its windshield wipers is broken, and the carburetor needs adjusting.  The tank holds 20 gallons, but at the moment is only three-quarters full.  How old is the taxi driver?"
You can take all the impact that science considerations have on funding decisions at NASA, put them in the navel of a flea, and have room left over for a caraway seed and Tony Calio's heart.\n-- F. Allen
You can't cheat the phone company.
You cannot have a science without measurement.\n-- R. W. Hamming
You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi.
You mean you didn't *know* she was off making lots of little phone companies?
You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1.\n-- Ernest Rutherford
You will never amount to much.\n-- Munich Schoolmaster, to Albert Einstein, age 10
It is the theory which decides what can be observed.\n-- Albert Einstein
God is subtle, but he is not malicious.\n-- Albert Einstein
Dopeler effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.\n-- Greg Oetjen of Lorton, VA in the Washington Post "Style Invitational Report from Week 278" published August 2, 1998
