A Compendium of quotations appearing in the magazine

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

April 1994

1. •Public opinion, in its raw stage, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans. * H. L. Mencken
   

2. •To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture. * Anatole France
   

3. •To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! * H. L. Mencken
   

4. •Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. * Arthur Schopenhauer
   

May 1994

1. •There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed for example that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter. * Bat Masterson
   

2. •"I think, therefore I am." * Rene Descartes
   "I think, therefore you are." * Kelvin Throop, solipsist
   

3. •The patriarch showed his sons a pile of sticks. He took up one and snapped it almost effortlessly. Then, he bound a bunch of sticks together, strained mightily, and was unable to break the bundle. "See?" he said. "each stick by itself can be broken easily, but if all sticks stay together, then they can't be broken. The same is true of us.". The sons considered; then one said, "But how do you get to be the head stick?" * Kelvin Throop III
   

4. •When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. * Ursula K. LeGuin
   

June 1994

1. •Nature does not care whether the hunter slays the beast or the beast the hunter. She will make good compost of them both, and her ends are prospered whichever succeeds. * John Burroughs
   

July 1994

1. •A great thinker is one who tells us it isn't so. This provides us with an endless succession of great thinkers, which is very nice for them, but it leaves the rest of us at rather a loose end. * Will Cuppy
   

2. •For 37 years I've practiced 14 hours a day and now they call me a genius. * Pablo de Sarasate
   

3. •Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall. * Sydney Harris
   

August 1994

1. •Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws. * John Burroughs
   

2. •Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. * Potter Stewart
   

3. •Why there must be a black hole under my bed:
   

1. ◦1. Its very hard to get out of it in the morning.
   

2. ◦2. Time dilation. In a time that seems to be only a few minutes to me in bed, the clock across the room advances by 8 hours.
   

3. ◦3. Warped space-time: It seems impossible to keep the sheets and blankets arranged to keep some parts of me warm, without others getting cold. Some sort of non-Euclidean geometry must be involved. * David C. Humm, Ph.D.
   

4. •He that knows little often repeats it. * Thomas Fuller
   

5. •A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension. * Oliver Wendell Holmes
   

6. •It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. * Mark Twain
   

7. •Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one. * Eleanor Roosevelt
   

8. •Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis. * John Dewey
   

9. •Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic. * William E. Gladstone
   

10. •He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities. * Benjamin Franklin
    

September 1994

1. •The science is as important as the fiction when it comes to sense of wonder, because what's being experienced is a glimpse of how awesome and marvelous reality might be. * E. R. Stewart
   

2. •The density of intelligence in the Universe? Try to compute the density of a planetary atmosphere given one molecule of that atmosphere! * Donald Kingsbury
   

3. •Venus as known to the ancients and she still attracts a lot of attention, especially when she is an evening star. Hardly an evening passes that somebody doesn't point up at her an exclaim, "What is that?" * Will Cuppy
   

4. •I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. * Woodrow Wilson
   

5. •The immature man wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mature man wants to live humanely for one. * Will Stekel
   

6. •While I applaud attempts to think rigorously about the far future, it cannot be done by the simple extension of handy rules of thumb. Other species, particularly, have other thumbs. * Greg Benford
   

October 1994

1. •With the near avalanche of technological progress, the horizons are nearly limitless for creating new scams. * Kelvin Throop III
   

2. •We do not get good laws to retrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws. G. K. Chesterton
   

November 1994

1. •If a learned man is not balanced, his learning does not avail. * Anon Author: Insinger
   

2. •If an animal does something, they call it instinct. If we do exactly the same thing for the same reason, they call it intelligence. * William Cuppy
   

3. •The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. * Michel de Montaigne
   

4. •Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…life is either a daring adventure or nothing. * Helen Keller
   

5. •We have a sample of one intelligent species to work with. From this sample of one we can deduce exactly nothing if we restrict ourselves to the use of statistics. We can compute all kinds of averages, height, lifespan, and the standard deviation? * Donald Kingsbury
   

6. •There is something wrong with everything that is popular. * Charles Fort
   

December 1994

1. •The Puritan Ethic demands that you work very hard and do things in the most difficult manner possible, even if an easier way is available. They forget that every kind of progress in every human endeavor has been the result of someone working hard to figure out an easy way to do something. * P. E. I. Bonewits
   

2. •I was forced to seek it [the truth], for it did not seek me. If a man wishes to see a foreign city it is no good for him to stay at home with his head on his pillow. * Paracelsus
   

3. •There is fine Waterford crystal, which rings delicately when struck, no matter how thick and chunky it may look; then then there are Flintstone jelly glasses. You may drink your Dom Perignon out of either one, but friends, there is a difference. * Stephen King
   

4. •The mistake is often made that science explains, or endeavors to explain phenomena. But that is the business of philosophy. The task science attempts is the simpler one of the correlation of natural phenomena, and in this effort leaves the ultimate problems of metaphysics untouched. * Dr. H. Stanley Redgrove
   

5. •I was lucky. The more I practiced, the luckier I got. * Jack Nicholson
   

Mid-December 1994

1. •We must either find a way or make one. * Hannibal
   

2. •Minds that have nothing to confer find little to perceive. * William Wordsworth
   

3. •I sometimes wonder if one of the politically correct ideas of the '70s--not giving children toy weapons because it encouraged aggression--might have been a contributing factor to teenagers carrying pistols to school today. * Grey Rollins
   

4. •A man who doesn't respect his own work shouldn't be allowed to do it. * Kevin Throop
   

5. •The degree of political intrigue in a work environment is inversely proportion to the actual work related abilities of the participants. * Michael Fendley
   

6. •An incompetent organization promotes those who are nonthreatening and who it perceives fulfill its incompetency requirements. * Michael Fendley
   

7. •A competent organization knows the difference between the wheat germ and the chaff, and which is valuable. * Michael Fendley
   

8. •An organization that values style over substance is destined to be beaten in the market place by one that does not. * Michael Fendley
   

January 1995

1. •I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. * Eleanor Roosevelt
   

2. •We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light. * Ralph Waldo Emerson
   

3. •Henry Clay … did say:"I would rather be right than President." It may sound like sour grapes, but I would rather be practically anything than President. * Will Cuppy
   

4. •Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true. * Leon Suenens
   

5. •All our decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last * Marcel Proust
   

6. •Example is not only the best way of propagating an opinion, but it is the only way worth taking into account. * Samuel Butler
   

7. •It is much easier to be critical than to be correct. * Benjamin Disraeli *
   

8. •Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered. * Napoleon I
   

9. •To an alien studying the news media of Earth, it would seem that by far the most important area of concern on this planet is spectator sports. * Kevin Throop
   

10. •Deliberation: the act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on. * Ambrose Bierce
    

11. •We know Mars can support life. If microbes couldn't do it, we probably can. * Robert Zubrin
    

February 1995

1. •He that judges without informing himself to the utmost that he is capable, cannot acquit himself of judging amiss. * John Locke
   

2. •Many beautiful things have been said about money. * Will Cuppy
   

3. •Doing science is very different from doing the arts. Science is difficult. You need mathematics and statistics, which is dull like learning a language. The difference is that with a human language each word you learn you can use. In science you can work away for months and nothing happens. The arts intrinsically appeal to the human soul but a lot of science doesn't and a lot of science is incredibly boring to do. * Richard Gregory
   

March 1995

April 1995

1. •Any successful laboratory demonstration of a parapsychological event is indistinguishable from a carefully rigged hoax. * Kelvin Throop III
   

2. •Everybody who argues against judging by appearances bases his argument upon other appearances. * Charles Fort
   

May 1995

1. •The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. * William James
   

2. •It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful. * Jean-Jacques Rousseau
   

3. •Most of our so-called reasoning consists of finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. * James Robinson
   

4. •Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories. * Felix Cohen
   

5. •An enemy is a successful person whose views oppose your own. * Gary Wright
   

6. •Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. * Oscar Wilde
   

7. •Science is part of our culture. Culture isn't only art and music and literature, it's also understanding what the world is made of and how it functions. People should know something about stars, matter, and chemistry but we deal with chemistry all the time. People don't know what heat is, they hardly know what water is. I'm always surprised how little people know about anything. I'm puzzled by it. * Max Perutz
   

8. •Believe you are defeated, believe it long enough and it is likely to become fact. * Norman Vincent Peale
   

9. •If a man did not, from time to time, sovereignly close his eyes, he would finally be unable to see anything worth looking at. * Rene Char
   

10. •It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well, nor the judgment to held their tongues. * Jean de la Bruyere
    

11. •For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else. * Ralph Waldo Emerson
    

12. •We make progress if, and only if, we are prepared to learn from our mistakes. * Karl R. Popper
    

1. ◦AND if we are not afraid to make mistakes from which we can learn. * Kelvin Throop
   

13. •Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as others of what they know. * Aristotle
    

14. •War will disappear, like the dinosaur, when changes in world conditions have destroyed its survival value. * Robert A. Millikan
    

15. •Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. * Matsuo Basho
    

16. •All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, to, and why. * James Thurber
    

17. •The man who wants his dreams to come true must wake up. * Anonymous
    

18. •To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of whom are absent. * Robert Copeland
    

19. •Failures are divided into two classes--those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought. * John Charles Salak
    

20. •The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. * Samuel Johnson
    

21. •He who hesitates may know something the rest of you don't. * Mark Evans
    

22. •Only nature is eternal, unless we destroy it. * James Robinson
    

23. •It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power. * Blaise Pascal
    

June 1995

1. •It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. * Aeschylus
   

July 1995

1. •So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it. * James Thurber
   

2. •Mistakes are seldom serious unless repeated. * Anonymous
   

3. •Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible. * Eric Hoffer
   

4. •The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. * Alfred North Whitehead
   

5. •The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest to fool. * Richard Feynman
   

6. •The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously. * Hubert Humphrey
   

7. •A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. * Francis Bacon
   

August 1995

1. •They also say that every time a star blinks it makes a difference to each of us, so powerful are the laws of cause and effect…it may make a difference to you. * Will Cuppy
   

2. •Nature abhors smugness. * Kelvin Throop
   

3. •Let us live so that when we die even the undertaker will be sorry. * George Bernard Shaw
   

September 1995

1. •An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth it contains. * Henri F. Amiel
   

2. •No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent. * Walter Bagehot
   

October 1995

1. •If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it to themselves. * Joseph Lane Kirkland
   

November 1995

1. •One of the great virtues of our democratic system is that only one of the candidates gets elected. * Bernard Meltzer
   

2. •To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another. * John Burroughs
   

3. •It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear. * Francis Bacon
   

4. •Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. * Aaron Levenstein
   

December 1995

Mid-December 1995

1. •What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. * Benjamin Disraeli
   

2. •A sunfish sometimes lays 300 million eggs. What are they trying to prove? * Will Cuppy
   

3. •Whether he likes it or not, man is the instrument of nature; it forces on him its character and appearance. * Pablo Picasso
   

4. •There is nothing so imprudent or so improvident as over-prudence or over-providence. * Samuel Butler
   

January 1996

1. •The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used. * Alfred North Whitehead
   

2. •Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. * Jean de la Bruyere
   

3. •Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it. * Henry David Thoreau
   

February 1996

1. •Let a smile be your umbrella if you want, but it's better to come in out of the rain. * Kelvin Throop III
   

March 1996

1. •Armadillos make affectionate pets, if you need affection that much. * Will Cuppy
   

2. •Space will not be opened by always leaving it to another generation. * Dr. William A. Gaubatz
   

3. •The frontier! Three-quarters of a century have passed since we announced that America's last frontier was gone forever. We were wrong. In spite of ourselves we have moved on into an undiscovered world. We shall always have a frontier, because we are not facing a finite North American continent whose menaces and surprises must one day be tabulated; we are facing an infinite universe, and the last challenge has yet to be formulated. Possibly we shall encounter it tomorrow morning. * Bruce Chatton
   

April 1996

1. •"Never make a pet of a bear," a zoo keeper once told me, with what struck me as needless elan. I make wrong moves from time to time, but I have never even come close to making a pet of a bear. * Will Cuppy
   

May 1996

June 1996

1. •In addition to other forms of nonsense, Aristotle is credited with promoting the syllogism, if not actually inventing it. That's the line of reasoning that goes like this:
   

1. ◦Socrates is rational;
   

2. ◦Socrates is a man;
   

3. ◦Therefore man is rational.
   

2. •
   

3. •Even at the time, everybody knew perfectly well that Socrates was not rational. * Will Cuppy
   

4. •The finest of all human achievements--and the most difficult--is merely being reasonable. * Jane Bryant Quinn
   

5. •Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly. * Jonathan Swift
   

6. •I have a dream that some day, my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. * Martin Luther King, Jr.
   

July 1996

1. •A sexy story larded over with science is something different from a science novel based on sex. Here the possibilities are limitless. * Eric Temple Bell
   

2. •You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give. * Eleanor Roosevelt
   

3. •All things are possible until they are proved impossible--and even the impossible may only be so as of now. * Pearl S. Buck
   

4. •In these…United States, it has long been axiomatic that any endeavor worth the attention of a publicity flack must be inaugurated by a quota of celebrities who need not necessarily be aware of exactly what they are sponsoring. * Ernest K. Gann
   

5. •The right way [to get at truth] is to be open-minded, to state the facts as you see them, and to be willing to acknowledge it frankly if you are shown to be wrong. And above all, to remain good humored. * Colin Wilson
   

6. •Too often the contrivances and machines built by early workers in the art, after a brief though strenuous existence, find their way to the junk heap long before their value as historical documents becomes apparent. * Merrit Crawford
   

7. •Morally, socially, and economically [17th Century] France was a cesspool of corruption. Yet it survived and became even more corrupt. Humanity is unbeatable. * Eric Temple Bell
   

8. •The only thing I like about Mars is that the gravitational pull there is so slight that one could jump three times as high as one can on Earth, but that would hardly be worth the trip. I suppose the novelty would soon wear off. * Will Cuppy
   

9. •No matter how showy atom-smashers and spacecraft are, there are still some subjects that just can't be manipulated or meddled with in a laboratory. It'll be a long time before a geologist can start an earthquake or volcano for the purpose of an experiment! * P. E. Isaac Bonevits
   

10. •Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept their results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition. Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. * Wade David
    

11. •Genetic storage is a nuance of evolution too often ignored. * Robert T. Bakker
    

August 1996

1. •In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact. * Thomas Huxley
   

2. •Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense. * Robert Frost
   

September 1996

1. •The man who can make hard things easy is the educator. * Ralph Waldo Emerson
   

2. •A glass may be half full or half empty; but either way, half a glass is better than none. * Kelvin Throop III
   

3. •Some people see the glass as half-full. Others see it as half-empty. I see it as too big. * George Carliln
   

October 1996

1. •Long, long, ago when Ursa Major was named, bears probably looked a lot more like dippers than they do today. * Will Cuppy
   

2. •Even though the arc of the moral Universe is long, it bends toward justice. * Martin Luther King, Jr.
   

November 1996

1. •What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. * George Bernard Shaw
   

2. •Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent. * Bertrand Russell
   

3. •To date, we've gotten closest to the human mind in the infant science of parapsychology, only recently let in the back doors of the halls of Establishment Science, when the Parapsychological Association was finally admitted into membership in 1969 in the American Association fort the Advancement of Science (which is sort of a super AMA for Establishment scientists, designed to keep out the riffraff). * P. E. Isaac Bonowits
   

4. •Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. * Thomas Huxley
   

January 1997

1. •If you're attacked from all sides, it's possible that you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong. * Adam Gopnik
   

2. •Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process. * Stephen King
   

3. •Walk right out on the stage, and tell your tale to your audience, and perhaps many will believe it. * Harry Houdini
   

4. •If we as individuals are to have the freedom--the ability to make choices--that an adult is entitled to, then a necessary correlate of that right is that we must hold ourselves responsible for the results of those choices. One obvious answer to someone who says "I am not responsible for my own actions" is, "Then you are not entitled to a full level of adult freedom, but only the amount which you can be held responsible for." * Henry G.H. Stratmann
   

5. •The more you read about politics, the more you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. * Will Rogers
   

6. •The promised land always lies on the other side of the wilderness. * Havelock Ellis
   

7. •Honey catches more flies than vinegar, if you want to catch flies. * Kelvin Throop III
   

8. •Honey catches more flies than vinegar, but you can catch even more with garbage. * Anon Systems Analyst
   

9. •The early bird gets the worm. Where does that leave the early worm? * Kelvin Throop III
   

10. •The early worm gets the bird. * Hollwood adage
    

11. •A senior technician in an industry that suddenly evaporates to nothing finds himself in an unusual position. * Nevil Shute
    

12. •You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus. * Mark Twain
    

13. •It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ. * W. H. Auden
    

February 1997

March 1997

1. •"I can't do it" never accomplished anything; "I will try" has performed wonders. * George P. Burnham
   

2. •No man ever became great or good except though many and great mistakes. * William E. Gladstone
   

3. •People could survive their natural trouble all right if it weren't for the trouble they make for themselves. * Ogden Nash
   

4. •If you leap into a well, providence is not bound to fetch you out. * Thomas Fuller
   

5. •It requires a very unusual mind to make an analysis of the obvious. * Alfred North Whitehead