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Bruce Penny's platitudes
>-----------=====***=====-----------<
PENNY'S PLATITUDES
>-----------=====***=====-----------<
The following are miscellaneous contributions to human wisdom collected over
the past 15 years by Bruce Penny. In most cases the authors have been
forgotten (rightfully so in many cases). Authenticity cannot be verified.
Exact wording is doubtful.
>-----------=====***=====-----------<
Genius does what it must, talent does what it can, you had best do what you're
told.
Son, I have no idea what you think marriage is like but whatever you think,
you're wrong, it's not like that at all.- SYSOP to Jr. SYSOP
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your
feet wet.
The first myth of management is that it exists.
A pro is someone who works on a bad day. - Norman Mailer
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
- Abraham Maslow
You should believe at least 6 impossible things every day before breakfast. -
White Queen
Virtue is merely the lack of opportunity.
People are like china. They look beautiful but if you examine them closely you
can find flaws. When you turn the heat on they crack.
For every winner you have a loser - or else you have inflation.
Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or their
descendants. I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying. - Woody Allen
Remember, take it easy, but take it.
My talent I use in my work, my genius I reserve for my life. - O. Wilde.
Reality is for those people who can't cope with drugs.
What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable.
Anyone can remember names. Few of us have the courage to call them.
My god is not dead ... to bad about yours.
If at first you don't succeed, they will do it for you.
Slowness comes from God, haste from the Devil.- Islam
Friends may come and go but enemies accumulate. - Jones
Them what has, gets.
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces.
A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never
sure.
The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time. The last 10% takes the other
90%.
Variables won't and constants aren't.
If the facts don't conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.
Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger
can.
Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield
negative results.
Ginsberg's Theorem:
1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't quit the game.
Murphy was an optimist. - O'Toole
Anyone who doesn't understand a theory will oppose it with a degree of
hostility that is inversely proportional to the extent of his knowledge of the
subject. - Zubes Law
It's not whether you win or lose but how you place the blame.
How can I be wrong when I'm so sincere?
Quiet people aren't the only ones who don't say much.
Keep both feet on the ground and you'll never get your pants off.
When everything is coming your way you are probably on a one-way street.
To err is human, to forgive is against company policy.
When it comes to giving some people stop at nothing.
There are two kinds of people - those that divide people into two categories
and those that don't.
Either lead or follow or get the hell out of the way.
If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders
of giants. - I. Newton
The past is another county. They do things differently there.
He is lowering himself by his bootstraps.
Men who hold doors open for women make sure that the important ones are closed.
A tentative committment.
Let them eat cake.
Even a paranoid has some real enemies.
There are three kinds of people: Those who make things happen, those who watch
things happen and those that don't know what the h--- is going on.
You can't fire me. You fire employees, you sell slaves.
You may not be responsible for being down but you are responsible for getting
up.
It's time to discover the meaning of life and get it over with.
Anybody can talk about statistics, I can cite them.
Have you ever read the Bible? -- even if only for loopholes.
I don't mind going out on a limb -- that's where all the fruit is.
I don't even have confidence in history, much less forecasts.
His ear is so close to the ground it is full of grasshoppers. - H. Truman
The Big Apple looks like a sucked orange.
There are only two emotions - fear & greed.
Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.
It's hard to get up at 5AM in silk pajamas.
We owe it to ourselves to have a national debt.
Prediction should be deeply subordinate to hope.
You didn't find anything? I found that there was nothing.
Experience is what you find when you were looking for something else.
The only cure for democracy is more democracy.
It's not whether you can get 10,000 Angels on the head of a pin but whether you
can keep them there.
Hire people with hooks.
You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad. -
Adali Stevenson
Quickly, I must hurry, for there go my people and I am their leader.
With some people you spend time, with others you invest it.
I'm waiting for opportunity to break the door down and force its way in.
The wages of sin go unreported.
Don't get mad, get even.
We have all the answers, especially when we disagree. - Wall Street Week
You've got the guilt anyway, don't waste it.
You're not getting older, you're getting riper.
Sociology is slow journalism.
There is certainly less here than meets the eye.
David thinks that money grows on sprees.
Don't everyone listen to me at once.
Plausible deniability -- codify ambiguity
I beseech you ... think it possible that you might be mistaken. - Oliver
Cromwell
It's just you and me against the world baby and I don't like the odds.
I have guts, I just don't want them spilled all over the place.
I want to establish a meaningful relationship with your pocketbook.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
At some point in the life cycle of virtually every organization, its ability to
succeed in spite of itself runs out. - Brien
Blessed is he who has reached the point of no return and knows it, for he shall
enjoy living. - Bennett
Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed. -
Bennett
Between us, only a relative and indirect and always dubious communication is
possible. - Ortega y Gasset
At any given time there are more important people in the world than important
jobs to contain them. - Bunk Carter
The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone else to blame
it on.
The chief cause of problems is solutions.
If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you
should run for your life. - Thoreau
Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man. - Fred Bucy
The super ego is that part of you that is soluble in alcohol.
I'm into a new life style that doesn't require my participation.
Start at the bottom and work our way down.
If I did not previously know you to be a gentleman, I should not have
discovered such at this interview.
I'm disenchanted with disenchantment.
If anointed I will not serve.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
Every employee comes with a brain at absolutely no additional cost.
History is a pack of tricks we play on the dead. - H. Ford
Personalize agreement and depersonalize disagreement..
I've been educated far beyond my intelligence..
You're not throwing money away, you're plowing it back into the economy.
Our democracy is like a raft - it won't sink but you will always have your feet
wet. - R. Long
Linda is even tempered, she's mad all the time.
The decision is easy - do all of everything you can and hope that it's enough.
Caught with your parameters down. - W. Heller
Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it
concentrates his mind wonderfully. - S. Johnson
If you don't know where to go, don't take the ball and run with it.
Conscience: that inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking. - H.
L. Mencken
With money in your pocket you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well
too.
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly
disguised as insoluble problems. - John W. Gardner
He's a hero on the battle field of inaction. - Lincoln
The feudal serfs paid about half as much of their income to their king as the
modern American pays to his government.
The harvest is past, the summer is ended and we are not saved. - Jeremiah 8:20
History is populated with tyrants who have done the inconceivable - and now a
button exists.
If you wish to converse with me, define your terms. - Voltaire
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - Santayana
Business school ethic - if it doesn't double by next Thursday, blow it off.
The tools of the mind become burdens when the environment which made them
necessary no longer exists. - Henri Bergson
I don't understand my own actions - St. Paul
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. I am no god and I'll
contend no longer. - Schiller & Asimov
I wake up in the morning with nothing to do and by the end of the day I'm not
half finished.
As Freud taught us, there are always problems if you know how to look for them.
- Barthelme
Unemployment isn't so bad if you can afford it.
Get yours while there's still some left.
There is nothing more practical than a good theory.
Everyone should be free to do good at their own expense. - M. Friedman
When faced with two equally good hypotheses, choose the simplier. - Occam's
Razor
You're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. - Scoop Jackson
The most exhilarating thing in life is to be shot at, without result. - W.
Churchill
Government is the only agency that can take a useful commodity like paper, slap
some ink on it, and make it totally worthless. - Ludwig von Mises
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
That's not the truth that makes men free, only annoyed.
Man is the missing link between apes and humans.
I'm not lost, I'm just disoriented.
Intensity of experience makes up for lack of goals.
You drive faster when you're lost.
I'm not a member of an organized political party, I'm a Democrat. - W. Rogers
Money is always there but the pockets change.
Nibble the bullet or bite the marshmallow.
Many things are worth seeing but few are worth going to see.
Some problems don't have solutions, only consequences..
I wish I had been born rich instead of brilliant.
My whole life passed before my eyes and I wasn't in it.
I'm the kind of guy that comes down from the hill after the battle and shoots
the wounded.
What do you think of Western Civilization? I think that would be a good idea.
- M. Ghandi
You might think that I will cut you down, but I shall let you hang.
I have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. - H. Kissinger
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. (sic) - Ike
Eisenhower
We don't know who discovered water but we know it wasn't a fish. - John Culkin
If you get to it and you can't do it... well there you jolly well are, aren't
you. - Lord Buckley
I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his
ability. - O. Wilde
I was, I am, I will be, me is a question of grammar and not of existence. -
Cioran
To feel life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent, is like having fallen
desperately in love with an inch. - A. Watts
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. -
A. Einstein
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
The race is not always to the strong, nor the battle to the swift, but that's
the way to bet. - D. Runyon
We are what we pretend to be. - K. Vonnegut, Jr.
I believe that the moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoic
thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the
total discrediting of the world of reality. - Salvador Dali, 1930
Go, go, go said the bird, human kind cannot bear very much reality. - T. S.
Eliot
If you don't get uptight, nobody can ever use you.
You are free and that is why you are lost. - F. Kafka
We have met the enemy and they are us. - Pogo
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without
civilization in between. - O. Wilde
Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? - M. West
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor
less. - Humpty Dumpty
The man who invented the guillotine died under its knife.
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
I don't just believe in luck, I rely on it.
The student who does not surpass his master, fails his master.
Good conversation depends on how much one can afford to take for granted. - O.
W. Holmes
Have your afterthoughts first.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling one's efforts after having forgotten one's
aim. - Santayana
How do you like your children?...medium rare. - W. C. Fields
The cost of living has gone up a dollar a quart. - W. C. Fields
The environment is everything but me. - B. Fuller
Child - Consumer trainee
Calculus - if you lie over and over it becomes the truth.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that there ain't no free lunch.
The universe is wiggly. - Alan Watts
Here lies the body of Solomen Pees Pees ain't here, only the pod, Pees shucked
out and has gone home to God.
It is never possible to step twice into the same river. - Heraclitus
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. -
Proust
For whatever reason, be it historical, or oppression, or what have you, there
are an awful lot of not too bright women.
A conservative is a worshipper of dead radicals.
Henry James chews more than he bites off.
He is a very humble man - he has a lot to be humble about.
There are only two kinds of people, the pure and the responsible. - A. MacLeish
You can't become a martyr every time you get ticked off.
Education, taken as a whole, is probably preferable to ignorance.
Love God and sin bravely. - St. Augustin
Law is the second oldest profession.
If you're not in business for fun or profit, what the h--- are you doing here?
The most successful economic ploy was not in making money but in contriving
ways not to spend it.
If a man can trust you with his tools, there isn't a lot more he has to know
about you.
Every misfit carries some of the load of making the whole more fit.
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered, he has not destroyed. - W.
Berry
Every day, do something which will not compute.
In order to support one individual in our society, something like 25 tons of
materials of all kinds must be extracted from the earth and processed each
year.
Competition encourages people to resemble one another. - M. McLuhan
Though men consider truth as the summum bonum, they nevertheless have a great
fondness for the lie. - F. Bacon
A burning would has come to dance inane. - J. Joyce
Love thy label as thyself.
The person who profits most from freedom of the press, owns one.
You've got to learn how to fall before you learn how to fly. - P. Simon
He who waits until everything is perfectly clear before deciding, never
decides.
Don't think of me as your boss...Think of me as your best friend who's ALWAYS
right.
It's tough to make your mark on the world if you are an eraser head.-Winnie the
Pooh
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.-G. Chesterton
A chicken is an egg's way of making another chicken.-Samuel Butler
He sees everything in quotation marks.
On the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own rump. -
Montaigne
Sliding down the razor blade of life - Tom Lehrer
Most complex structures found in the world are enormously redundant.
When in a dilemma, introduce novelty.
Women refused to be dictated to so they went out and became stenographers.
Any stigma's good enough to beat a dogma. - G.K. Chesterton
My dear Degas, poems are not made with ideas, they are made with words. -
Mallarme
Is literature to match experience or make it?
Their failure is to ignore the mechanism of the universe in favor of its
content.-M. Mcluhan
Comedy moves the individual toward the group, tragedy separates the individual
from his environment.
Technology marches on...over you or through you, take your choice.
One of the few rules of evolution is that extreme specialization results in
eventual extinction. - Hardin
Creativity is a function of alienation and irresponsibility.
Workers of the world, disperse. - Richardson
It can't get out of control because it already is out of control.
View death as an economic convenience and not as a biological necessity.
People think love is emotion. Love is good sense. - Ken Kesey
Whatever frightens you, do it. That fear is a valuable key.
One educational route out of a dead end is indeed back.
You are also several feet around you, claim it.
What is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying. - Dostoevski
Vietnam was the ultimate in the American way of selling.
Economists are the keepers of the possibility of civilization. - J.M. Keynes
It's not actual experience that teaches but your perception of that experience.
The liberal paranoids (if that's not redundant) are at it again.
Education is to prepare humanity for dehumanization.
I can't refute your emotions.
Christians make tolerably good martyrs, but are unbelievably callow when it
comes to thrusting the dagger at the tyrants heart.
The school of hard knocks educates criminals as well as businessmen.
A gluttony of things and processes terminated by a glorious constipation..
Pleasure may be a necessary state of respite but it is a phenomenon of
standstill; it is akin to death.
The pessimism about America comes from a perverted sense of national pride.
The time has come to pay the piper.
Liberal baiting with a sledge hammer.
It's not what we stand for...it's what we get talked into that counts.
Make whatever grand plans you will. You may be sure that the unexpected and the
trivial will disturb and disrupt them.
Dad has contracted hardening of the categories.
I wish I was as sure of anything as David is of everything.
His philosophy is something to the left of whoopie.
There are times and countries when the only place for an honest man is in
jail.- T. Mann
The computer takes away man's benign capacity to forget.
The test of sincerity is the weight of the platitude.
Individual behavior, group action, social policy - all are functions of ideas,
images and ideologies that may be created out of nothing and vanish into
nothing.
There are people alive today who are not going to die.
This is a jaded time.
The environment is everything but me. - B. Fuller
Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Women are like elephants to me...I like to look at them but I wouldn't want to
own one. - W.C. Fields
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I've never tried
before. - M. West
An instruction book didn't come with Spaceship Earth.
I'm not against the police, I'm just afraid of them. - A. Hitchcock
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. - Thoreau
The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
Knowledge is power. - F. Bacon
Liberal - something like a politically motivated lemming. - Texas Observer
Everything moves in threes.
Cerebral Hygiene
It's hard to be brilliant three times a day. - H. Kissinger
Highest density of logical errors per page I've ever seen. - C. Sagen
A new aftershave that smells like money - it would drive women mad.
Tack against the Zeitgeist.
I keep my body for sentimental value.
It was a blessing in disguise - I must say it was most effectively disguised. -
W. Churchill
The lack of money is the root of all evil. - G.B. Shaw & Rev. Ike.
The drug problem - I can't get any.
It's better to be quiet and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
Can God deliver a religion addict?
Circumstantial evidence - a trout in the scotch.
We've got to make this stuff we're lost in look as much like home as possible.
I used to think David was wrong 9 out of 10 times...he has just increased his
score.
The last 10 years have not met with my approval.
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of
undisputed authority. - P. Tillich
All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves. -
Emerson
Time is what we want most, but alas, what we use worst. - W. Penn
Do you personally have any difficulty making decisions? Well, yes and no.
There is someone out there watching over us...the government.
Borens Laws:
1) When in charge, ponder
2) When in trouble, delegate
3) When in doubt, mumble
If you can't convince them, confuse them. - H. Truman
Forbes Law: To reflect sadly that one could have done it in 20 minutes, but as
things turned out, one has to spend 2 days to find out why it has taken 3 weeks
for someone else to do it wrong.
Murphy: Nature always sides with the hidden flaw - If anything Dan go wrong, it
will at the moment the system becomes indispensable - It is impossible to make
anything fool proof because fools are so ingenious
I'm the product of my own imagination.
If I could tell what would happen in the future, I wouldn't show up for it.
Daily life under the Republicans has surpassed surrealism and broken through
into science fiction.
Support the ABA, join the AMA.
There's only one thing I want you fellas to do...talk me out of it. - Cowardly
Lion
He was his own worst enemy...not while I'm alive.
There are only two kinds of people - those that divide people into two
categories and those that don't.
Beauty may only be skin deep but ugly goes clean thru. - K. Vonnegut
Cream rises - until it curdles.
Live every day as if it is your last. One day you will be right.
In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. - A. Warhol
Don't lose / Your head / To gain a minute / You need your head / Your brains
are in it...Burma Shave
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes I even have trouble doing it. - T.
Bankhead
Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second. - J. Godard
The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie. - L. Bruce
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth. - S. Holmes
I'd love to see Christ come back to crush the spirit of hate and make men put
down their guns. I'd also like just one more hit single. - Tiny Tim
A man needs a little madness or else he never dares to cut the rope and be
free. - Zorba
Work makes you free. - Rudolph Hess
Real wealth can only increase. - B. Fuller
When you win, nothing hurts. - J. Namath
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - O. Wilde
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. - S. Freud
Any man who so much as kisses a girl other than his wife is a cheap, unfaithful
cheat, and is only fit to be horsewhipped.
Life without caffeine is stimulating enough. - Sanka
Honest officer, had I known my health was in jeprody I would never have lit
one. - Hell's Angel
I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I must have been changed
several times since then. - L. Carroll
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. - Dorthy
Give me Librium or give me Meth.
When will you realize that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of
organized protected robbery.
The rich will do everything for the poor but get off their backs. - K. Marx
Tip the world over on its side and everyting loose will land in Los Angeles. -
F.L. Wright
Neckties strangle clear thinking. - Lin Yutang
If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement. - R.
Reagan
When a small man casts a large shadow, the sundown is near.
Women of the future will make the moon a cleaner place to live.
Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country
choose a second-rate president. - R.M. Nixon
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the
last fifty years. - R.D. Laing
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. - H.D. Thoreau
If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. - E. Hemingway
He's the only living organism I know who's natural habitat is hot water. - R.
Bloch
Too much of a good thing - can be wonderful. - Mae West
The pilot light is out on my flame of ambition .- Pooh Bear.
He who laughs last, didn't get thhe joke.- Alan Thicke.
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