Blue Notebook Quotes Volume Eight

May 13, 1998


We're locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be - convict or idiot?
-Michel Duval (Kim Robinson), Green Mars

 I cannot believe that the purpose in life is to be "happy." I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.
-Loe C. Rosten

 Faith Manages.
If you have the dream, the ability and the passion, you can bring your dreams to life despite overwhelming opposition. That's the message.
-J. Michael Straczynski

 Vietnam is seen by some as an attractive market despite its poor infrastructure, unaccountable government, and state-run economy.
-Kurt Oeler, c|Net

 It's sorta like serial cleverness. Cleverness is cheap.
-Tom Walton

 Since that time, the government's ability to enforce its laws has been established. As my father wisely pointed out, they own the world's largest organized mob with unlimited resources.
-Randy Whitted, TechWeb

 At least you like what you do, and you can remain only a few keystrokes away from your friends.
-Emily Domalski

 It's just that I've had an epiphany, you know? You get to a point in retirement where you ask yourself, 'How much golf can you play?'
-Lee Iacocca.

 It beats the shit out of being homeless.
-Ivan Kotcher, on moving into his new house after his old house burned down

 Markets tend to cure wild dreams.
-Daniel J. Boone

 You would not believe the fluids the body can produce.
-Ivan Kotcher

 Anyone who thinks you’re going to have painful choices in Social Security doesn’t understand the marketplace.
-Newt Gingrich

 Special PRIVILEGED ACCESS to areas of this web site, where, in the EXCLUSIVE company of people ALMOST AS SUCCESSFUL AS YOU, you will be able to see your cruise-vessel in the final stages of development, with no TACKY END-USERS on cheap SUBURBAN ISP's hanging around pointlessly, lost on their way to alt.binaries.pictures.buses or Calvin's Bondage Babes.
-From the Starship Titanic Web Page

It just made men seem like a bunch of flatulent, urinating dolts.
-Kathleen Kotcher on "100 Reasons It's Great To Be Male"

 What was up with that friggin' band?
-St. Louis Soccer Coach on the Virginia Pep Band at the Men's Soccer Final Four '97.

Can we credibly charge fifteen thousand dollars for seven pages?
-Ivan Kotcher

 Discharge of a nuclear weapon will be deemed a warlike act even if accidental.
-From the Travelers' Homeowners Insurance Policy

 It's just not smart to antagonize the government.
-Barbara Darrow, Computer Reseller News, on MS vs. DOJ

 Facing the combined might of the entire federal government is not exactly like fighting Borland or Lotus.
-Jeff Matthews, RAM Partners

 It is the government and not Microsoft that is the cause of any confusion that might have been created in the mind of the court and the view of the public.
-Richard Urowsky, MS Lawyer

 Email is like god, Evan, they both work in mysterious ways.
-Pat Yates

 Not that I would ever call them grubby little specimines of sub-humanity.
-Ivan Kotcher on Dead Heads

 If there's a better definition of time travel than Terry Gilliams's undigested porridge, I have yet to hear it.
-Thomas Lakeman

 The disappearance of frontiers has left many of us feeling like a dog that has actually caught a car: Now what the hell do I do?
-ibid

 Life is too short to stay squeeky clean.
-Morgan Thomas

 We humans find evolution boring. It's so, so slow. We don't have a million years to hang around to evolve something new. We live in the fastest lane. We are children of change.
-Gerry McGovern

 The Internet is a decentralized medium that is the sum total of all the people using it.
-Ira Magaziner, Internet adviser to the President

 It's much more efficient to waste the half hour at it if the half hour happens to be counted as work time.
-Bill Pemberton

 Adam Smith invented capitalism. We just gave it an address.
-Pandesic Corp Advertisement

 And all this antitrust stuff doesn't amount to a hill of JavaBeans.
-Mike Elgan, Windows Magazine

 So my new theory is: sexual frustration caused by drug-induced clumsiness sublimates itself into heightened stock-picking ability.
-Greg Forster

 You're a high school band teacher. They aren't normal. It's a cult with instruments.
-Jeff Hawkins

 You know, I hate to point this out, but when you're a lying little ho' no one likes you.
-Ivan Kotcher on Monica Lewinski's 48% unfavorable poll numbers

 The good is more bits for everyone.
-Tom Walton

 A name tends to lose its naffness and becomes associated with its own success. The classic example is Microsoft, of course. I mean, as a company name it's pretty bland - but we never notice that, do we? It's a word loaded with meaning.
-Lawrence Timms, ipn-ecommerce

 To understand the concept, you should think of free speech, not free beer.
-Richard Stallman on freeware

 Fuck all that shit, just buy MathCAD.
-Jim Miller on doing math

 Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there.
-Douglas Adams

 One of the lessons of the Internet is very often that you don't need to be perfect at the beginning, you just need to be pretty good and improve over time.
-Win Treese, Open Market Inc.

 On the Internet, everyone is a publisher, I agree. It's just that the great majority of them are really, really awful publishers.
-Gerry McGovern

 Almost everywhere in Europe and America the family is in disarray, violent crime is at intolerable levels, and large numbers of young people live in a godless stupor, their brains addled by drugs, sex and pop culture, their educational achievements in terminal decline.
-Roger Scruton, English philosopher, the Wall Street Journal

 When there's no information to be had, someone will produce it, and others will consume it, regardless of the quality or integrity of that information.
-Kris Kopitzke

 Stamp out stupid top level domains in our lifetime!
-Dave Boyes

 I'm not quite as reliable when I have unlimited access to Guinness.
-John Audette

 In a marketplace of ideas, there are going to be ideas that you find abhorrent. The best thing to do is to respond to them.
- Barry Steinhardt, President, Electronic Frontier Foundation

 What you need is a shower, a haircut, a wardrobe that fits, and a swift kick in the head.
-George Weilecher, on 'kids today.'

 With all the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness, and potential for abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.
-Judge Thomas Hogan, overturning the Line Item Veto Act

 So we strolled out of our building like secondary characters in a Fitzgerald novel.
-Mike Carter

 I will never run for office again. Never. Not even for dog warden.
-Rep. Bill Paxon, announcing his retirement from Congress

 Don't bet against AOL. It's like a cockroach, able to squeeze itself through some tiny crack in the wall just as your foot is hovering above it.
-Jeff Pundyk, TechWeb

 Because I don't need to worry about finances I can ignore Microsoft and take over the world from the grassroots.
-Linus Torvalds

 It's not a surprise that this is going to be a lengthy and complex deal in an industry where everybody sues everybody about everything. That's part of the communications industry today.
-John Sidgemore on the MCI-WorldCom merger

 I don't want to move out but not be able to eat meat. When I number crunch, that's my situation now. It's pathetic, I have a master's degree.
-Elaine Cipriano

 I want to acknowledge st. patrick's day! Perhaps some of you think this verdant holiday is an overcommercialized, tacit/blatant public approval to get stupidly drunk on a weeknight. Well, yeah, you're pretty much correct.
-Michael Carter

 You gotta look like our rates.
-Tom Walton on dressing at trade shows

 No matter how important the company is, no matter how great it is, Microsoft has to abide by the law just like everybody else.
-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)

 And it is harder for techie executives to adjust to office politics than it is for others - like marketers and lawyers - because they have math brains, which are logical and which expect logic to prevail. Corporations don't adhere to honesty or logic all the time.
-Jeff Kaplan, INS

 Sun's attempt to make Java the "war cry" to end Bill Gates' allegedly anti-competitive antics is diverting attention from the desperate gasp of vendors clinging to Java for the last hope of a future, any future.
-Niall McKay, InfoWorld

 Confusing the hell out of hackers for fun and profit.
-Network Associates advertising slogan

 We are humans. We live and die by communication and relationships.
-Gerry McGovern

 The future belongs to individuals and organisations who aggressively manage what they aren't aware of.
-Thornton May

 He's provocative, not smart.
-Tom Walton

 But that was then. The plug-in industry is dead now. Small-time developers couldn't survive giving away their software. People today are upgrading their browsers less and less frequently. E-zines are dropping off the Net. Wired is tired. Legislation is lurking just up ahead. Spam is running amok, and Netscape, the company that first showed us all the possibilities, is limping along.
-Jeff Pundyk on the 'Net today

 Sometimes a history is just a history.
-Greg Forster

 I can't imagine a technology that has been more underhyped.
-Scott McNealy on Java, 3/98

 Bill Gates's net worth now stands at about $50 billion, thanks to the recent run-up in Microsoft's stock to an all-time high. That means the Microsoft chief executive's personal net worth is more than the combined market value of Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Netscape Communications.
-Jeff Pelline, c|Net, 4/4/98

 You should make fun of everybody.
Once you stop making fun of somebody 'cause they took offense, you end up with Political Correctness.
Fuck whitey. Make fun of everybody.
-Sean Mike Whipkey

 On a home-opener afternoon in which the Yankees and Oakland A's played a game that vaguely resembled baseball, George Steinbrenner couldn't get over the length of the men's room lines.
-Tim Brown, The New Jersey Star Ledger

 We get to make movies for the rest of our lives. Realize that and have fun.
-Scott Macbeth, Newhouse School of Communication (Syracuse Univ)

 Microsoft is acting like the tobacco companies! I rest my case.
-Jesse Berst, Anchordesk

 A week ago I would never have considered staying out late on a Thursday, especially this one because I have a whole shitload of stuff to do. However, I have now blossomed into a full fledged fuck up, and would jump at the chance to inebriate myself rather than do work or (sighhhh) take part in blessed sleep.
-Jessica Anderson

 Ben "Hoping to be a drunk little genie next weekend" DeVore
-(obvious)

 No, that's not domestic terrorism. I can pretty much guarantee that's just domestic dumb shit.
-Ivan Kotcher on bomb scares in central Virginia

 If Jesus were walking the earth today, I'm convinced He would have an email address.
-Bishop Paul Loverde

All I gotta say is that it's going to be hard to find a sympathetic jury willing to listen to some pimply nerd explain how his life was ruined because his +3 Sword of Masturbation vanished in a server crash.
-Adam Thornton on the Ultima Online class action lawsuit

 You're never going to have perfect information and things are always going to change, so you've got to get out there and do it now.
-Richard McGinn, CEO Lucent Technologies

 Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf.
-Maria Seminerio, MSNBC

 The market size that can be named is not the true market size.
-Tom Walton
I have no response to that.
-Ivan Kotcher

 The Internet has caused business decision processes to change from rational investment value to emotional driven mass hysteria reaction.
-Associate at John Heim and Associates, in a perfect example of consultantspeak

 It is a great drug. I’ll be honest, I was in the protocol and participated in the program. I think we need to learn more about it. There are many men out there, millions of men out there, who suffer from impotence and this may be the first step.
-Bob Dole on Viagra


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