Greg's Quotes Page

Humourous or Pithy Quotes

"...A strange enigma is man!"
"Someone calls him a soul concealed in an animal," I suggested.
"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarked that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."

Sherlock Holmes, "The Sign of Four".

Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest.
Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."

Courtesy of Slackware's /usr/games/fortune.

"A watched algorithm never converges."

Martin Wilson (regarding Cadzow's composite property mapping).

"...the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose -- that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs."

Sherlock Holmes, "The Second Stain".

"We've become a nation of con men, living by selling double glazing to each other."

Fred Dibnah

"When I tell people I'm a Doctor and that I work in a hospital, people show me bits of their body that I just don't want to see!"

Kal Natarajan, Ph.D.

Greg: "C++ is the language of the gods...";
John: "It probably explains why they are all so angry!";