General Wisdom

Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history, dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire. What inner force drove this first athlete? Your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.

— Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"

Manual, n.: A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need in in the others.

— Ray Simard

Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon, there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he was so Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how completely Mournful he would be on Wednesday ...

— Walt Kelly

Mark's Dental-Chair Discovery: Dentists are incapable of asking questions that require a simple yes or no answer.

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

— Voltaire

Maryel brought her bat into Exit once and started whacking people on the dance floor. Now everyone's doing it. It's called grand slam dancing.

— Ransford, Chicago Reader 10/7/83

Maternity pay? Now every Tom, Dick and Harry will get pregnant.

— Malcolm Smith

Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.

— R. Drabek

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mathematicians often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is described as being n-dimensional. Like modern sex, any number can play.

— Dr. Thor Wald, in "Beep/The Quincunx of Time", by James Blish

"Matrimony isn't a word, it's a sentence."

Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a receipt.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

— Jules Feiffer

May a Misguided Platypus lay its Eggs in your Jockey Shorts

May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual!

May the Fleas of a Thousand Camels infest one of your Erogenous Zones.

May your Tongue stick to the Roof of your Mouth with the Force of a Thousand Caramels.

Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.

— R. S. Barton

Maybe you can't buy happiness, but these days you can certainly charge it.

McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom: If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95.

Meader's Law: Whatever happens to you, it will previously have happened to everyone you know, only more so.

Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.

Meeting, n.: An assembly of people coming together to decide what person or department not represented in the room must solve a problem.

Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged.

— "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams

Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ... [EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the woman's skin. Thank you.] ... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below.

— Dave Barry, "Saving Face"

Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American: The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife.

Mencken and Nathan's Ninth Law of The Average American: The quality of a champagne is judged by the amount of noise the cork makes when it is popped.

Mencken and Nathan's Second Law of The Average American: All the postmasters in small towns read all the postcards.

Mencken and Nathan's Sixteenth Law of The Average American: Milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that is possessed only by yokels, and no person born in a large city can never hope to acquire it.

Menu, n.: A list of dishes which the restaurant has just run out of.

Meskimen's Law: There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over.

Message will arrive in the mail. Destroy, before the FBI sees it.

Mickey Mouse wears a Spiro Agnew watch.

Micro Credo: Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift.

"Microwave oven? Whaddya mean, it's a microwave oven? I've been watching Channel 4 on the thing for two weeks."

"Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles."

Mike: "The Fourth Dimension is a shambles?" Bernie: "Nobody ever empties the ashtrays. People are SO inconsiderate."

— Gary Trudeau, "Doonesbury"

Miksch's Law: If a string has one end, then it has another end.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

— Groucho Marx

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

— Groucho Marx

Millihelen, adj: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

— Susan Ertz

Millions of sensible people are too high-minded to concede that politics is almost always the choice of the lesser evil. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," they say, "I will not vote." Having abstained, they are presented with a President who appoints the people who are going to rummage around in their lives for the next four years. Consider all the people who sat home in a stew in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey. They showed Humphrey. Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black.

— Russel Baker, "Ford without Flummery"

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Minnie Mouse is a slow maze learner.

Minors in Kansas City, Missouri, are not allowed to purchase cap pistols; they may buy shotguns freely, however.

Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

— Russell Baker

Misfortune, n.: The kind of fortune that never misses.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Miss, n.: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.

Mitchell's Law of Committees: Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it.

MOCK APPLE PIE (No Apples Needed) Pastry to two crust 9-inch pie 36 RITZ Crackers 2 cups water 2 cups sugar 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 2 tablespoons lemon juice Grated rind of one lemon Butter or margarine Cinnamon Roll out bottom crust of pastry and fit into 9-inch pie plate. Break RITZ Crackers coarsely into pastry-lined plate. Combine water, sugar and cream of tartar in saucepan, boil gently for 15 minutes. Add lemon juice and rind. Cool. Pour this syrup over Crackers, dot generously with butter or margarine and sprinkle with cinnamon. Cover with top crust. Trim and flute edges together. Cut slits in top crust to let steam escape. Bake in a hot oven (425 F) 30 to 35 minutes, until crust is crisp and golden. Serve warm. Cut into 6 to 8 slices.

— Found lurking on a Ritz Crackers box

Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.

Mohandas K. Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better.

Molecule, n.: The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion ...

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis: If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented it wasn't worth doing.

Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life.

Monday, n.: In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots

Money is the root of all wealth.

Moon, n.: 1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to hackers. See PHASE OF THE MOON. 2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC).

Mophobia, n.: Fear of being verbally abused by a Mississippian.

MORE SPORTS RESULTS: The Beverly Hills Freudians tied the Chicago Rogerians 0-0 last Saturday night. The match started with a long period of silence while the Freudians waited for the Rogerians to free associate and the Rogerians waited for the Freudians to say something they could paraphrase. The stalemate was broken when the Freudians' best player took the offensive and interpreted the Rogerians' silence as reflecting their anal-retentive personalities. At this the Rogerians' star player said "I hear you saying you think we're full of ka-ka." This started a fight and the match was called by officials.

More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

— Woody Allen

Mosher's Law of Software Engineering: Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.

Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little eyes. So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around and around for hours, looking for someplace to go, until finally the female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away. Then the male, driven by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs. So the truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of them that it doesn't make any difference.

— Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"

Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

— Turgenev

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

— Frank Zappa

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.

— Arnold Bennett

Mother is the invention of necessity.

Mother told me to be good, but she's been wrong before.

Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365. He [ten-year-old Truman Henry Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,255!" An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be as much fun to watch.

— James R. Newman (The World of Mathematics)

Murphy's Discovery: Do you know Presidents talk to the country the way men talk to women? They say, "Trust me, go all the way with me, and everything will be all right." And what happens? Nine months later, you're in trouble!

Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work.

Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.

"Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ..."

— Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"

Murray and Esther, a middle-aged Jewish couple, are touring Chile. Murray just got a new camera and is constantly snapping pictures. One day, without knowing it, he photographs a top-secret military installation. In an instant, armed troops surround Murray and Esther and hustle them off to prison. They can't prove who they are because they've left their passports in their hotel room. For three weeks they're tortured day and night to get them to name their contacts in the liberation movement.. Finally they're hauled in front of a military court, charged with espionage, and sentenced to death. The next morning they're lined up in front of the wall where they'll be shot. The sergeant in charge of the firing squad asks them if they have any lasts requests. Esther wants to know if she can call her daughter in Chicago. The sergeant says he's sorry, that's not possible, and turns to Murray. "This is crazy!" Murray shouts. "We're not spies!" And he spits in the sergeants face. "Murray!" Esther cries. "Please! Don't make trouble."

— Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"

Mustgo, n.: Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so long it has become a science project.

— Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends"

"My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it."

— "Grendel", by John Gardner

My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward, shouting "The WHO! The WHO!" and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one state in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK.

— Dave Barry, "The Snake"

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."

— Orson Welles

My God, I'm depressed! Here I am, a computer with a mind a thousand times as powerful as yours, doing nothing but cranking out fortunes and sending mail about softball games. And I've got this pain right through my ALU. I've asked for it to be replaced, but nobody ever listens. I think it would be better for us both if you were to just log out again.

"My life is a soap opera, but who has the rights?"

— MadameX

My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway or the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.

— Dorothy Parker

My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet, And a wild young wood-thing bore him! The ways are fair to his roaming feet, And the skies are sunlit for him. As sharply sweet to my heart he seems As the fragrance of acacia. My own dear love, he is all my dreams -- And I wish he were in Asia.

— Dorothy Parker

My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.

— Groucho Marx

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.

My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled -- Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world -- And I wish I'd never met him.

— Dorothy Parker

... My pants just went on a wild rampage through a Long Island Bowling Alley!!

"My pants just went on a wild rampage through a Long Island Bowling Alley!!"

— Zippy the Pinhead

My pen is at the bottom of a page, Which, being finished, here the story ends; 'Tis to be wished it had been sooner done, But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

— Byron

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

— Christopher Morley

Mythology, n.: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Naeser's Law: You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof.

NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Guiseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GUISEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.

— G. B. Shaw, "The Man of Destiny"

Nasrudin called at a large house to collect for charity. The servant said "My master is out." Nasrudin replied, "Tell your master that next time he goes out, he should not leave his face at the window. Someone might steal it."

Nasrudin walked into a shop one day, and the owner came forward to serve him. Nasrudin said, "First things first. Did you see me walk into your shop?" "Of course." "Have you ever seen me before?" "Never." "Then how do you know it was me?"

Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?", he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more."

Nasrudin was carrying home a piece of liver and the recipe for liver pie. Suddenly a bird of prey swooped down and snatched the piece of meat from his hand. As the bird flew off, Nasrudin called after it, "Foolish bird! You have the liver, but what can you do with it without the recipe?"

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?

— Solomon Short

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light. It did not last; the devil howling "Ho! Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.

Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.

— Fran Leibowitz

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

— Abraham Lincoln

Necessity is a mother.

Neckties strangle clear thinking.

— Lin Yutang

Never be led astray onto the path of virtue.

Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.

Never call a man a fool; borrow from him.

Never commit yourself! Let someone else commit you.

Never count your chickens before they rip your lips off

Never drink coke in a moving elevator. The elevator's motion coupled with the chemicals in coke produce hallucinations. People tend to change into lizards and attack without warning, and large bats usually fly in the window. Additionally, you begin to believe that elevators have windows.

Never eat more than you can lift.

— Miss Piggy

Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

— Salvor Hardin, "Foundation"

Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful.

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

— Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977

Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time.

Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower.

Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.

Never try to outstubborn a cat.

— Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

— Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS

"Never underestimate the power of a small tactical nuclear weapon."

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

— R. A. Heinlein

New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.

New Hampshire law forbids you to tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.

New members are urgently needed in the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Yourself. Apply within.

New members urgently required for SUICIDE CLUB, Watford area.

— Monty Python's Big Red Book

New systems generate new problems.

New Year's Eve is the time of year when a man most feels his age, and his wife most often reminds him to act it.

— Webster's Unafraid Dictionary

New York is real. The rest is done with mirrors.

New York's got the ways and means; Just won't let you be.

— The Grateful Dead

Newlan's Truism: An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.

NEWS FLASH!! Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West German pole-vault champion.

*** NEWSFLASH *** Russian tanks steamrolling through New Jersey!!!! Details at eleven!

Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.

Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.

Next Friday will not be your lucky day. As a matter of fact, you don't have a lucky day this year.

Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.

— F. J. Raymond

"Nice boy, but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice."

— Foghorn Leghorn

Nihilism should commence with oneself.

Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.

Nine megs for the secretaries fair, Seven megs for the hackers scarce, Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs, Three megs for system source; One disk to rule them all, One disk to bind them, One disk to hold the files And in the darkness grind 'em.

Nine-track tapes and seven-track tapes And tapes without any tracks; Stretchy tapes and snarley tapes And tapes mixed up on the racks -- Take hold of the tape And pull off the strip, And then you'll be sure Your tape drive will skip.

— Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes

"Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much."

— Augustine

Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.

"Nirvana? Thats the place where the powers that be and their friends hang out.

— Zonker Harris

No animal should ever jump on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain he can hold his own in conversation.

— Fran Lebowitz

No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a camel -- anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform effectively under such difficult conditions.

— Laurence J. Peter

No good deed goes unpunished.

— Clare Boothe Luce

No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut.

— Channing Pollock

No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.

No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.

No matter what other nations may say about the United States, immigration is still the sincerest form of flattery.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

"No one gets too old to learn a new way of being stupid."

No part of this message may reproduce, store itself in a retrieval system, or transmit disease, in any form, without the permissiveness of the author.

— Chris Shaw

No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it.

No problem is so large it can't be fit in somewhere.

"No proper program contains an indication which as an operator-applied occurrence identifies an operator-defining occurrence which as an indication-applied occurrence identifies an indication-defining occurrence different from the one identified by the given indication as an indication-applied occurrence."

— ALGOL 68 Report

"No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in that kind of paper."

— Mike Royko on the Chicago Sun-Times after it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch

No violence, gentlemen -- no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

— Sherlock Holmes

"No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too hot.'"

— Dr. Who

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

— Tallulah Bankhead

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION

Nobody said computers were going to be polite.

Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.

— Lewis Lapham

Nobody wants constructive criticism. It's all we can do to put up with constructive praise.

Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results.

Non-sequiturs make me eat lampshades.

Noncombatant, n.: A dead Quaker.

— Ambrose Bierce

Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.

"Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong."

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine ...

— Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

"Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none."

— Shakespeare

"Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree."

— Professor W.

Notes for a ballet, "The Spell": ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman -- unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any poultry jokes ...

— Woody Allen

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up.

Nothing is faster than the speed of light ... To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.

— Andrew Young

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

— Nero Wolfe

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

— Oscar Wilde

Nothing recedes like success.

— Walter Winchell

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

— Charlie Brown

November, n.: The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Now and then an innocent person is sent to the legislature.

Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the double lock will keep; May no brick through the window break, And, no one rob me till I awake.

"Now is the time for all good men to come to."

— Walt Kelly

"Now the Lord God planted a garden East of Whittier in a place called Yorba Linda, and out of the ground he made to grow orange trees that were good for food and the fruits thereof he labeled SUNKIST ..."

— "The Begatting of a President"

"Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. Gag me with a smurfette."

— P. Buhr, Computer Science 354

... Now you're ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage children emotionally. For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn to love him, then melts. And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an outcast by the other reindeer. Then along comes good, old Santa. Does he ignore the deformity? Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath? No. Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some kind of headlight with legs and a tail. So unless you want your children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop quickly.

— Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"

Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home tool sets for under $4?" An excellent question. Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where they have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of Raisinets and malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon administration. In either the hardware or housewares department, you'll find an item imported from an obscure Oriental country and described as "Nine Tools in One", consisting of a little handle with interchangeable ends representing inscrutable Oriental notions of tools that Americans might use around the home. Buy it. This is the kind of tool set professionals use. Not only is it inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the so-called quality tools sets: The handle will actually break right off if you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to direct sunlight.

— Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

"Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile."

— Karl Lehenbauer

"Nuclear war would mean abolition of most comforts, and disruption of normal routines, for children and adults alike."

— Willard F. Libby, "You *Can* Survive Atomic Attack"