General Wisdom

WARNING: Reading this fortune can affect the dimensionality of your mind, change the curvature of your spine, cause the growth of hair on your palms, and make a difference in the outcome of your favorite war.

Warning: Listening to WXRT on April Fools' Day is not recommended for those who are slightly disoriented the first few hours after waking up.

— Chicago Reader 4/22/83

Washington [D.C.] is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

— John F. Kennedy

Waste not, get your budget cut next year.

Wasting time is an important part of living.

Watson's Law: The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number and significance of any persons watching it.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

— Niels Bohr

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde

We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm.

— Winston Churchill

We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it.

— Whole Earth Catalog

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

— Walt Kelly, "Pogo"

We are going to give a little something, a few little years more, to socialism, because socialism is defunct. It dies all by itself. The bad thing is that socialism, being a victim of its ... Did I say socialism?

— Fidel Castro

"We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem."

— Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

"We are upping our standards ... so up yours."

— Pat Paulsen for President, 1988.

We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved.

We can predict everything, except the future.

We cannot put the face of a person on a stamp unless said person is deceased. My suggestion, therefore, is that you drop dead.

— James E. Day, Postmaster General

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

— Vroomfondel

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."

We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.

We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids?

— I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission

"We had it tough ... I had to get up at 9 o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work 29 hours down mill, and when we came home our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our grave singing Haleleuia ..."

— Monty Python

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

— Walt Kelly

We have only two things to worry about: That things will never get back to normal, and that they already have.

"We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation."

— Lily Tomlin

We have the flu. I don't know if this particular strain has an official name, but if it does, it must be something like "Martian Death Flu". You may have had it yourself. The main symptom is that you wish you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past "HIGH", that said "ELECTROCUTION". Another symptom is that you cease brushing your teeth, because (a) your teeth hurt, and (b) you lack the strength. Midway through the brushing process, you'd have to lie down in front of the sink to rest for a couple of hours, and rivulets of toothpaste foam would dribble sideways out of your mouth, eventually hardening into crusty little toothpaste stalagmites that would bond your head permanently to the bathroom floor, which is how the police would find you. You know the kind of flu I'm talking about.

— Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide"

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

— Alan M. Turing

We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgement.

We must remember the First Amendment which protects any shrill jackass no matter how self-seeking.

— F. G. Withington

We ought to be very grateful that we have tools. Millions of years ago people did not have them, and home projects were extremely difficult. For example, when a primitive person wanted to put up paneling, he had to drive the little paneling nails into the cave wall with his bare fist, so generally the paneling wound up getting spattered with primitive blood, which isn't really all that bad when you consider how ugly paneling is to begin with.

— Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some of our best friends are trying to kill us.

We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant. ... I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile. There had been a fight. I had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls. Everyone told him, "You ride the bull, senor. You do not fight it." But he was lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull. And then he fought me. And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing what men must do. ... "Stop the car," the girl said. There was a look of terrible sadness in her eyes. She knew about the woman of the tollway. I knew not how. I started to speak, but she raised an arm and spoke with a quiet and peace I will never forget. "I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the tollway belle's for thee." The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day.

— Peter Applebome, International Imitation Hemingway Competition

we will invent new lullabies, new songs, new acts of love, we will cry over things we used to laugh & our new wisdom will bring tears to eyes of gentile creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then & in the end a summer with wild winds & new friends will be.

We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna And a Sun Myung Moon!

— Maxwell Smart

"We'll cross out that bridge when we come back to it later."

We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right in his bowl full of jelly.

— Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"

We're only in it for the volume.

— Black Sabbath

We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away. The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week, but for some reason nobody's ever done it.

— Andy Rooney

Weiler's Law: Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

Weinberg's First Law: Progress is made on alternate Fridays.

Weinberg's Principle: An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Weiner's Law of Libraries: There are no answers, only cross references.

Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter. He'll come in handy if you run out of food.

— Dean McLaughlin.

Well, here it is, 1983, so it won't be long before you start reading a lot of boring stories about people like Vance Hartke. Hartke is a governor or mayor or something from one of the flatter states, and the reason you'll be reading about him is that he's one of the 50 top contenders for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. These men will spend the next 18 months going around the country engaging in the most degrading activities imaginable, such as wearing idiot hats and appearing on "Meet the Press". "Meet the Press" is one of those Sunday morning public interest shows that the public is not the least bit interested in. It features a panel of reporters who ask questions of a guest politician, who wins an Amana home freezer if he can get through the entire show without answering a single question ...

— Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics"

Well, I would -- if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive they they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.

— President Ronald Reagan, on the MX missile

Well, my terminal's locked up, and I ain't got any Mail, And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail; I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues, I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues. If you think that it's nice that you get what you C, Then go : illogical statement with your whole family, 'Cause the Supreme Court ain't the only place with : Bus error views. I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues. On a PDP-11, life should be a breeze, But with VAXen in the house even magnetic tapes would freeze. Now you might think that unlike VAXen I'd know who I abuse, I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.

— Core Dumped Blues

"Well, that was a piece of cake, eh K-9?" "Piece of cake, Master? Radial slice of baked confection ... coefficient of relevance to Key of Time: zero."

— Dr. Who

"Well," Brahma said, "even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred."

— The Mahabharata.

Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

Wethern's Law: Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.

"What are we going to do?" "Me, I'm examining the major Western religions. I'm looking for something that's soft on morality, generous with holidays, and has a short initiation period."

"What are you doing?" "Examining the world's major religions. I'm looking for something that's light on morals, has lots of holidays, and with a short initiation period."

What color is a chameleon on a mirror?

"What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty teenager asked her mother. "Encouragement, dear," she replied.

What does "it" mean in the sentence "What time is it?"?

What does it mean if there is no fortune for you?

What garlic is to food, insanity is to art.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

"What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so that we wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our country. Nice try anyway, George."

— D.J. on KSFO/KYA

What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance?

What good is having someone who can walk on water if you don't follow in his footsteps?

What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower stall. Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of while he showers. Then I hop right back into the stall because our dog, Earnest, who has been alone in the basement all night building up powerful dog emotions, has come bounding and quivering into the bathroom and wants to greet me with 60 or 70 thousand playful nips, any one of which -- bear in mind that I am naked and, without my contact lenses, essentially blind -- could result in the kind of injury where you have to learn a whole new part if you want to sing the "Messiah", if you get my drift. Then I hop right back out, because Robert, with that uncanny sixth sense some children have -- you cannot teach it; they either have it or they don't -- has chosen exactly that moment to flush one of the toilets. Perhaps several of them.

— Dave Barry, "Saving Face"

What I tell you three times is true.

"What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty- sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrifically witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties.

— Dave Barry, "$#$\%#^\%!^\%&@\%@!"

What I want is all of the power and none of the responsibility.

"What I've done, of course, is total garbage."

— R. Willard, Pure Math 430a

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

— Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

— Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"

What is a magician but a practising theorist?

— Obi-Wan Kenobi

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

— Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875

What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton on its peak.

"What is the Nature of God?" CLICK...CLICK...WHIRRR...CLICK...=BEEP!= 1 QT. SOUR CREAM 1 TSP. SAUERKRAUT 1/2 CUT CHIVES. STIR AND SPRINKLE WITH BACON BITS. "I've just GOT to start labeling my software..."

— Bloom County

"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the FOUNDING of a bank?"

— Bertold Brecht

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

— Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical_Essays", 1928

What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do.

What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with.

What publishers are looking for these days isn't radical feminism. It's corporate feminism -- a brand of feminism designed to sell books and magazines, three-piece suits, airline tickets, Scotch, cigarettes and, most important, corporate America's message, which runs: "Yes, women were discriminated against in the past, but that unfortunate mistake has been remedied; now every woman can attain wealth, prestige and power by dint of individual rather than collective effort."

— Susan Gordon

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

— Ursula K. LeGuin

What the hell, go ahead and put all your eggs in one basket.

What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener.

What this country needs is a dime that will buy a good five-cent bagel.

What this country needs is a dime that will buy a good five-cent bagel.

What this country needs is a good five cent ANYTHING!

What this country needs is a good five cent microcomputer.

What this country needs is a good five cent nickel.

What this country needs is a good five dollar plasma weapon.

What this world needs is a good five-dollar plasma weapon.

What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn?

— Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which nobody really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday Morning Time, whereby at 7 a.m. every weekday we go into a space- launch-style "hold" for two to three hours, during which it just remains 7 a.m. This way we could all wake up via a civilized gradual process of stretching and belching and scratching, and it would still be only 7 a.m. when we were ready to actually emerge from bed.

— Dave Barry, "$#$\%#^\%!^\%&@\%@!"

What you don't know can hurt you, only you won't know it.

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

— Steven Wright

"What's that thing?" "Well, it's a highly technical, sensitive instrument we use in computer repair. Being a layman, you probably can't grasp exactly what it does. We call it a two-by-four."

— Jeff MacNelley, "Shoe"

"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?"

— Dr. Who

"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?"

— The Doctor

Whatever became of eternal truth?

Whatever became of Strange de Jim? Well, he found a substitute for cocaine: "You cover Q-tips with sandpaper and ram them up your nostrils as far as they will go. Then you sniff talcum powder while shredding hundred dollar bills."

— Herb Caen

Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down.

— Collis P. Huntingdon

"Whatever the missing mass of the universe is, I hope it's not cockroaches!"

— Mom

When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him -- that's where the money is.

— Robespierre

When a fellow says, "It ain't the money but the principle of the thing," it's the money.

— Kim Hubbard

When a fly lands on the ceiling, does it do a half roll or a half loop?

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

— Robert Heinlein

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog along to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

— Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

When all other means of communication fail, try words.

"When are you BUTTHEADS gonna learn that you can't oppose Gestapo tactics *with* Gestapo tactics?"

— Reuben Flagg

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

When does summertime come to Minnesota, you ask? Well, last year, I think it was a Tuesday.

When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.

"When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving."

— Steven Wright

When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer.

— Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"

When I said "we", officer, I was referring to myself, the four young ladies, and, of course, the goat.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.

— Clarence Darrow

When I was a kid I said to my father one afternoon, "Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?" He answered, "If the zoo wants you let them come and get you."

— Jerry Lewis

"When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, `Well, what do you need?'"

— Steven Wright

When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

— Woody Allen

When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. "It is always so," my mother said. "You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone." ... Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.

— Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope"

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

— Mark Twain

"When in doubt, tell the truth."

— Mark Twain

When in doubt, use brute force.

— Ken Thompson

When in panic, fear and doubt, Drink in barrels, eat, and shout.

When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!

— Laurie Anderson

When Marriage is Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Inlaws.

When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.

— Calvin Coolidge

When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, "Forty-seven years -- and I find I mind it less and less."

— Louise Andrews Kent

When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done.

— Daniel B. Luten

When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical"

— Jon Carroll

When the government bureau's remedies don't match your problem, you modify the problem, not the remedy.

When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics.

— Voltaire

When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade ...

— Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly.

— Donald Douglas

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

— George Bernard Shaw

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

— Thomas Paine

When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before -- except our fingertips will have been singed.

— Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.

— Amrom Katz

"When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut."

When you don't know what you are doing, do it neatly.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

— Harry Truman

When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him.

— R. A. Lafferty

"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."

— Winston Curchill, On formal declarations of war

When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't know the answer either.

— Edgar R. Fiedler

When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.

— The Wall Street Journal

When you try to make an impression, the chances are that is the impression you will make.

When you're away, I'm restless, lonely, Wretched, bored, dejected; only Here's the rub, my darling dear I feel the same when you are near.

— Samuel Hoffenstein, "When You're Away"

When you're not looking at it, this fortune is written in FORTRAN.

Whenever anyone says, "theoretically", they really mean, "not really".

— Dave Parnas

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

— A. Lincoln

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

— Oscar Wilde

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

— Mark Twain "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

— Mark Twain

WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE Oh, dear, where can the matter be When it's converted to energy? There is a slight loss of parity. Johnny's so long at the fair.

Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.

Whether you can hear it or not The Universe is laughing behind your back

— National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?

While anyone can admit to themselves they were wrong, the true test is admission to someone else.

While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

— Robert Burns, Address on "The Rights of Woman", November 26, 1792

While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.

While it may be true that a watched pot never boils, the one you don't keep an eye on can make an awful mess of your stove.

— Edward Stevenson

While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position.

While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their correctness never does.

While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still very reassuring to know that it's still there.

While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are safe, for you can watch both of his.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Whistler's Law: You never know who is right, but you always know who is in charge.

"Who cares if it doesn't do anything? It was made with our new Triple-Iso-Bifurcated-Krypton-Gate-MOS process ..."

Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

— A. E. Housman

Who messed with my anti-paranoia shot?

Who needs friends when you can sit alone in your room and drink?

Who's on first?

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.

— George Ade

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

"Why are we importing all these highbrow plays like `Amadeus'? I could have told you Mozart was a jerk for nothing."

— Ian Shoales

"Why be a man when you can be a success?"

— Bertold Brecht

Why bother building any more nuclear warheads until we use the ones we have?

Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?

Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to avoid responsibility with?

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?

Why do we have two eyes? To watch 3-D movies with.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

— Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"

Why does New Jersey have more toxic waste dumps and California have more lawyers? New Jersey had first choice.

Why don't elephants eat penguins ? Because they can't get the wrappers off ...

"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved"

— Mark Twain

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?

"Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?"

— Lily Tomlin

"Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love you knowing nothing?"

— Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year? Just picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your children open their old-fashioned presents. Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?" You: "A spinning top! You spin it around, and then eventually it falls down. What fun! Ha, ha!" Son: "Is this a joke? Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer with two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory, and I get this cretin TOP?" Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad? Look at this." You: "It's figgy pudding! What a treat!" Daughter: "It looks like goat barf."

— Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"

"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"

— Oscar Wilde

Why You Can't Run When There's Trouble in the Office: No matter where you stand, no matter how far or fast you flee, when it hits the fan, as much as possible will be propelled in your direction, and almost none will be returned to the source.

— John L. Shelton

Wiker's Law: Government expands to absorb revenue and then some.

William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

Williams and Holland's Law: If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods.

Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat.

Wit, n.: The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery ... by leaving it out.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

With a gentleman I try to be a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.

— Otto von Bismark

With a rubber duck, one's never alone.

— "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?