General Wisdom

Alden's Laws: (1) Giving away baby clothes and furniture is the major cause of pregnancy. (2) Always be backlit. (3) Sit down whenever possible.

Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall, Aleph-null bottles of beer, You take one down, and pass it around, Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.

Alex Haley was adopted!

Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting for a dial tone.

Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it.

— Peggy Joyce

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

— H. L. Mencken

All bridge hands are equally likely, but some are more equally likely than others.

— Alan Truscott

All extremists should be taken out and shot.

All Finagle Laws may be bypassed by learning the simple art of doing without thinking.

"All flesh is grass"

— Isiah Smoke a friend today.

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own importance.

All I can think of is a platter of organic PRUNE CRISPS being trampled by an army of swarthy, Italian LOUNGE SINGERS ...

All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power

— Ashleigh Brilliant

All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.

— Woody Allen

"All my friends and I are crazy. That's the only thing that keeps us sane."

"All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific."

— Jane Wagner

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

— The Book of Bokonon / Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

All other things being equal, a bald man cannot be elected President of the United States.

— Vic Gold

All power corrupts, but we need electricity.

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

— Samuel Butler

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

— E. Rutherford

"All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right hands."

— Saint Patrick

All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.

All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?"

— Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"

"... all the modern inconveniences ..."

— Mark Twain

All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.

— La Rochefoucauld

All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second.

— Jim Fiebig

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

— Sean O'Casey

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.

— Richard P. Feynman

All things are possible, except skiing thru a revolving door.

All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun. Money's just the way we keep score.

All true wisdom is found on T-shirts.

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.

— Francois Fenelon

Alliance, n.: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Alone, adj.: In bad company.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

— Dave Barry

Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.

Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office.

— Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical Gamekeeping."

— Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959)

Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back.

Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.

"Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way."

Am I ranting? I hope so. My ranting gets raves.

AMAZING BUT TRUE ... If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.

AMAZING BUT TRUE ... There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert.

Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

— Charlie McCarthy

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

— John O'Hara

America was discovered by Amerigo Vespucci and was named after him, until people got tired of living in a place called "Vespuccia" and changed its name to "America".

— Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"

American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room without having little pictures on the doors.

— Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister"

"Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it."

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

— James Michener, "Space"

An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but is always polite to traffic cops.

"An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax."

— David Letterman

An apple every eight hours will keep three doctors away.

An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used "next time". Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile".

— Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"

An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.

An attorney was defending his client against a charge of first-degree murder. "Your Honor, my client is accused of stuffing his lover's mutilated body into a suitcase and heading for the Mexican border. Just north of Tijuana a cop spotted her hand sticking out of the suitcase. Now, I would like to stress that my client is *not* a murderer. A sloppy packer, maybe..."

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.

An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.

An English judge, growing weary of the barrister's long-winded summation, leaned over the bench and remarked, "I've heard your arguments, Sir Geoffrey, and I'm none the wiser!" Sir Geoffrey responded, "That may be, Milord, but at least you're better informed!"

An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.

— A. P. Herbert

An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch. He wears a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Golfer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence: "The Rolex Hyperion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating handcraftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold. No watch parts or anything. Just a great big chunk on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and they'll see his Rolex Hyperion. Hahahahahahahahaha."

— Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"

An exotic journey in downtown Newark is in your future.

"... an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite often picturesque liar."

— Mark Twain

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.

— Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann"

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him. "Well, zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute." The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, "And from this he makes a living?"

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

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of purge."

Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all.

And as we stand on the edge of darkness Let our chant fill the void That others may know In the land of the night The ship of the sun Is drawn by The grateful dead.

— Tibetan "Book of the Dead," ca. 4000 BC.

... and furthermore ... I don't like your trousers.

And I heard Jeff exclaim, As they strolled out of sight, "Merry Christmas to all -- You take credit cards, right?"

— "Outsiders" comic

... And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man

— A. E. Housman

And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.

"... And remember: if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

— "Scoop" Nisker, KFOG radio reporter Preposterous Words

And so, men, we can see that human skin is an even more complex and fascinating organ than we thought it was, and if we want to keep it looking good, we have to care for it as though it were our own. One approach is to undergo a painful surgical procedure wherein your skin is turned inside-out, so the young cells are on the outside, but then of course you have the unpleasant side effect that your insides gradually fill up with dead old cells and you explode. So this procedure is pretty much limited to top Hollywood stars for whom youthful beauty is a career necessity, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles.

— Dave Barry, "Saving Face"

"...and the fully armed nuclear warheads, are, of course, merely a courtesy detail."

And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports, which we call legs. The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the world.

— Michael Frayn, "The Tin Men"

"And what will you do when you grow up to be as big as me?" asked the father of his little son. "Diet."

And yet, seasons must be taken with a grain of salt, for they too have a sense of humor, as does history. Corn stalks comedy, comedy stalks tragedy, and this too is historic. And yet, still, when corn meets tragedy face to face, we have politics.

— Dalglish, Larsen and Sutherland, "Root Crops and Ground Cover"

Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy.

— Tom Lehrer

Ankh if you love Isis.

Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree.

Anthony's Law of Force: Don't force it; get a larger hammer.

Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop. Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike your toes.

Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you're trying to think of.

Any clod can have the facts, but having an opinion is an art.

— Charles McCabe

Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.

— Charles McCabe

Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representation of contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation of anything -- except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting upright in a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.

— Richard Schickel

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

— Aesop

Any father who thinks he's all important should remind himself that this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a whole week.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to sell it.

Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true.

— Solomon Short

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

— Sydney J. Harris

Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a larger object.

Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient to exactly the point of most pressure.

— Milt Barber

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

— Rich Kulawiec

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.

Anybody who doesn't cut his speed at the sight of a police car is probably parked.

Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire.

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

— Robert Benchley

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

— Publius Syrus

Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.

— Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

— Samuel Goldwyn

Anyone who hates Dogs and Kids Can't be All Bad.

— W. C. Fields

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

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

Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy from a baby" has never tried taking candy from a baby.

— Robin Hood

Anything free is worth what you pay for it.

Anything is good and useful if it's made of chocolate.

Anything is good if it's made of chocolate.

Anything labeled "NEW" and/or "IMPROVED" isn't. The label means the price went up. The label "ALL NEW", "COMPLETELY NEW", or "GREAT NEW" means the price went way up.

Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing

"Apathy is not the problem, it's the solution"

Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement. Afterism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.

— James Alexander Thom

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the problems of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

"APL is a write-only language. I can write programs in APL, but I can't read any of them."

— Roy Keir

Aquadextrous, adj.: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes.

— Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

AQUARIUS (Jan 20 - Feb 18) You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive. You lie a great deal. On the other hand, you are inclined to be careless and impractical, causing you to make the same mistakes over and over again. People think you are stupid.

Arbitrary systems, pl.n.: Systems about which nothing general can be said, save "nothing general can be said."

Are you a turtle?

Are you a turtle?

"Arguments with furniture are rarely productive."

— Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"

ARIES (Mar 21 - Apr 19) You are the pioneer type and hold most people in contempt. You are quick tempered, impatient, and scornful of advice. You are not very nice.

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

— Mickey Mouse

Armadillo: To provide weapons to a Spanish pickle

Arnold's Laws of Documentation: (1) If it should exist, it doesn't. (2) If it does exist, it's out of date. (3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws.

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?

— Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

Art is anything you can get away with.

— Marshall McLuhan.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

— Paul Gauguin

Arthur's Laws of Love: (1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you remind them of someone else. (2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of yourself in person.

Artistic ventures highlighted. Rob a museum.

As a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. "What kind of a sick perverted disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask, "that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?" ...

— Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

— Matt Cartmill

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

— Albert Einstein

As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.

— Weisert

As I was going up Punch Card Hill, Feeling worse and worser, There I met a C.R.T. And it drop't me a cursor. C.R.T., C.R.T., Phosphors light on you! If I had fifty hours a day I'd spend them all at you.

— Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes

As I was passing Project MAC, I met a Quux with seven hacks. Every hack had seven bugs; Every bug had seven manifestations; Every manifestation had seven symptoms. Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks, How many losses at Project MAC?

As long as I am mayor of this city [Jersey City, New Jersey] the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist". You never hear a real American talk like that.

— Frank Hague (1896-1956)

As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

— Oscar Wilde

As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.

"As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs; a process that traditionally requires some debugging."

— USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new computer system.

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

— Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

— Woody Allen

As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance.

— National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such things as a free variable."

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.

— Sandra Boynton, "Chocolate: The Consuming Passion"

As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. [In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to figure out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on Wilbur. "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual organs!" You should have seen their original design.] As a result, birds are very, very difficult to arouse sexually. You almost never see an aroused bird. So when they want to reproduce, birds fly up and stand on telephone lines, where they monitor telephone conversations with their feet. When they find a conversation in which people are talking dirty, they grip the line very tightly until they are both highly aroused, at which point the female gets pregnant.

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

As you reach for the web, a venomous spider appears. Unable to pull your hand away in time, the spider promptly, but politely, bites you. The venom takes affect quickly causing your lips to turn plaid along with your complexion. You become dazed, and in your stupor you fall from the limbs of the tree. Snap! Your head falls off and rolls all over the ground. The instant before you croak, you hear the whoosh of a vacuum being filled by the air surrounding your head. Worse yet, the spider is suing you for damages.

As Zeus said to Narcissus, "Watch yourself."

ASHes to ASHes, DOS to DOS.

Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard).

— Edgar R. Fiedler

Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.

Ask Not for whom the Bell Tolls, and You will Pay only the Station-to-Station rate.

Ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls ... if thou art in the bathtub, it tolls for thee.

"Asked by reporters about his upcoming marriage to a forty-two-year-old woman, director Roman Polanski told reporters, `The way I look at it, she's the equivalent of three fourteen-year-olds.'"

— David Letterman

Ass, n.: The masculine of "lass".

Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve. Run with decent folk and your own decent instincts will be strengthened. Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum. Hang around with rich people and you will end by picking up the check and dying broke.

— Stanley Walker

"At a recent meeting in Snowmass, Colorado, a participant from Los Angeles fainted from hyperoxygenation, and we had to hold his head under the exhaust of a bus until he revived."

At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest.

— Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.

— The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.

— The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985

... at least I thought I was dancing, 'til somebody stepped on my hand.

— J. B. White

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.

— Marshall Lumsden

At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.

Atlanta makes it against the law to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp.

Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason.

— Winston Churchill

Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever depths they were once able to plumb.

— Stanley Kaufman

Automobile, n.: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians.

Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep.

— National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Avoid reality at all costs.

"Avoid revolution or expect to get shot. Mother and I will grieve, but we will gladly buy a dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you."

— Dr. Paul Williamson, father of a Kent State student

Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Bagbiter: 1. n.; Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. adj.: Failing hardware or software. "This bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar." Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING.

Bagdikian's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele.

Baker's First Law of Federal Geometry: A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides by governors.

Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.

Banectomy, n.: The removal of bruises on a banana.

— Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

Bank error in your favor. Collect $200.

Barach's Rule: An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician.

Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Barth's Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't.

Baruch's Observation: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Baseball is a skilled game. It's America's game -- it, and high taxes.

— Will Rogers

Basic is a high level languish. APL is a high level anguish.

"BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'."

Basic, n.: A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company.

Bathquake, n.: The violent quake that rattles the entire house when the water faucet is turned on to a certain point.

— Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

Be a better psychiatrist and the world will beat a psychopath to your door.