One-Liners

Herewith a collection of some of my pithy, cute quotes. As you can see, I’m rather poverty-stricken in this department so far, but I expect to expand the collection with time.


If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there.

Corollary: If you don’t know what the hell you’re trying to accomplish, you probably won’t accomplish it.

I don’t spend much time following other people’s work on interactive storytelling. It’s not that I don’t respect that work; it’s just that I think about it the same way that General George Patton thought about war. He declared that the point in war is not to die for your country, but to make the other fellow die for
his country. In the same way, I think it’s better to concentrate on doing work of such quality that you force the other fellow to follow your work.

The easiest way to be the biggest fish in the pond is to make your own pond.

When dealing with others, never, EVER forget that they are in reality Pleistocene hunter-gatherers who are only faking it as civilized people – and doing it rather badly.

The very first rule in dealing with terrorism is, "Don’t allow yourself to be terrorized by terrorism."

War is not a game; it is a transaction in which you pay blood and treasure for a political objective. Strive for skinflintiness.

Alexander harbored the conceit that he was a god; Caesar harbored the conceit that he was an Alexander; and the German Kaisers and Russian Czars harbored the conceits that they were Caesars. Nobody today would like to think of themselves as a Kaiser or a Czar; it seems that the ambitions of megalomaniacs have been losing their grandeur.

I prefer wrestling with the truth fighting and kicking, rather than having it served up dead and limp in book or classroom.

If you think about how stupid the average person is, and that half the population is stupider than the average, then it starts to make more sense that 20% of the American public believes Fox News.

This story requires some background: some old friends were visiting, along with their 5-year old daughter. Our guest room has a double bed, but it’s not big enough to accommodate all three of them. So it was decided that they would sleep in the guest room and the girl would sleep on a small bed in another room. That room had a large picture window, and of course we live way out in the mountains, so the picture window faced open wilderness. The little girl was afraid to sleep alone in that room. The parents were reassuring her that it was safe when I stepped in. “Are you afraid that there might be ferocious dinosaurs out there?” I asked. Wide-eyed, she nodded. “Well, I can assure you that there are absolutely no dinosaurs out there. The monsters ate them all.”
She slept on the floor in the guest room.

The other day I was watching my wife using her iMac, when I noticed that her screen display looked better than the one on my computer. It was brighter, clearer, and the colors were more vibrant. “Garsh” says I, “is her monitor really better than mine?” My computer is upstairs while hers is downstairs, so I couldn’t put them side by side to determine the answer. But then I had a brilliant idea: on her computer, I took a screenshot of the movie she had been watching. I emailed that screenshot to my computer. Then I took the DVD up to my computer and put it on exactly the same frame as I took the screenshot of. Then I compared the two images. Damned if they weren’t both the same!

I don’t make eye candy; I make mind cuisine.

Vituperation is always an attempt to assert power, and the only people who feel the need to assert power are those who have none.

People who live in glass houses need shower curtains.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away; an onion a day keeps everyone away.

The early worm gets himself caught by a bird.