robin's quotes

Understanding what some one says to you is . . . attributing to him the idea which his words arouse in yourself.

Roughly and ordinarily and plainly speaking, you hear American doctors and lawyers and schoolmasters talking in such a way that it is very clear that they have no real understanding of their own language and its good or bad form. I'm not referring to the deliberate use of slang and colloquialisms; I'm referring to the pathetic attempts of such people to speak with unwonted correctness and horribly failing.

I hear children now, especially in the cities, talking in an appalling fashion, so devoid of sharp consonants and proper vowel sounds that it might be the mumbling of a village idiot. Down, I say, with any candidate who talks like that. If his speech is so faulty, he probably cannot think.

"Perhaps the clumsier writers do ignore the existing distinctions while the sophisticated use them to play sophisticated tunes; perhaps the scrupulously objective lexicographer cannot establish those distinctions from his quotation slips alone. For all that, distinctions do exist. They exist in good writing, and they exist in the linguistic consciousness of the educated."

...the pointy-haired boss doesn't mind if his company gets their ass kicked, so long as no one can prove it's his fault. The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the center of the herd.

Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is "industry best practice."

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.

"Hey... I like being spawned."

"Mr. Worf, scan that ship." "Aye, Captain... 300 DPI?

: Indeed, I don't know of a single
: physicist who thinks that tachyons actually exist.)
The same goes for married physicists: they merely *wish*
that travel into the past were possible....

There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people
were trapped on the escalators.