upFRONT

Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

—Charles MacKay, 1841

You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

—Navajo Proverb

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.

—G. K. Chesterton

Jetlag is evil. But not as evil as Flash.

—Deborah Branscum

Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

—polar bear on Slashdot

One night I was layin' down, I heard mama 'n papa talkin', I heard papa tell mama, let that boy boogie-woogie, it's in him, and it got to come out. And I felt so good, went on boogie'n just the same.

—John Lee Hooker

To suggest that the author knows best how to write effectively to each individual reader is silly, yet that's what I understand of your position.

—John Wilcox, Microsoft employee, defending Smart Tags

Even if Smart Tags don't violate copyright or deceptive trade laws, they still violate the integrity of the Web. Part of the appeal of the Web is that it allows anyone to publish anything, to take their thoughts, feelings and opinions and put them before the world with no censors or marketroids in the way. By adding Smart Tags to web pages, Microsoft is interposing itself between authors and their audience. Microsoft told Walter Mossberg, “The feature will spare users from under-linked sites.” Microsoft is in effect deciding how authors should write, and how developers should build, web sites.

—Chris Kaminski

Intellectual property (IP) has been driving the species for some five million years. In the past 100 or so years, it's increasingly been saddled with the chore of lining the pockets of middlemen and parasites who, sans this lining, would lack sufficient intellect to open a can of beer.

—Tom Matrullo

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them that we are missing.

—Gamel Abdul Nasser

If the business notion of best practices had been applied from the dawn of human civilization, human beings never would have achieved civilization. Art history would focus on things like ancient Roman bas-reliefs of the current Tide and Cheer equivalents, the Sistine Chapel ceiling would say “Bank With Medici!” and instead of a torch, the Statue of Liberty would be brandishing a tube of Preparation H.

—Christopher Locke

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

—Douglas Adams