Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. -- Robert A. Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak. -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale

Ambiguity: Telling the truth when you don't mean to.

What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you. -- Nietzsche (?)

Forget the lowlife, tourist, squeaky clean middle-class bad boys who call their sex-depravity in blunt prose, fine writing. Forget the copycat girls who wouldnt know the end of a dildo from a vacuum rod. They are only chintz dipped in mud and we are after real material. What is forbidden is scarier, sexier, unnightmared by the white-collar cataloguers of crap. 'Don't do that' makes for easy revolt. What is forbidden is hidden. To worm into the heart and mind until what one truly desires has been encased in dark walls of what one ought to desire, is the success of the serpent. -- Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects (?)

I think, therefore I am -- Rene Descartes

I don't think so. -- Descartes' last words, as he suddenly vanished

The phrase "we (I) (you) simply must--" designates something that need not be done. "That goes without saying" is a red warning. "Of course" means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers. -- Robert A. Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus

Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely proportional to the number of times you have looked at it.

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force. -- Dorothy Parker

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. -- Tom Clancy (?)

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