Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea...
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And now, like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career, and just fade away...an old soldier who tried to do his duty, as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.
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For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart....
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The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . .If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
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The incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another, and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth... For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution.
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Arson and cruelty to animals are 2 of 3 childhood warning signs regarding the potential to be a serial killer. (To no longer objectify living beings by ceasing hunting and fishing takes one l step further away from the murder of humans.)
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Elections are only passing events in a far more complex and ongoing process. It is clear from these results that although the ANC will still be the largest party in South Africa, in absolute terms, its supports continues to decline in election after election.
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What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July I answer A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
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Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
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TRUST: I know that you will not -- deliberately or accidentally, consciously or unconsciously -- take unfair advantage of me. I can put my situation at the moment, my status and self-esteem in this group, our relationship, my job, my career, even my life, in your hands with complete confidence.
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The only way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your fingers down his throat.
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I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.
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There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
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Or, at least, one-tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid and often painful and uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which suprised her. Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed to use only about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
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The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.
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For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across--which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terribble miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidently swallowed by a small dog
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One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
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If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
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Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.
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I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis
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There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.
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The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place.
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Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason.
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Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
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A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
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A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.
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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
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The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution of way of life, or say and so things that make people think.
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