The High Wood

Famous Last Words

"I do not have to forgive my enemies. I have had them all shot."
Ramon Maria Narvaez, Spanish politician and general in 1868

"Stopped"
Dr Joseph Henry Green, checking his own pulse in 1863

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance"
General John Sedgewick (American Civil War)

"Tomorrow, I shall no longer be here"
Michel de Notre Dame (Nostradamus) in 1566

"When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident... or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort."i
E. J. Smith, Captain, RMS Titanic in 1907

Ideals and Idealists

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make a better soup
H.L.Mencken

If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't fit to live
Martin Luther King

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it
Oscar Wilde

Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others
Groucho Marx

Fame

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever
Napoleon Bonaparte

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Steven Wright

Programmers and Programming

Warning: parts of this may be incomprehensible to non-programmers...

less sucks less more than more,
that's why I use more less and less more
Unknown

Read the source, Luke
Ancient Programmer Wisdom

There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Unknown

Any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit
Reverend Jim Peasboro

Perl combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript
Jamie Zawinski

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 ton
Popular Mechanics, March 1949

The 6 stages of debugging:
    1. That can't happen
    2. That doesn't happen on my machine
    3. That shouldn't happen
    4. Why does that happen?
    5. Oh, I see
    6. How did that ever work?
Unknown

Just don't create a file called -rf
Larry Wall

Infinity

Infinite green bottles, hanging on the wall,
Infinite green bottles, hanging on the wall,
And if one green bottle, should accidentally fall,
There'd be infinite green bottles, hanging on the wall.

There are n Types of People

This isn't really a quotes section, although someone must have said it first.

There are 2 types of people: those who divide the world into two types of people and those who don't

There are 3 types of people: those who can count and those who can't

There are 10 types of people: those who know binary and those who don't

... walk into a bar

These aren't really quotes either but what the hell...

Two strings walk into a bar.
    First string: Bartender, I'll have a beer. u.5n$x5t?*&4ru!2[sACC~ErJ
    Second string:Pardon my friend, he isn't null terminated.
    (programmer joke)

Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar.
    First atom:My God, I've lost an electron!
    Second atom:Are you sure?
    First atom:Yes, I'm positive

Quotes that don't fit into other categories

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read
Groucho Marx

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate
Unknown

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is probably not for you
Unknown

No man is an island but then no man is a potato salad either
David Steinberg

The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference but in practice there is
Richard Mansfield