some good quotes

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bloomz

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Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them. - Curtis Grant

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. - Al Capone (1899-1947)

This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it. - Al Capone

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. - Howard Scott

It was involuntary. They sank my boat. - John F. Kennedy, when asked how he became a Navy hero

'You know, said Arthur, 'it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.

'Why, what did she tell you?'

'I don't know, I didn't listen.' ' - Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you will see why. - Mignon McLaughlin

Not only is life a b*tch, but it is always having puppies. - Adrienne Gusoff

Hell is other people. - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Mom and Dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in. But every time I do, they tell me to stop it." - Bill Waterson, Calvin & Hobbes

There are two rules for success...

1. Never tell everything you know.

2.
- Roger H. Lincoln

Does anyone else ever get the distinct impression that some day a group of people in suits are going to walk into your office or your home and say, 'We've got you now! You had everyone *thinking* you were a grown up, but you're not. Now get your things. Your mother's got supper on the table and you have to be in bed by 7:30.' Or is it just me? - Cynthia Melcher

"We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit." - The Texas Observer

Of course, it has never paid much. - Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Shrub


Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!' till you can find a rock. - Wynn Catlin

Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.- Goldberg

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. - Robert Frost

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. - Caskie Stinnett

A diplomat is a man who says you have an open mind, instead of telling you that you have a hole in the head. - unknown

Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave. - Wilson Mizner

One only has an adventure when one makes a mistake, but [as] my grandmother used to say: "You don't have to get out of trouble if you don't get into trouble." - Richard Wheeler, rowing around Cape Cod, 9/26/00 Cape Cod Times

Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough already. - Karl Marx, last words, 1883

Dead, we become the lumber of the world,/ And to that mass of matter shall be swept / Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept. - Seneca

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. - Tennessee Williams

People hear that I am a horror writer and they think that I must be a monster, but actually I have the heart of a small child - I keep it in a jar on my desk. - Robert Bloch

I wouldn't mind dying - it's that business of having to stay dead that scares the shlt out of me. - R. Geis

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.- W. Somerset Maugham

Don't look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes you'll know that you're dead. - Tennessee Williams

I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so. - Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist. - Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757) on his deathbed

I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in on by the storms, and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair. - John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

I hope that after I die, people will say of me, "That guy sure owed me a lot of money." - Jack Handey


Monty Python deserves it's own little spot:
Quote:
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

- Monty Python's Meaning Of Life '

Men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils. - Carrie Nation Rknot

Very few men would fall in love if they had never read about it. - La Rochefoucauld, quoted in The Harbourmaster, William McFee, 1931

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. - Socrates

It's a condescending thing, Dear. You wouldn't understand. LMAO

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is. - H.L. Mencken

American women expect to find in their husbands the perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers. - W. Somerset Maugham

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise. - Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends. - Ben Franklin

If Jack's in love, he's no judge of Jill's beauty. - Ben Franklin

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. - HL Mencken

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late. - HL Mencken

Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives. - HL Mencken

Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another. - HL Mencken

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phase makes it, feminine intuition. - HL Mencken

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. - HL Mencken

When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies. - Shakespeare

Love is temporary insanity curable by marriage. - Ambrose Bierce

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women. - Marquis de Sade

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces. - Maureen Murphy
 
And more

A beauty is a woman you notice; A charmer is one who notices you. - Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

Women prefer men who have something tender about them -- especially the legal kind. - Kay Ingram

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base. - Dave Barry

The quickest way to a man's heart is through his chest. - Roseanne Barr

When I eventually met Mr Right I had no idea that his first name was Always. - Rita Rudner

Wild horses couldn't drag a secret out of a woman. However, women seldom have lunch with wild horses. - Ivern Boyett

Women: Can't live with them, can't bury them in the back yard without the neighbours seeing. - Sean Williamson

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1950)

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilt and I'll show you a man. - Erica Jong

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. - Rebecca West

Studying in the solitude of the mountains is not equal to sitting at the cross-roads and listening to the talk of men. - S.G. Champion

Or sitting at a picnic. Or listening to women. - Anne Zeilstra

For those who believe the feminist revolution is over, a glance around the world reveals a sobering reality. If poverty, misery, and the failure of democracy mark much of the world, we have a great deal to fear....Whether it's kidnapped young woman in China or the powerless woman in a society that follows strict Islamic law, women have growing reason to fear for their rights in much of the world. - Caryl Rivers, Boston Globe, Feb 24 2002

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Quote:

If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, Of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism how passionately I hate them!

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

If you keep an open mind, people will try to put garbage in it.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere...Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

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Posted: Sat Sep 04, 2004 8:10 am Post subject:

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Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Quote:

If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, Of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism how passionately I hate them!

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

If you keep an open mind, people will try to put garbage in it.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere...Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.




Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Quote:

Silence is not always a sign of wisdom, but babbling is ever folly.

Experience is a dear teacher, and only fools will learn from no other.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Never confuse motion with action.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Well done is better than well said.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.

If Jack's in love, he's no judge of Jill's beauty.

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. (upon signing the Declaration of Independence)

The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature....(in 1765, to the editor of a London newspaper)
 
and more

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Quote:
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, "I don't know."

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

If there is a God, he is a malign thug.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again. . . and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. (apparent misattribution)

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy for us.

Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born. A Biography

[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

A classic something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me I always feel that they have not said enough.

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

The very ink in which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos . . . A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling down stairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life, he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him into the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way. Letters From the Earth

There are many humorous things in the world: among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
--------------------------------
 
Too many piglets, not enough tits. - Abraham Lincoln

As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it? - William Marcy Tweed, Tammany Hall boss

If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal. - Noam Chomsky

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It's the other lousy 2% that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them. - Lily Tomlin

No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

Illegal immigrants have been a problem in America for hundreds of years...Just ask any Indian. - Peter Jennings

First, we hang all the lawyers. - Jack Cade, 15th century English rebel

If you get them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. - "Murphy"?

Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles. - Pat Paulsen

We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs. - Harold Geneen

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. - Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949)

Why are we surprised when politicians play politics? It's not like they are supposed to be real adults... they are, after all, politicians and don't have real jobs and aren't playing around with their money. - Max

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. - Napoleon

Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office. - David Broder

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites? - H.L. Mencken

I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.

I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. And tomorrow isn't looking good either.

Always remember to pillage BEFORE you burn.

Others often better express myself.

Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot.

A flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries.

Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.

Given a fifty-fifty chance, you will be wrong 90% of the time.

IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

He who laughs last thinks slowest.

Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

A closed mouth gathers no foot.

A good scapegoat is hard to find.

Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.

I used to have a handle on life, then it broke.

When there's a will, I want to be in it.

We have enough youth, how about a fountain of smart?

Give me ambiguity or give me something else.

"Criminal lawyer" is a redundancy.

Everything above is a true statement, for sufficiently false values of true.

If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

Red meat isn't bad for you. Fuzzy, blue-green meat is bad for you.

Why is it called tourist season if we can't shoot at them?
 
WOW! Thanks for the words-The outer bands of the hurricane are blowing out side and I decided to check the board while I still have electricity- what a treat- this house bound stuff is for the birds. Where do you get all this stuff? :scatter :scatter
 
A few more

Bumper stickers, one-liners, etc:
(many from Steven Wright)

If Jesus was Jewish why does he have a Mexican name?

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it. - G.B. Shaw

Save Your Breath ... You'll need it to blow up your date!

Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.

Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine. - David Moulton

You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.

If electricity is produced by electrons, is morality produced by morons?

Gravity - It's not just a good idea, it's the Law! - NASA briefing slide

Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.

Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.

Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you're a jerk.

Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

Christmas is at our throats again. - Noel Coward, annual holiday card

I don't know whether the world is run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. - unknown

There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. - Steven Wright

Despite the high cost of living it remains a popular item. - unknown

Life's a whore and I'm broke.

Ever notice that fifteen minutes into a Jerry Lewis telethon you start rooting for the disease? - Jim Sherbert

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. - Charles Kuralt

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. - Robert Benchley

I know only two tunes: one of them is "Yankee Doodle" and the other one isn't. - Ulysses S. Grant

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I'm right. - Moliere

California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange. - Fred Allen

The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police. - Jeff Marder

They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it. - Gracie Allen

A rabbi, a priest, and a duck walked into a bar. The bartender looked up and said, "What is this? A joke?"

Do I mind if you smoke? I don't give a shlt if you burn to the ground!

Sign on a Child Psychologist's door:
"We have always been dependent on the strangeness of kinder."

Smoking areas in restaurants are like peeing areas in swimming pools.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. - Oscar Wilde?

Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings. - George F. Will, 1994

For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord.

Life is sexually transmitted.

If people were meant to go around naked, they would have been born that way. - Playboy

It's hard to work in groups when you're omnipotent. - Q., Star Trek, the Next Generation
 
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