…and this is a 
How can I be tagged with the Random Quotes meme? I've had this set of random quotes set up to appear on my site for years—it seems redundant to ask me to go through someone else's quote file and pull out five that I like. Since Janet did it, though, I'll go along…only I'm going to insist on using my own file, and just giving you the first five that pop up.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
Stephen Jay Gould
Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
Tim O'Neill, on the JW's anti-evolution book
The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H.L. Mencken
From now on in America, any man lucky enough to get a BJ knows to pull the shade; for there is probably a Republican outside peeking in the window.
…anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolution" in the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
Ernst Mayr
Here, I'll make it easy for you. Click here to get 5 random quotes from my file. Now you can do it, too.
Comments
Posted by: George Cauldron
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August 19, 2006 2:12 PM
That Rack Jite link still doesn't work. :-(
Posted by: Stephen Frug | August 19, 2006 2:22 PM
Too bad none of your Terry Pratchett quotes come up in that batch. Hmmm. Clicking the random link a few times we get:
"But of course there were the rules. Everyone knew there were rules. They just had to hope like Hell that the gods knew the rules, too."
(Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
"Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr."
(Terry Pratchett, The Unadulterated Cat)
-- by the way, does anyone know any easy way to add random quotes to a blogspot blog?
Posted by: davis | August 19, 2006 3:20 PM
The correspondence between the Unitarian John Adams and the Deist Thomas Jefferson are especially interesting, since modern day fundamentalists like to claim that our Founding Fathers were a bunch of Holy Rollers.
Posted by: bernarda | August 19, 2006 4:50 PM
Mencken, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Posted by: Dendroica
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August 19, 2006 5:04 PM
Stephen Frug -
I did not know of a way to do this for quotes but perhaps one these will be helpful. They use JavaScript to create random elements in a webpage. The script can be inserted into your template. With a little modification they could do it for quotes.
Random Images
Random Header and Tagline
By the way, I found these at a wiki site for Blogger Hacks.
Posted by: melior | August 19, 2006 6:42 PM
Stephen, applying my knowledge of arcane computer science principles (reduce it to a previously solved problem) and blackbelt in Google skills, I searched on the name of the script Dr. Myers is using here (getfortune). Hope this points you in the right direction.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=getfortune
Posted by: whomever1 | August 19, 2006 6:43 PM
Sorry-this quote isn't as literary as the above, but this statement in Aug 17 Nature threw me a little:
(Editorial--Revival in Iran) "One practical advantage for science in Muslim countries is the lack of direct interference of religious doctrine, such as exists in many Christian countries. There has never, for example, been a debate about darwinian evolution, and human embryonic stem-cell research is constrained by humanistic rather than religious ethics."
Posted by: Ian B Gibson | August 19, 2006 7:35 PM
One of my favourites:
Q: Why did the germ cross the microscope?
A: To get to the other slide.
Deep, subtle, erudite; it's got it all!
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | August 20, 2006 3:13 AM
Random, but selected:
"The wisest mind has something yet to learn."
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior."
Henry C. Link
"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."
Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)
"I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people."
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), "Is Shakespeare Dead?"
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988), Caltech commencement address, 1974
Posted by: Mike Huben | August 20, 2006 9:13 AM
I've kept a file of Favorite Quotations for well over 20 years now. It's VERY similar in intent, and there's some overlap. Not quite as long, but you'll find some good ones. Feel free to copy.
Posted by: Caledonian | August 20, 2006 7:33 PM
Posted by: Caledonian | August 20, 2006 7:44 PM
"What's this? Trix? Aunt! Trix? You? You're after the prize! What is it?" He picked up the box and studied the back. "A glow-in-the-dark squid! Have you got it out of there yet?" He tilted the box, angling the little colored balls of cereal so as to see the bottom, and nearly spilling them onto the table top. "Here it is!" He hauled out a little cream-colored, glitter-sprinkled squid, three-inches long and made out of rubbery plastic. -- James P. Blaylock, "The Last Coin"
Posted by: dkew | August 20, 2006 11:29 PM
I spent far too much time on a quote collection, but it includes some of my most viewed pages, including one on superstition and reason. It's great to see more sources here.
Posted by: Ian H Spedding | August 21, 2006 9:51 AM
Marcus Cole to Dr. Franklin,Babylon 5: A Late Delivery from Avalon