Here are the many signature lines which I use in my e-mail as I see fit. You may copy any or all of these to use. I gathered these from many sources, including from e-mail messages sent to me by others.
"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down." -- Leslie Lamport
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -- Aldous Huxley
"Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching." - Bertrand Russell
"Once I built a tower up to the sun, Brick and rivet and lime, Once I built a tower, Now it's done, Brother, can you spare a dime?" --Bing Crosby, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg, Brother, can you spare a dime?
A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion.-- Chinese Proverb
When asked about internal memos citing where Microsoft executives reportedly mentioned "sucking the air" out of Netscape, Microsoft attorney John Warden said "colorful language is no sign of evil intentions."
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. -- Confucious
"Congratulations, Mr. Starr! As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have succeeded in unmasking a sexual relationship between two consenting adults." Bill Ginsburg, former attorney to Monica Lewinsky, in a letter to Independent Whitewater Counsel, Ken Starr
"The most dangerous strategy is to cross a chasm in two jumps."
"We are going to cut off [Netscape's] air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free." (Paul Maritz Microsoft Executive)
The most dementing of all modern sins is the inability to distinguish excellence from success. -- David Hare
"Don't tell people what to do. Tell them what needs to be done. They'll surprise you with their ingenuity." - Gen. George Patton
A gentleman accidentally walks in on a naked lady. Not wanting to be rude, he says "Excuse me sir" and walks out.
To make a claim that the failure to introduce new software, a new operating system on time, is going to affect the economy ... that's just unbelievable. -- DANIEL BACHMAN, Sr. Economist,WEFA Inc.
What you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it! --Goethe
He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally." -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"
``If I could control tomorrow's haze. The darkened shore wouldn't bother me. If I can't control the web we weave. My life will be lost in the fallen leaves'' -- David Bowie, OUTSIDE, ``No Control''
If you don't know where you want to go, we'll make sure you get taken. -- Microsoft ad slogan, translated into Japanese.
"... if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Nietzsche
"Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?" - Nietzsche
"If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."
Fudd's First Law of Opposition
If your strength is small, don't carry heavy burdens. If your words are worthless, don't give advice.
Chinese Proverb
"In a world with no fences. Who need Gates"
"While we're all very dependent on technology, it doesn't always work." -- Bill Gates
Trying to make light of the embarrassment, when as Gates kicked off a publicity campaign for Windows 98 with a speech at the huge Comdex convention in Chicago,the system crashed during a demonstration.
"Microsoft doesn't innovate, it copies and re-markets ideas. As the competition is squelched by Microsoft's monopoly, so goes the innovation...." --Jonathan Farmer
The idea that people know what they want is wrong. - Laura Jennings, Vice President, Microsoft Network
Linux has an installed base conservatively estimated at around 3 million users.... Vendors say that most of the top companies in the US have bought the OS - but that few will readily admit to running their multimillion-dollar corporations on code put together by a band of software idealists. -- Wired
"Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot."
"It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the OS asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator." - Microsoft's Christian Wildfeuer, February 24, 1997
"We must take care to guard against two extremes equally prejudicial; the one, that men (and women) of ability, who have employed their time for the service of their community, may not be deprived of their just merits, and the reward of their ingenuity and labour; the other, that the world may not be deprived of improvements, nor the progress of the arts be retarded" - per Mansfield LJ in Sayre v. Moore, 1785.
Like medieval peasants, computer manufacturers and millions of users are locked in a seemingly eternal lease with their evil landlord, who comes around every two years to collect billions of dollars of taxes in return for mediocre services. -- MARK HARRIS, Electronics Times
"Of course in this you fellows see more than I could see. You see me." -- Marlowe in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
We have no intention of shipping another bloated OS and shoving it down the throats of our users. -- Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz
Morning people may be respected, but night people are feared.
"Never confuse motion with action." --Benjamin Franklin
"Her breasts (I mean the breasts in general) never look that ARTISTIC on screen - the way they move and flow on bed - very organic." -- Michael Gottuso
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from . .." -- (Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks," Prentice-Hall,1981, p. 168).
"Nothing scares me more than someone who absolutely knows, with religious conviction, what is best for me." - Thomas Jefferson
Tag-O-Matic: Rumour: NT means Not Tested
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. -- Oscar Wilde
Nil mihi rescribas, tu tamen ipse veni. -Ovidius-
Ancient Greek: Oxus = "Sharp" Moros = "Dull" "Oxymoron" = A Sharp Dullness Or A Foolish Wise. ...A Self Contradicting Phrase.
Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it. --Plato
Hostis si quis erit nobis, amet ille puellas, gaudeat in puero, si quis amicus erit. - "Propertius" 50-15bC
Some are too inclined in America to say, well, if they're rich, they must be doing something right. Would we say that about the Gambino family? --Rick Ross, Java Lobby
To hear Microsoft tell it, you'd think the Computer Age had changed the rules of commerce. Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates has argued that the government is trying to structure an industry it knows little about. This is nonsense. What Gates is attempting is as old as the efforts to monopolize the steel, rail, oil, and telephone industries in the robber baron era. -- ROBERT KUTTNER, Businessweek
There is a fantasy in Redmond that Microsoft products are innovative, but this is based entirely on a peculiar confusion of the words "innovative" and "successful." Microsoft products are successful -- they make a lot of money -- but that doesn't make them innovative, or even particularly good. -- ROBERT X. CRINGELY
"The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money." -- Henry Ford
"Some men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after." -- Henry David Thoreau
"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and the self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it." -- Theodore Roosevelt
The difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" (Socrates)
When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain
"I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one." -- Mark Twain
"Two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead." -- Mark Twain
"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again." -- TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz" in the Marin Paper
"If you are trying to get to the moon, climbing a tree, although a step in the right direction, will not prove to be very helpful."
The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain. -- (U.S. Chief Justice Burger for the majority in 397 U.S. 728)
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. (Perhaps, someday, it will give us pleasure to remember this ordeal). -- Virgil
Part of innovation has to be integration. We are going to continue to integrate products. -- William Neukom, Microsoft VP
Windows 95 --- The only OS with the Year 2000 bug built into its name.
Windows NT 5.0 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, release of the Windows NT operating system. While there are important new features in this release, version 5.0 will build on a proven system architecture and incorporate tens of thousands of bug fixes from version 4.0. -- Microsoft press release
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. -- Winston Churchill
I doesn't take all kinds, there just are all kinds. -- Winston Churchill
Thank you gentlemen, you are everything we have come to expect from years of government training. -- MIB Zed
Half the lies they tell me aren't true. -- Yogi Berra
"If an innovative piece of software comes along, Microsoft copies it and makes it part of Windows. This is not innovation. This is the end of innovation. If Microsoft is allowed to continue its "just-add-it-to-Windows" approach, the information age will be controlled by one company. Microsoft is already the most powerful company on earth, but you ain't seen nothing yet." -- Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle Corp.
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -- Ghandi
"To keep up, you need the right answers. To get ahead, you need the right questions." -- John Browning and Spencer Reiss
Your computer is dead... it was once so alive.... Do you regret installing Win 95?