A selection of my favourite quotes - updated irregularly :)

"Well I don't know darling, luck favours the prepared." ~ Edina Mode

"To clarify for anyone who does not have kids, “bonding leave” doesn’t mean gazing lovingly into your baby’s eyes for hours on end. Bonding, for me, was, “What the hell does this nonverbal thing want?” training. I think a metric for how much time you need for leave is when you the parent are able to tell a non-parent caregiver how to take care of your kid. For me, that was pretty much a full three months. It seems unfair to me to ask a parent, whether or not they had physically given birth, to return to work until they have a chance to figure out all of this stuff. This is just as important for non-child-carrying parents as it is for the person who did give birth." ~ Edith

"In theory, there's no difference between theory in practice; In practice, there is." ~ Anon

"Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals." ~ Iain M. Banks

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ~ George Orwell

"They are not often aggressive or offensively military. This is the dismal part of it: that these men, almost the best value in the ordinary upper class that we have, should allow themselves to suppose that all this is somehow necessary and inevitable; that they should give so much labour and time to the killing of others, though to the plain appeals of poverty and inefficiency in government, as well national as international, they are so absolutely heedless. How is it that as much blood and money cannot be poured out when it is a question of saving and helping mankind rather than of slaying them?" ~ Arthur Greame West 

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” ~ Steve Jobs

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" ~ John Maynard Keynes

"For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you." ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole." ~ Donald Knuth

“Time isn't a straight line. It's all... bumpy-wumpy. There's loads of boring stuff. Like Sundays and Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons. But now and then there are Saturdays.” ~ The Doctor

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." ~ Ernest Rutherford

"I’ve always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you." ~ Randall Munroe

"English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water, nestling in green nowhere, armoured and effete, bold flag-bearer, lotus-fed Miss Havishambling opsimath and eremite, feudal still, reactionary Rawlinson End." ~ Vivian Stanshall

“Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villian by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengence; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.” ~ V

"But one way or another, eventually the whole thing will collapse in on itself, blow off its outer layers, and become a black hole. This black hole will keep soaking up water, spraying off X-rays in the process, until finally the municipal water department notices what you’ve been doing and shuts off your service." ~ Xkcd what if?

"I have a message for Global Warming sceptics - Buy Beachfront Property! Then call me in 50 years..." ~ John Green

"The lesson of Chernobyl is that the most dangerous substance in the world is human stupidity. If everyone who whined about nuclear technology actually understood it, the world's average IQ would increase by 50 points. When idiots drink and drive and kill thousands, we don't ban cars. But when idiots run emergency shutdown tests with an untrained night crew without telling the designer of the reactor or nuclear authority scientists, then deliberately drive the reactor into the nuclear equivalent of "balanced on tiptoes on a stool perched on a stepladder on a table ... made of plutonium," suddenly all nuclear power is evil. Those responsible were so bad at planning that their driving tests all end with proctologists, and they're not allowed to undress themselves without three handlers and a fire extinguisher." ~ Cracked on Chernobyl

"When I said, 'death before dishonor,' I meant alphabetically." ~ Exsam

"HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the nerves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror." ~ Robert Harvey

"Robert asked me if I would be okay having it on PATV, apparently the show needed a place to land, and I told him that I didn’t know what an Extra Credits was but that I liked credits as a generalized class and that having more of them than was strictly necessary probably wasn’t a bad plan." ~ Tycho Brahe

"Estimated total economic productivity of the human race (so far): $2,396,950,000,000,000" ~ XKCD (21/11/11)

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." ~ Robert Anson Heinlein

"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." ~ P.J. O’Rourke

"So this week we will be having some form of battle between a spearhead formation of 10 assumably wooden crafted pins and a respectivly large almost spherical shiny decimation device. AKA bowling." ~ Matt Wade

"If you see a paper that says 'Higgs boson discovered,' it's likely to be bollocks." ~ Prof. Brian Cox

"I don't ask for money. I don't ask for sexual favors. I don't ask for access to the hardware you design and sell. I just ask for the thing I gave you: source code that I can use myself." ~ Linus Torvalds

“Not all those who wander are lost.” ~ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (useful to know his middle names for pub quizzes)

"Remove illiteracy from your barbarian. Enjoy books." ~ Pathfinder Conversion Guide

"I'm still bent, hellishly so!" ~ Captain Jack Sparrow

"Coffee is a mere beverage; tea is a way of life" ~ Miriam Novalle

"During this lecture I am unfortunately going to have to do a little bit of maths. I apologise because I realise that this is completely against the spirit of the physics department" ~ Tony Arber

"In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." ~ Edward P. Tryon

"With no power, comes no responsibility." ~ Dave Lizewski

"So the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this. Go to Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you're staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the sealed packet and sniff. Careful - you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal." ~ Douglas Adams

"Rather three days without food than a day without tea." ~ Chinese proverb

"I'm going to run around the house now naked ... 17 seconds a personal best!" ~ Felicia Day as Codex

"I sentence you to sudden, instant, and even immediate death!" ~ Prince John

"There are, roughly, forty thousand humans on the planet. There are over four hundred and fifty million robots. Some months back, a robot named QWERTY wrote the first of his epic, rap yodelling operas. It was then that I knew that conflict between the two was inevitable" ~ Blunt

"Slayer." ~ Random Vampire "Slayee." ~ Buffy

"Nothing shall stop our scheduled hedonism!" ~ General Grievous

"Leaving them with two tanks, ranged DPS, melee DPS and four midgets." ~ Cracked on Gandalf's Death

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. [A]s good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye." ~John Milton

“I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS.” ~ Larry DeLuca

“If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are excited, it will calm you.” ~ William Gladstone

"You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here." ~ Jayne

"Imminent violence" ~ Jayne

"Once upon a time ... in Nazi-occupied France" ~ Inglorious Basterds

"Surprise!" "Additional surprise!" "Further surprise!"

"I am leaving, you are about to explode." ~ Teal'c

"I ready a standard action to cast Lightning Bolt when the enemy's speed reaches exactly 88mph."

"Why does everyone fear my penis whisk?" ~ Nathan

"The hammer is my penis." ~ Captain Hammer

"Fantasy Football is Dungeons and Dragons for people who used to beat up Dungeons and Dragons players" ~ Cracked

"In 1994 while on weekend manoeuvres in France, I commandeered a Chieftain tank without permission of my immediate superiors. I then attempted to invade Paris. However, en route I stopped off at Disneyland, or Eurodisney as it was then called, and was subsequently apprehended on Space Mountain." ~ Nick Frost in Spaced

"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." ~ Simon Pegg in Spaced

"There is no such thing as coincidence" ~ Qui-Gon Jinn

"The Fudge Factor simply put is the numerical factor which your results must be multiplied by in order to be in accordance with theory" ~ Anon