I'll bite: Hard science TA's and RA's often repair equipment; it's part of our science. If you want a silver spoon, don't go to grad school. Science is all about dangerous chemicals, semi-safe experimental equipment, and 4am drives down gravel roads in old vans with a nice steep drop on one side. Guardrail? Ho ho ho. Fixing the computers is just the tip of the iceberg. Plus, where else could you get on-the-job experience with a PDP-8?

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Rabindranath Tagore

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit -- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

Henry David Thoreau

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Aristotle

I find the pessimist to be, if not exactly pleasant, then at least sincere. You always know what a pessimist is thinking, and if you don

Christopher Orlet, from The Opti

It isn't the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog, that counts.

Harry Howell

Not all that have fallen are vanquished.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.

Chinese Proverb

One person's constant is another person's variable.

Susan Gerhart

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

Henry David Thoreau

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Johann von Goethe

Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth

Stephen Vizinczey

People forget they have options. And they forget that those things don't really matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don't have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn't mean concentrating on what you don't have, it's positive thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning.

Cecelia Ahern