Military Laws


If your sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.

The most dangerous thing in the combat zone is an officer with a map.

Incoming fire has the right of way.

Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

The problem with taking the easy way out is that the enemy has already mined it.

The buddy system is essential to your survival; it gives the enemy somebody else to shoot at.

The further you are in advance of your own positions, the more likely your artillery will shoot short.

If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.

The quartermaster has only two sizes, too large and too small.

The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.

There is nothing more satisfying than having someone take a shot at you, and miss.

Professionals are predictable, it's the amateurs that are dangerous.

Teamwork is essential -- it gives them someone else to shoot at.

Don't be conspicuous. In the combat zone, it draws fire. Out of the combat zone, it draws sergeant.

The only suppressive fire works is when it is used on abandoned positions.

Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you.

The enemy invariably attacks on two occasions: when they're ready, when they're not.

If the enemy is within range, so are you.

Mines are equal opportunity weapons.

A purple heart just proves that you were smart enough to think of a plan, stupid enough to try it, and lucky enough to survive.
Miscellaneous Laws


Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than expected. Carefully planned projects take four times longer to complete than expected, mostly because the planners expect their planning to reduce the time it takes.

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.--Donald E. Westlake

If I traveled to the end of the rainbow, as Dame Fortune did intend, Murphy would be there to tell me, the pot's at the other end.

In the history of life, no good news has followed that sentence [ "We have to talk."].

Nothing is as easy as it looks.

Everything takes longer than you think.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Except when you want to prove this.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.

If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

Trust everybody ... then cut the cards.

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.

The tough part of a Data Manger's job is that users don't really know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't want.

No one is listening until you make a mistake.

One child is not enough, but two children is too many.

The bag that breaks is the one with the eggs.

The more an item costs, the farther you have to send it for repairs.

You never want the one you can afford.

Never ask the barber if you need a haircut or a salesman if his is a good price.

If it says "one size fits all" it doesn't fit anyone.

Love letters, business contracts, and money due to you always arrive three weeks late, whereas junk mail arrives the day it was sent.

When you drop change at a vending machine, the pennies will fall nearby, while all other coins will roll out of sight.

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

No matter which way you go, it's uphill and against the wind.

The hidden flaw never remains hidden.

When reviewing your notes for a test, the most important ones will be illegible.

The least experienced fisherman always catches the biggest fish.

Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.

The one item you want is never the one on sale.

If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.

If you perceive that there are four possible way in which a procedure can go wrong and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.

It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

Mother nature is a bitch.

Murphy's Law of Research: Enough Research will tend to support your theory.

Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.

Every solution breeds new problems.

Murphy's Law of Copiers: The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its importance.

Murphy's Law of the Open Road: When there is a very long road upon which there is a one-way bridge placed at random, and there are only two cars on that road, it follows that: 1)the two cars are going in opposite directions, and 2) they will always meet at the bridge.

Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: Things get worse under pressure.

Murphy's Constant: Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.

Murphy's Philosophy?: Smile...tomorrow will be worse.

Quantization Revision of Murphy's Law: Everything goes wrong all at once.

Rule of Accuracy: When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.

Law of Perversity of Nature: You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread is buttered.

The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.

Achenson's Rule of the Bureaucracy: A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Acton's Law: Anybody can win -- unless there happens to be a second entry.

Airplane Law: When the plane you are on is late, the plan you want to transfer to is on time.

Alan's Law of Research: The theory is supported as long as the funds are
Love Laws



All the good ones are taken.

If the person isn't taken, there's a reason.

The nicer someone is, the farther away he / she is from you.

The amount of love someone feels for you is inversely proportional to how much you love them.

Money can't buy love, but it sure gets you a great bargaining position.

The best thing in the world are free -- and worth every penny of it.

Every kind of action has a not-so-kind reaction.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Availability is a function of time. The minute you get interested is the minute they find someone else
Technology Laws


You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track.

Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.

All great discoveries are made by mistakes.

A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.

New systems generate new problems.

Any give program, when running, is obsolete.

A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.

The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.

After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.

Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.

If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.

Work smarter not harder and be careful of you spelling.

If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.

If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

When all else fails, read the instructions.

Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner.

Any simple theory will be worded in the most complicated way.