Quickly change the lockscreen message on your Mac to a random quote. There are a bunch of quotes built-in, but if you like, you can pass -f path/to/file to provide your own list of quotes. Items should be one quote per line, without any fancy characters.

lock-quote needs to be run with sudo since the defaults write command requires it. You could have it run via cron to change regularly (use root's crontab, i.e. sudo crontab -e), but if you want to (ir)regularly be surprised, you can safely alias sudo itself (or some other semi-common hook), e.g. alias sudo='sudo lock-quote && sudo -E '

You can read the current lock quote without sudo via defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist LoginwindowText.

• Format lines if too long, center them
• Environment variable to set file rather than pass each time
• Usage