from, obviously and properly enough, Rand Lindsly
rand@skydiver.eng.sun.com
I'd take a Bromo, but I can't stand the noise
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
E.M. Cioran
There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Happiness is not something you experience, it's something you remember
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
"For certain people after 50, litigation takes the place of sex."
-Gore Vidal
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have
made an international reputation for myself by thinking once
or twice a week."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid;
you must also be well-mannered."
Voltaire (1694-1778)
"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."
William James (1842-1910)
"Parades should be classed as a nuisance and participants
should be subject to a term in prison."
-Will (I never met a man I didn't like) Rogers
"If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for
any office of trust in the United States."
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on,
I go to the library and read a good book.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Impiety, noun. Your irreverence toward my deity.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. Its's
what you do with what you have left.
- Hubert Humphrey
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands
in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.
Rebecca West
An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
Michael Korda
It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever
turn it into a fact.
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.
Victor Borge
Even paranoids have real enemies.
Delmore Schwartz
My only aversion to vice, is the price.
Victor Buono
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
-Kingsley Amis
If you are an author and give one of your books to a member of
the upper class, you must never expect him to read it.
Paul Fussell
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
War is like love; it always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Know thyself? A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever
observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar
who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.
-Andre Gide (1876-1951)
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
-Nicholas Murray Butler
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure
I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it through not dying.
Woody Allen
One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)
"The world began when I was born and the world is mine to win"
--Badger Clark
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Albert Schweitzer
I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he
could hate that too.
Peter De Vries
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.
Christopher Morley
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your
intelligence.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
"Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often
arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or
clinical, distinctions."
--Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Urine Test
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the
utterly bewildered.
Al Capp
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
Anatole France
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.
James Reston
Virtue is insufficient temptation.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and
deserve to get it good and hard.
H.L. Mencken
She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Thank heavens the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber (1894-1961)
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It may not be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong - but that is the way to bet.
Damon Runyon
California is the only state in the union where you can
fall asleep under a rose bush in full bloom and freeze to death.
William Claude Dunkenfield ("W. C. Fields")(1880-1946)
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again.
Then give up. There's no use being a damned fool about it.
William Claude Dunkenfield ("W. C. Fields")(1880-1946)
Start every day with a smile and get it over with.
William Claude Dunkenfield ("W. C. Fields")(1880-1946)
"The ant has made itself illustrious/by constant industry industrious. What?
Would you be calm & placid,/if you were full of formic acid?" --O. Nash,ca1935
"The pig if I am not mistaken/supplys us sausage ham and bacon.
Let others say his heart is big/I call it stupid of the pig." --O. Nash
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The husband who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep
his mouth shut and his checkbook open.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
No good deed goes unpunished.
Clare Boothe Luce
It is always the best policy to tell the truth,
unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
Jerome K. Jerome
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
I once said cynically of a politician, "He'll
doublecross that bridge when he comes to it"
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.
Louis Ferdinand Celine
I'm not OK, you're not OK, and that's OK.
William Sloane Coffin
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that
bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all
brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are
all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
Henry Miller (1891-1980)
"...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise
anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear
and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded..." Plato, _Phaedrus_
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
You never realize how short a month is until you pay alimony.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Dinner theater is anti-culture.
John Simon
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount
of time and causes the most amount of trouble.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils,
because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Humanity is not a gift of nature,
it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.
Richard Bach
There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
John Ciardi
Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And
those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York.
Harry Ruby
Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
Heywood Broun
The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
E.M. Cioran
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance
for the evil conscience of their parents.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our
race is indiscriminate charity.
Andrew Carnegie
NEITHER BLOODY NOR BOWED
They say of me, and so they should,
It's doubtful if I come to good.
I see acquaintances and friends
accumulating dividends,
and making enviable names
in science, art, and parlor games.
But I despite expert advice,
keep doing things I think are nice,
and though to good I never come
inseperable my nose and thumb.
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Children should neither be seen nor heard from - ever again.
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
Television is for appearing on - not for looking at.
Noel Coward (1899-1973)
The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.
Edouard Manet
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to
others, they would no longer be fantasies.
Fran Lebowitz
I do not care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt,
except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they
have preservatives.
Calvin Trillin
There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a
rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
Ross MacDonald
It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian anymore than
going to the garage makes you a car.
Laurence J. Peter
A man must properly pay the fiddler. In my case it so
happened that a whole symphony orchestra had to be subsidized.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent
many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
Harry Hershfield
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
My heart is pure as the driven slush.
Tallulah Bankhead (1903-1968)
God heals, and the doctor takes the fee.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
Fran Lebowitz
I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.
Jules Renard (1864-1910)
Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position
ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
You can't expect a boy to be depraved until he has been to a good school.
H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
Martin Mull
Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who
speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it;
if you are sick, you shouldn't take it.
Henry Ford
And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting
fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming
meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who
hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of
Chaos for revelation and God's presence?
It was the Steppenwolf
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace
in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
Woody Allen
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.
The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -- Mark Twain
"A chic type, a rough type, an odd type -- but never a stereotype"
-- Jean-Michel Jarre
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of
broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
Peter De Vries
A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes,
containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.
S.J. Perelman
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers.
Charles Chincholles
There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist-
the taxidermist leaves the hide.
Mortimer Caplin
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who
die under his care.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The English instinctively admire any man who has
no talent and is modest about it.
James Agate
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.
Fred Allen (1894-1956)
"One of these days, the people are going to demand
peace of the government, and the government is going
to have to give it to them." Dwight Eisenhower
I believe with all my heart that one cannot be America's
president without a belief in God, without the strength
that your faith gives you.
George Bush
to convention of National Religious Broadcasters
God must hate common people, because he made them so common.
Philip Wylie
Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days
on nothing but food and water.
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging
loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting
the sincerity of other pessimists.
Jean Rostand
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers.
Leonard Brandwein
Real programs don't eat cache.
Remember the generational battles twenty years ago? Remember all
the screaming at the dinner table about haircuts, getting jobs and
the American dream? Well, our parents won. They're out living the
American dream on some damned golf course in Vero Beach, and we're
stuck with the jobs and haircuts.
-P. J. O'Rourke
The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as
one nears the journey's end.
-Cicero
If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.
-Turkish proverb
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only
earthly certainty is oblivion.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Sexual enlightenment is justified insofar as girls cannot learn
too soon how children do not come into the world.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.
Anatole France (1844-1924)
Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
I.F. Stone
Communism is like one big phone company.
Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy.
It's only necessary to be rich.
Alan Alda
"Destiny...is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice;
it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved"
William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)
"Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation
wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any
certainty in our hands is the care of our own time".
- Edmund Burke
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and
commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate
dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) "The Devil's Dictionary"
"The bonds that links your true family is not one of blood, but of
respect and joy in each others life.
Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
-- Richard Bach
Health food makes me sick.
Calvin Trillin
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Grub first, then ethics.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold
of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
Quentin Crisp
Hell is for other people.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.
Anatole France (1844-1924)
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Happiness is seeing your mother-in-law's picture on the back of a milk carton.
Anonymous
I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate
your marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have
babies.
-Randall Terry
Executive Director, Operation Rescue
We are totally opposed to abortion under any circumstances. We are
also opposed to abortifacient drugs and chemicals like the Pill and
the IUD, and we are also opposed to all forms of birth control with
the exception of natural family planning.
-Judie Brown
President, American Life Lobby
Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.
-Jimmy Swaggart
I listen to the feminists and all these radical gals - most of them
are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have married, but
they've married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to
the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all
they need. Most of these feminists need a man to tell them what time
of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad
at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men --
that's their problem.
-Jerry Falwell
Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the
way we're made you've got to take it up with God.
-Phyllis Schlafly
The argument that making contraceptives available to young people
would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a
cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight.
-Jerry Falwell
It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by
fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer,
or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or
brain damaged baby (even ten years later when she may be happily
married).
-Phyllis Schafly
I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure.
-Joseph Schiedler
Director, Pro-Life Action League
"For every problem, there is one solution which is simple,
neat and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken
Mabey this world is another planet's hell.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep,
and never to refrain when awake.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawer.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
"Obviously something slipped through here."
Reverend John Vaughan
Financial administrator for the Archdiocese of Miami
(when asked why they held stock in companies
that manufacture contraceptives)
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
The lion and calf shall lie down together, but the calf won't get much sleep.
Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence,
so why bother shaving?
The wicked at heart probably know something.
Whosover loveth wisdom is righteous, but he that keepeth company with fowl is
weird.
My Lord, my Lord! What hast Thou done, lately?
From "Without Feathers" by Woody Allen
I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.
Fran Lebowitz
Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.
Woody Allen
"Wait here, Audrey. This is between me and the vegetable."
Rick Moranis, 'Little Shop of Horrers'
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on
the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) _Note Books_
Cabbage, n.:
A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as
a man's head.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)"The Devil's Dictionary"
Grief is a species of idleness.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in
those who would gain by the new ones.
-Machiavelli
Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead
James Thurber (1894-1961)
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. 'Yes' is the answer.
-Swami X
Democracy: The worship of jackals by jackasses.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad.
R.D. Laing
War is like love; it always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.
Cleveland Amory
"The ability to understand a question from all sides meant one was totally
unfit for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of the real man."
Thucydides on the Athenian mood during the Peloponnesian war
(circa 455-400 B.C., the eve of the decline of Athens' power)
There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Finance is the art of passing currency from
hand to hand until it finally disappears.
Robert W. Sarnoff
If all the economists in the world were laid end to
end, they wouldn't reach any conclusion.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and
hung out to dry.
Calvin Trillin
Wife: a former sweetheart.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Californians invented the concept of life-style.
This alone warrants their doom.
Don DeLillo
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.
Arthur Koestler
Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves,
when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!
Goethe (1749-1832)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)
It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.
Gore Vidal
"The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right."
William Safire
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
What the world needs today is a definite, spiritual mobilization
of the nations who belive in God against this tide of Red agnosticism.
...And in rejecting an atheistic other world, I am confident that the
Almighty God will be with us.
President Herbert Hoover
in proposing the abolition of the United Nations
in favor of a "cooperation of God-fearing free nations"
Address upon the American Road 1948-1950 p66
Democracy is, first and foremost, a spiritual force, it is built upon a
spiritual basis - and on a belief in God and an observance of moral
principle. And in the long run only the church can provide that basis.
Our founder knew this truth - and we will neglect it at our peril.
President Harry Truman
Public Papers of the President of the United States:
Harry S. Truman - 1951 U.S. Gov. 1966 p1063
Our religious faith gives us the answer to the false beliefs of Communism...
I have the feeling that God has created us and brought us to our present
position of power and strength for some great purpose.
President Harry Truman
Public Papers of the President of the United States:
Harry S. Truman - 1951 U.S. Gov. 1966 pp548-549
It sure does, Ben, it definitely does...this is definite...it specifically
clearly, unequivocally says that Russia and other countries will enter
into war and God will destroy Russia through earthquakes, volcanoes...
Pat Robertson when asked the question
"Does the Bible specifically tell us
what is going to happen in the future"
"700 Club" December 2, 1981
America has begun a spiritual reawakening. Faith and hope are being
restored. Americans are turning back to God. Church attendance is
up. Audiences for religious books and broadcasts are growing. And
I do believe that he has begun to heal our blessed land.
President Ronald Regan
to the National Association of Evangelicals
Columbus, Ohio
No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor
should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
President George Bush
to Robert Sherman of American Atheist Press
at the Chicago airport while announcing
federal disaster relief for Illinois
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on
the Christian religion."
George Washington
"I believe with all my heart that one cannot be America's
president without a belief in God, without the strength
that your faith gives you."
George Bush
to convention of National Religious Broadcasters
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
Danny Kaye
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.
Steven Wright
If you can't take the heat, get out of the gene pool.
unknown
The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius is limited.
unknown
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
-- Elbert Hubbard
This was found in another alias and thought it might apply...Rand
The actual origins of the Annual Adolph Eichmann's Evil Cake Contest
are probably better off lost in the hall-closet of history, but the
legend remains.
The contest was born out of a student paper on Hannah Arendt which was
submitted as an assignment in The Schoolhouse (a writing program).
The only extant fragment of that immortal paper is part of its final
sentence: "...but the icing on Adolph Eichmann's evil cake was..."
which spawned a tradition of writing unknown to man before its time,
and which has been reverently memorialized by an annual event.
Excerpts from this year's contest entries rate no more introduction:
"In short, Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which
the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic
ooze."
"The Syracusans defeated the Athenians on their own turf, the sea."
"Like raisins in a bread pudding, the moments lie within the body
of Henry."
"As a domestic animal, Othello is a child."
"Morality is ubiquitous in everything that is good or bad."
"Why should someone be penalized because he has studied diligently and
deciduously in high school."
"`Tyranny of the majority' as a dangerous and omnipotent force is
still a dangerous issue - we see it manifest itself in our culture in
such things as florescent biker shorts and Motley Crue."
"In the upcoming times of cutbacks, the defense industry can turn to
making stimulation devices."
"Today, the world is teetering on the brink of nuclear Agamemnon."
"But when the chips are down, women hold the reins."
A plan is just a tangent vector on the manifold of reality.
"Skratch" Garrison
This just goes to show you can halve your cake and eat it two.
Jay Osborn (in response to yesterday's "Eichmann's evil cake" posting)
Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties,
and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.
Joseph Addison
"What are politicians going to tell people when the
Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?"
-- William Simpson, A.C.L.U.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.
Anatole France (1844-1924)
Conservative. noun. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial
challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
-- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985
You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable
doubt.
-- Ed Meese, on the Hinckley verdict
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
Peter De Vries
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable. H.L. Mencken
DISCLAIMER: A society where such disclaimers are needed is saddening.
Unknown
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile.
Hunter S. Thompson
I like the word `indolence.' it makes my laziness seem classy.
Bern Williams
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Katherine Anne Porter
I don't want to wrap myself in the flag, because I'm afraid I'll get burned.
former Chief Justice Warren Burger
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Here's some words of wisdom sprayed painted on a wall in Berkeley:
Bush: Read my labia
The music at a wedding procession always reminds
me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
I grew up to have my father's looks - my fathers speech patterns -
my father's posture - my father's walk - my father's opinions and
my mother's contempt for my father.
Jules Feiffer
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it,
the more it begins to make sense.
Harold S. Kushner
I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out
the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughan
I will say this about being an optimist-- even when
things don't turn out well, you are certain they
will get better.
Frank Hughes
I like children. If they're properly cooked.
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed
by just one person.
VII Putnam
The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Gore Vidal
Rene Descartes was in this bar, and the bartender asked
him "Would you like another drink?"
Rene replied, "I think not" -- so he disappeared.
We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.
Peter De Vries
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"You can convince anyone of anything if you just push it at them 100%
of the time. They may not believe it completely, but they will still use
it to form opinions, especially if they have nothing else to draw on."
- Charles Manson
One man's religion is another mans' belly laugh.
Isacc Azimov
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing
between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
J. K. Galbraith
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
For certain people after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.
Gore Vidal
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
Jules Renard (1864-1910)
History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.
Andy Warhol
Canada: A few acres of snow.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
It strkes me as singularly inappropriate for a school to use its
students for fund-raising. It reminded me of the first time I saw
a gypsy mother send her baby out to beg.
William Hamilton
Its okay to get jacked up and head out onto the highway, but I've been there
and I can tell you that the fast lane is littered with countless smoldering
wrecks.
H.S.Thompson
I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts
to bite people themselves.
August Strindberg
If the headache would only precede the intoxication,
alcoholism would be a virue.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind
only the slime of a new bureaucracy
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced
to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Brendan Behan
I can't take a well-tanned person seriously.
Cleveland Amory
Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have
been born is of course the miracle.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost
a lawsuit, and once when I won one.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy
MIT Assasination Club slogan
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate,
but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Robspierre replied softly, 'the question is to know where is the enemy.'
'He is out there, and I have hunted him,' said Danton.
'He is within, and I am watching him,' said Robespierre."
V. Hugo, "Ninty-three"
Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
It has been proven that the pig is the only homosexual animal.
As this perversion is most prevalent in pork-eating nations,
it is obvious that it gets into your genes through the meat.
Tasleem Ahmed - Islamic missionary
from a Muslim mission in Galaway Ireland
first quoted in London's "Freethinker" magazine
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly
from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
(also attributed to Oscar Wilde)
Insanity: aperfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.
R.D. Laing
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance,
and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were
not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
Henry David Thoreau, "Walden," the Conclusion
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and
pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather
preserve its life than destroy it.
Henry David Thoreau, "Maine Woods," `Chesuncook'
I think I think, therefore, I think I am.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long
from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"
----------------------------------------------------
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any
rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to
stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people
do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive
considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and
in the rong run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their
sons: "Come back with your shield, or on it." Later on, this custom
declined. So did Rome.
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites.
Moderation is for monks.
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
(incorrectly quoted in previous curmudgeon - ed)
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves.
Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than
one man. How's that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million
men. Let's play that over again too. Who decides?
What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts?
Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars
fortell", avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind
the unguessable "verdict of history" - what are the facts, and to how many
decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your
single clue. Get the facts!
Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation.
Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity
is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal
and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor
jerk who is shy and half slug who must tighten his belt.
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility.
And vice versa.
Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
You live and learn. Or you don't live long.
One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.
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.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
The phrase "we (I) (you) simply must..." designates something that need
not be done. "That goes without saying" is a red warning. "Of course"
means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and
others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
Tom Stoppard
Television: chewing gum for the eyes.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
Morality is the weakness of the mind.
Arthur Rimbaud
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian
principle of the survival of the vulgarist.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Advertising is legalized lying.
H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
If the world were a logical place, men would ride sidesaddle.
Rita Mae Brown
Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are
a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.
Jean Rostand
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
Kinsgley Amis
Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.
Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
Peter De Vries
Unless you hate your father and mother and wife and
brothers and sisters and, yes, even your own life,
you can't be my disciple.
Jesus Christ (0?-32?) if St. Luke is to be believed
see Luke 14:26
The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.
Holbrook Jackson
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred
it from God to the medical profession.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What's reality anyway? Nothing but a collective hunch.
--- Lily Tomlin ---
"Neither liberty nor property is safe while the legislature is in session."
Red is grey and yellow white
We decide which is right
and which is an illusion.
---Moody Blues, "Tuesday Afternoon"---
What's reality anyway? Nothing but a collective hunch.
WRITTEN by Jane Wagner, only spoken by Lily Tomlin.
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
Germaine Greer
Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.
Jules Feiffer
"Let's face it...most relationships you have in life don't work out."
Alex Bennett
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.
Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people.
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
I don't really trust a sane person.
Pro football lineman Lyle Alzado
Whis is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone
suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
Fred Allen
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its
refraction, and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most
curious manner to make use of it? These and other suchlike
considerations, always have, and always will prevail with
mankind, to believe that there is a Being who made all things,
who has all things in his power, and who is therefore to be
feared."
Isaac Newton
Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727)
"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming"
Wernher von Braun commenting on bureaucracy
"If you torture data long enough, it will tell you anything you want !"
unknown
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
We are all born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must
be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.
Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
Andre Malraux
Man is more ape than many of the apes.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
I have found little that is good about human beings. In my
experience most of them are trash.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long.
Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so
those with irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
The main difference between men and women is
that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West
Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within
the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
How can one conceive of a one party system in
a country that has over 200 varieties of cheese.
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of
purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
Fran Lebowitz
Isn't there any other part of the matzo you can eat?
Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) on being served
matzo ball soup three meals in a row
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place.
J.D. McCoughey
"Men have become fools with their tools"
Thomas Elisha Stewart (1963-)
"Men have become the tools of their tools"
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation
to which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp
For flavor, instant sex will never supercede
the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Quentin Crisp
France is the only country where the money falls apart and
you can't tear the toilet paper.
Billy Wilder
In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America,
but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use,
which they have obtained from books of travel.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
If my film makes one more person miserable, I've done my job.
Woody Allen
The length of a film should be directly related to the
endurance of the human bladder.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.
Miyamoto Musashi, 1645
Clergyman, n. - A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual
affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Lawers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
Jeremy Bentham
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin
Whatever their other contributions to our society,
lawyers could be an important source of protein.
Guindon cartoon caption
If you laid all of the lawyers in the world, end to end, on the equator ----
It would be a good idea to just leave them there.
Unknown
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"I have seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched
C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All
those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die."
Roy Baty, Nexus6, N6MAA10816, Combat
One of the delights known to age, and beyond
the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that
I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.
J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party
when the masks are dropped.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts
you in your effort to believe it.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
Jack Paar
I'm a scientist; nothing shocks me.
Indiana Jones
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport;
when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.
Beilby Porteus (1731-1808)
Death, A Poem
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he
comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he
next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from
that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts - 1827
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
A Day at the Races - 1936
Animals have these advantages over man:
they never hear the clock strike,
they die without any idea of death,
they have no theologians to instruct them,
their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies,
their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms
with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Fork, n. An instrument used chiefly for the
purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the
work he's supposed to be doing at that moment.
Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
It is impossible to enjoy idling unless there is plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat.
Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen, 1903-1978)
Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
A cult is a religion with no political power
Tom Wolfe
The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat
beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.
Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
I find women with well developed flesh very attractive. The scrawny
little things doing commercials on my television set are slightly
repulsive -- like famine victims.
Dana Hatch
My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved,
but I never saw any reason to limit myself.
Emo Philips
A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are.
Victor Lownes
I caused my husband's heart attack. In the middle of lovemaking I
took the paper bag off my head. He dropped the Polaroid and keeled
over and so did the hooker. It would have taken me half an hour to
untie myself and call the paramedics, but fortunately the Great Dane
could dial.
Joan Rivers
Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
Woody Allen
Jesus was a crackpot.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - San Francisco Chronicle 12/17/85
Let Bhagwans be Bhagwans
Headline considered by the Washington Post
according to William Safire in his 12/8/85 column
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would
have repudiated his doctrine.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) "What is Religion"
I'm not going to climb into the ring with Tolstoy.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) from a letter
Hemingway was a jerk.
Harold Robbins as quoted in Leslie Halliwell's The Filmgoer's Companion, 1984
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
Dave Barry
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and
disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture
professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.
Simone Weil
When I hear the word "culture" I reach for my gun.
Hans Johst (c. 1939)
It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
Dick Cavett
========================================================================
Average Iraqi
Has visited the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates, cradle of
the ancient civilization founded by his ancestors
Average American
Once got really sick on the Wild Mouse ride at Six Flags theme
park
Average Iraqi
Willing to participate in Holy War for his nation
Average American
Willing to participate in People's Choice Awards
Average Iraqi
Lines up by the thousands to die for country
Average American
Will go to any extreme to avoid jury duty
Average Iraqi
Has endured many food shortages during wars with Iran and embargo
by West
Average American
Shoves McDonalds cashier if their Happy Meal doesn't include
McCookies
Average Iraqi
Believes if he dies in battle, he will go straight to Paradise
Average American
Believes if, in a dream, you don't wake up before hitting the
ground, you die
Average Iraqi
Has friend or relative wounded in ruthless wars of conquest
Average American
Has beer guzzling uncle who shot self in foot on hunting trip
Average Iraqi
Thinks Saddam Hussein is a political genius
Average American
Thinks Saddam Hussein makes Dan Quayle seem like Einstein
========================================================================
College football would be more interesting if the faculty played
instead of the students - there would be a great increase in
broken arms, legs and necks.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.
Rita Mae Brown
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
John Updike
Nothing fails like success.
Gerald Nachman
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee Williams
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure
is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby
Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
So little time, so little to do.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.
Dick Gregory
A pessimist is a person who has to listen to too many optimists.
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
George F. Will
It could probably be show by facts and figures that there is
no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
Horace Smith
What is virtue but the trades unionism of the married.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
Philip Sheridan
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Woody Allen
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of
the not worth knowing.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people
who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
George Santayana (1863-1952)
I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you and education.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
When in doubt, duck.
Malcolm Forbes
"Our best work is done when it needs to be."
F. Phelps
Economists are people who work with numbers but
who don't have the personality to be accountants.
Unknown
An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.
Will Rogers (1879-1935)
There is no free lunch.
Milton Friedman
A husband is what's left of the lover once the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
Mahatma Gandi was what wives wish their husbands were: thin, tan and moral.
Unknown
There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first. Adela Rogers St. Johns
A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?
And he answered:
It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.
It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.
It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City
upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come
to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.
And that is Fate? said the priest.
Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.
That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was too.
-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
If you want to read about love and marriage, you
have to buy two separate books.
Alan King
Marriage is based on the theory that when man
discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste he
should at once throw up his job and go work in the brewery.
George Jean Nathan (1882-1958)
"Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even
Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when
his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is Nought. His less
accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in
the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not
very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well
as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger
at Nought really sets off _in medias res_. No retrospect will take us
to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on
earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which
our story sets out."
-George Eliot (1819-1880)
from _Daniel Deronda_
"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast
enough." -- Mario Andretti
"The cowards never start and the weak die along the way." -- Kit Carson
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established
authorities are wrong." -- Voltaire (1694-1778)
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Sin is geographical.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J.B. Priestley
Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who
wish to annoy their fellow creatures.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
A small, 14-seat plane is circling for a landing in Atlanta. It's totally
fogged in, zero visibility, and suddenly there's a small electrical fire in the cockpit which disables all of the instruments and the radio. The pilot
continues circling, totally lost, when suddenly he finds himself flying next to a tall office building.
He rolls down the window (this particular airplane happens to have roll-down
windows) and yells to a person inside the building, "Where are we?"
The person responds "In an airplane!"
The pilot then banks sharply to the right, circles twice, and makes a perfect
landing at Atlanta International.
As the passengers emerge, shaken but unhurt, one of them says to the pilot,
"I'm certainly glad you were able to land safely, but I don't understand how
the response you got was any use."
"Simple," responded the pilot. "I got an answer that was completely accurate
and totally irrelevant to my problem, so I knew it had to be the IBM building."
Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
Rebecca West
The people are that part of the state that does now know what it wants.
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest
outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
Joseph Conrad
America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is
sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that
actions speak louder than words.
Fran Lebowitz
My work is done, why wait?
Suicide note left by Kodak founder George Eastman (1854-1932)
All right, then, I'll say it: Dante makes me sick.
Last words of Spanish playwright Lope de Vega on being
assured on his deathbed that the end was very near
I don't feel good.
Last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
Last words of Pancho Villa (1877?-1923)
Go away. I'm all right.
Last words of H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.
Actor Edmund Gwenn (1875-1959) on his deathbed
Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults
by confessing our parents' shortcomings.
Laurence J. Peter
Psychiatry is the care of the id by the odd.
Unknown
Psychoanalysis is that mental illnes for which
it regards itself a therapy.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980)
No statue has ever been put up to a critic.
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics
is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how its done, they've
seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
Brendan Behan
My tears stuck in their little ducts, refusing to be jerked.
Peter Stack in a movie review
in the San Francisco Chronicle-Jan 2, 1983
Television is democracy at its ugliest.
Paddy Chayefsky (1923-1982)
Television is more interesting than people. If it were not,
we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms.
Alan Corenk
The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't
make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough.
Bill Maher
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
A.J. Liebling
Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by
the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough
to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about
anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to
verify my notions have only wasted my time.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (in a letter to H.G. Wells)
I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously
at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact they do so.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
All movements go too far.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole
lot of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself
would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
How could I lose to such an idiot?
A shout from chess grandmaster
Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935)
I believe that people would be alive today if
there were a death penalty.
Nancy Reagan
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect
can only advise his client to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
A doctor can bury his mistakes but a supplier based engineer
can only advise the product designer to specify a heavier
texture.
Mick Lloyd Kerman (MT 1055-9+)
How do you like that guy? Can't run six balls and he's
President of the United States.
Pool hustler Johnny Irish on Nixon
Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar....He's one of the few
in the history of this country to run for high office talking
out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out
of both sides.
Harry S Truman (1884-1972)
I don't give a shit about the Italian lira.
President Richard M. Nixon on being asked by
H.R. Haldeman if he wanted to hear a report
on the decline of the Italian lira
I would have made a good Pope.
Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain
Lily Tomlin
If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't
hesitate to do so.
Andre Gide (1876-1951)
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women
at the Mayo Clinic.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion
that he is trying to be funny.
Guy Davenport
Television is now so desperately hungry for material
that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
Gore Vidal
Puritanism...helps us enjoy our misery while we are
inflicting it on others.
Marcel Ophuls
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in
fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Practice freedom of religion. Set fire to the church of your choice.
National Lampoon, _Radio Dinner_, 1972
Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person
standing between Nixon and the White House.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) in 1960
As given in A. Schlesinger Jr's, "A Thousand Days"
I'm not sure I've even got the brains to be President.
Barry Goldwater in 1964
Gerry Ford is a nice guy, but he played too much football
with his helmet off.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself,
"Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin."
Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy and Billy
The thought of being President frightens me and I do
not think I want the job.
Ronald Reagan in 1973
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan - a Mount Rushmore of incompetence.
David Steinberg
I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected
terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to
say what is going to happen or will not happen.
California Govenor Jerry Brown
San Francisco Examiner, Oct 12, 1980
Well, I would - if they realized that we - again if - if we led them
back to that stalemate only because that our retaliatory power, our
seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so
destructive that they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
Ronald Reagan when asked if nuclear
war could be limited to tactical weapons.
Verbatim transcript from a press conference.
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Listen, there is no courage or any extra courage that I know of to find
out the right thing to do. Now, it is not only necessary to do the right
thing, but to do it in the right way and the only problem you have is
what is the right thing to do and what is the right way to do it. That is
the problem. But this economy of ours is not so simple that it obeys to
the opinion of bias or the pronouncements of any particular individual,
even to the President. This is an economy that is made up of 173 million
people and it reflects their desires, they're ready to buy, they're
to spend, it is a thing that is too complex and too big to be affected
adversely or advantageously just by a few words or any particular - say
a little this and that, or even a panacea so alleged.
Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) in response
to the question: "Has government been lacking
in courage and boldness in facing up to the recession?"
Verbatim transcript from a press conference.
Almost all reformers, however strict their social
conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
Romance should never begin with sentiment.
It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Success is the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Gioacchino Rosini
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents,
gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates (470-399 BC)
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
Plato (427?-348? BC)
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Children are guilty of unpardonable rudeness when they spit
in the face of a companion; neither are they excusable who
spit from windows or on walls or furniture.
St. John Baptist de La Salle
The Rules of Christian Manners and Civility (c. 1695)
Until a child is one year old it is incapable of sin.
The Talmud (c. 200)
A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.
Thomas B. Reed
All religions are founded on the fear of the many
and the cleverness of the few.
Stendhal
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting
human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There are times when you have to choose between being a human
and having good taste.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Bibo, ergo sum. - I drink, therefore I am
Fredirect Toyou
Cogito ergo spud. - I think, therefore I yam
Graffito reported by Herb Caen
San Francisco Chronicle, April 24, 1980
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.
That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
Jean Kerr
Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
Elias Canetti
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
What a beautiful fix we are in now; peace has been declared.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) after the Treaty of Amiens, 1802
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
Unknown
Vote early and vote often.
Al Capone (1899-1947)
"An honest election, under democracy, is an act of innocence
which does not take place more than once in the history of a given nation."
(Jose Marie Gil Robles; speech in Madrid, 1933)
"Voting for the right is doing nothing for it."
(H.D. Thoreau, "An Essay on Civil Disobedience," 1849.
Politics: "The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."
(Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary," 1906)
>From the California Civil Code, "Object of a Contract":
#1597. Everything is deemed possible except that which is impossible in
the nature of things.
>From the California Civil Code, "Maxims of Jurisprudence":
#3528. The law respects form less than substance.
#3529. That which ought to have been done is to be regarded as done.
#3530. That which does not appear to exist is to be regarded as if it
did not exist.
#3532. The law neither does nor requires idle acts.
#3533. The law disregards trifles.
#3535. Contemporaneous exposition is in general the best.
#3537. Superfluity does not vitiate.
#3546. Things happen according to the ordinary course of nature and
the ordinary habits of life.
#3547. A thing continues to exist as long as is usual with things of
that nature.
Being in politics is like being a football coach;
you have to be smart enough to understand the game
and dumb enough to think it's important.
Eugene McCarthy
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are
punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Plato (427?-347 BC)
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon
minds wallow in sluice of their own making.
Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Do we really deserve top billing?
Fred Allen (1894-1956) to Henry Morgan
at a meeting of the National Conference
of Christians and Jews
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.
Fred Allen (1894-1956)
"The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act.
A general association takes place, and common interest
produces common security."
Thomas Paine in his "The Rights of Man," (1791):
"The less government we have the better."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these
ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the
right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute
new government..."
Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of Independence)
[bracketed comment added for clarity]
"...a revolution of government is the strongest proof that
can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense."
John Adams (Diary, 1786)
"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
Thomas Jefferson (Motto on his seal)
"A little rebellion now and then...is a medicine necessary
for the sound health of government."
Thomas Jefferson (Letter to James Madison, 1787)
"I know not what course others may take, but as for me,
give me liberty, or give me death."
Patrick Henry (Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775)
Dictatorship is without a doubt the most satisfying form of
government...as long as I'm the dictator.
Phil Stromer 11/9/90-
Never argue with a fool. Listeners can't tell which is which.
Unknown
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970)
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you find it.
Jules Renard (1864-1910)
Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers
merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure
you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), 1850
Bad spellers of the world, untie!
Grafitto
Fix this sentence: He put the horse before the cart.
Stephen Price
I can't seem to bring myself to say, "Well, I guess I'll be
toddling along." It isn't that I can't toddle. It's that
I can't guess I'll toddle.
Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Max Weinreich (1894-1969)
"Phreblitt, n. a word used to describe someone in immediate danger of
losing his/her life in a violent, painful manner that will
immensely satisfy those who witness the deed. e.g. Timothy
Miller is a phreblitt."
In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the
world it is a fact.
Marlene Dietrich
When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When
you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health.
If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death.
J.P. Donleavy
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with
themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an
actual life, you would have received further instructions
as to what to do and where to go.
Unknown
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being
nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
John Lennon (1940-1980)
"The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative."
Edward Abbey (Vox Clamans in Deserto)
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government,
intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption
from the cares of office.
Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is
a most depressing and humiliating reality.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that
some men should be happier than others.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good
and not quite all the time.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
What a time! What a civilization!
Cicero (106-43 BC)
Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is!
Catullus (87?-54? BC)
How little you know about the age you live in if you think
that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.
Ovid (43? BC - AD 18)
It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.
Publilius Syrus (c. 42 BC)
There is no glory in otustripping donkeys.
Martial (40-102)
The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.
Menander (342? - 292? BC)
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.
Cicero (106-43 BC)
A man with his belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race.
Henery Miller (1891-1980)
Tropic of Cancer 1934
(Of Jesus): "A parish demogogue."
Shelley (Queen Mab)
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he
who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
A great many people think they are thinking when
they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James (1842-1910)
Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street
musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any
citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols,
or bombs without incurring any penalties.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
When two dogs fight for a bone, and the third runs
off with it, there's a lawyer among the dogs.
German proberb
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman
out of a divorce.
Don Quinn
When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
the risk of boring everyone to tears, I thought I'd post an insightful
passage on the psychology of business meetings from the book, "The Great Crash",
by John Kenneth Galbraith. He wrote the book in '54, before he became famous as
one of JFK's "best and brightest". The context is, "what Hoover was doing after
the market crashed."
"...he was conducting one of the least understood rites in American life. This is
the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business, but to do no business.
It is a rite which is still much practiced in our (1950s) time."
"Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to
instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find
thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But
there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings
are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium
of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides
over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages not because there is busi-
ness to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business
is being done. Such meetings are more than a subsitute for action. They are widely
regarded as action."
"The fact that no business is transacted at a no-business meeting is normally not a
serious cause for embarrassment to those attending. Numerous formulas have been devised
to prevent discomfort. Thus scholars, who are great devotees of the no-business meeting,
rely heavily on the exchange-of-ideas justification. To them, the exchange of ideas is,
an absolute good. Any meeting at which ideas are exchanged is, therefore, useful. This
justification is ironclad. It is very hard to have a meeting of which it can be said
that no ideas were exchanged." (Note - Galbreath was a professor of economics at Dart-
mouth at the time.)
"Salesmen and sales executive, who are important practitioners of the no-business
meeting, commonly have a different justification, and one that has strong spiritual
overtones. Out of the warmth of comradeship, the interplay of personalities, the
stimulation of alcohol, and the inspiration of oratory comes a compulsive rededica-
tion to the daily task. "
"The no-business meetings of the great business executives depend, for their il-
lusion of importance, on something quite different. Not the exchange of ideas or
spiritual rewards of comradeship, but a solemn sense of assembled power gives
significance to this assemblage. Even though nothing of importance is said or done,
men of importance cannot meet without the occasion seeming important."
I thought this was choice.
A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry -
that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three-Mile Island.
Johnny Carson
Blow in it's ear.
Johnny Carson on the best way to thaw a frozen turkey
Cogito ergo spud. - I think, therefore I yam
Graffito reported by Herb Caen
San Francisco Chronicle, April 24, 1980
On Thanksgiving Day all over America, families sit down to
dinner at the same moment - halftime.
Unknown
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
>From macd@EBay Wed Nov 21 11:57:51 1990
The Pilgrim Fathers landed on the shores of America and fell
upon their knees. Then they fell upon the aborigines.
(Anon.)
A ship in harbor is safe--- but that is not what ships are for.
John A. Shedd
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now
I'm beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
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.
Bert Whitney
Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours.
Richard Bach
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly
on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
P.G. Wodehouse
THE JOYS OF SCIENCE
The compiler of these gems is Ben Stewart, a retired elementary school science
teacher, who found each of these answers in the essays, tests, and discussions
he conducted over the years with fifth- and sixth-graders.
"Humidity is the experience of looking for water and finding air."
"Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they're
there."
"Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so
sometimes it's brother against brother."
"Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never
been able to make out the numbers."
"We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets
blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on."
"The main value of tornadoes is yet to be discovered."
"To most people solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists solutions
are things that are still all mixed up."
"When the fuel in a rocket starts burning gasses rush out the nozzle. So
would anybody."
"I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how and that is the
important thing."
"When a wave rolls over on itself it's called a breaker. Of just about
anything I guess."
"Thunder is a rich source of loudness."
"Question: In what ways are we dependent on the sun? Answer: We can always
depend on the sun for sunburns and tidal waves."
"Wind is like the air, only pushier."
"Hard mud is called shale. Soft mud is called gooey."
"You can listen to thunder after lightning and tell how close you came to
getting hit. If you don't hear it you got hit, so never mind."
"When people run around and around in circles we say they are crazy.
When planets do it we say they are orbiting."
"Rainbows are just to look at not really to understand."
"South America has cold summers and warm winters, but somehow they still
manage"
"Most books say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into
a sun in the daytime."
"Isotherms and Isobars are even more important than their names sound."
"A vibration is a motion that cannot make up it's mind which way it wants to go
"Many dead animals of the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be
oil."
"Genetics explain why you look like your father and if you don't why you
should"
"Although Edison was once considered a great inventor, we now know of many
inventions he overlooked."
"Talc is found in rocks and on babies."
"Our mother Earth has small poles and a large equator because of the tremendous
speed as she hurdles through space. Since we are along for the ride, we also
get to be flat at our poles and rounded at our equators."
"A planet cannot have an axis until it can get a line to run through it."
"Everybody leans to the sun in the summer and away in winter. We are all a
little tipsy that way."
"We get our temperature three different ways. Either farenheit, celcius or
centipede."
"Question: In free fall, how long would it take to reach the ground from a
height of 1000 feet? Answer: I have never performed this experiment."
Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the
continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were
followed after a certain interval by a baby.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman
giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy
by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to
resort to physics or chemistry.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.
From The Last Goon Show of All
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHIES OF THE WORLD EXPLAINED
Taoism: Shit Happens.
Confucianism: Confucius say, "Shit Happens".
Buddhism: If shit happens, it is not really Shit.
Zen Buddhism: What is the sound of Shit Happening?
Hinduism: This Shit has Happened before.
Islam: If Shit Happens it is the will of Allah.
Protestantism: Let Shit Happen to someone else.
Catholicism: If Shit Happens you deserve it.
Judaism: Why does Shit always Happen to us?
New Age: Love your Shit, let it Happen!
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal
rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine
hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
quoting an unnamed newspaper editor
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another-
it is one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Men and women, women and men. It will never work.
Erica Jong
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
Gloria Steinem
Woman was God's second mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Timothy Leary
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
Isaac Asimov
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the
living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children,
and by children to adults.
Thomas Szasz
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
"What we choose to call sanity is a big house where the
mad have no mothers."
(The Clown Prince of Darkness, correspondence, 1988)
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all the others that have been tried.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
Robert Byrne
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Henry Kissinger
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
J.P Morgan, when asked what the stock market will do, replied,
It will fluctuate.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.
When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Walking women want to see the southern cross at night
And so they set aside a sock, and tie their laces tight
Yes mournful is the melody that echoes in their heads
Without a beat they march along, believing Bach is dead.
The Residents "Duck Stab":Bach is Dead
He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
Trotsky
Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some
people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
Robert Byrne
If law school is so hard to get through...
how come there are so many lawyers?
Calvin Trillin
Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign
Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
Peter Ustinov
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only
a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A person in a uniform is merely an extension of another person's will.
Philip Slater
Brides aren't happy - they are just triumphant.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)
We have to distrust each other. It's our only defense against betrayal.
Tennessee Williams
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because
they are more certain they are their own.
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
The gods too are fond of a joke
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
He was a wise man who invented God.
Plato (427?-348? BC)
Wit is educated insolence.
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these
Ovid (43 BC-AD 18)
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
Alfred Jarry
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling
grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
Don't be humble, you're not that great.
Golda Meir
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to
Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons.
Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in
wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people
was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most
oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the
Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this
oppression upon us.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them
Madonna
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no
solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are
no straight lines.
R. Buckminster Fuller
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to.
Arnold H. Glasgow
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
Alan Dean Foster "To the Vanishing Point"
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sigmund Freud
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and
some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller
The good die young - because they see it's no use living if
you've got to be good.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is
second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little
scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds
if we felt like it.
Dave Barry
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves,
only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that
there may be something to them we are missing.
Gamel Abdel Nasser
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
People are so busy lengthening their lives with exercise they
don't have time to live them.
Johathan Miller
Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.
Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
Saint, noun. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?
Irv Kupcinet
A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the Universe,
"the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
Stephen Crane
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere
in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Bill Watterson, cartoonist
All my life I said I wanted to be someone...I can see now that
I should have been more specific.
????
I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Sigmund Freud
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that
nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for
which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important
than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no
chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of
better men than himself.
John Stewart Mill
Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language.
You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more,
you should never wish to do less.
General Robert E. Lee
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance
in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a
most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a
fricassee, or a ragout.
Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"
We will occasionally use this arrow notation unless there is danger of
no confusion.
Ronald Graham, "Rudiments of Ramsey Theory"
I'm free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in
the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find
that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are
dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes,
to make it possible.
T. E. Lawrence _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_
It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more
true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are
usually attracted by other things than power. When they
do act, they think of it as service, which has limits.
The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insa-
tiable, implacable.
David Brin _The Postman_
The will to win is worthless if you don't get paid for it.
Reggie Jackson
In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and
healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to
the death for it.
Monty Python
In the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, it's often useful to have a nice,
solid piece of wood in your hands.
Ian Faith, manager of Spinal Tap
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
Self-denial is indulgence of a propensity to forego.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
Eric Berne
I'm a born-again atheist.
Gore Vidal
Read my lips--NO NEW TAXES!
George Herbert Walker Bush,
Nov. 1988
If the bloodbath must come, then let's get on with it!
Gov. Ronald W. Reagan to
the U.C. Board of Regents
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient
while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory,
decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.
Timothy Leary
Bacchus: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for
getting drunk.
"Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance."
- Robert Quillen
"Men make history, and not the other
way around. In periods where there is
no leadership, society stands still. Progress
occurs when courageous, skillful leaders
seize the opportunity to change things for
the better."
Harry S Truman (1884-1972)
Santa Claus had the right idea. Visit everyone once a year.
-- Victor Borges
Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.
I.F. Stone 1907-1989
Blessed be the meek, for they shall inherit six feet of the earth.
The Clown Prince of Darkness, corresponsdence
It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
Andrew Jackson
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to
speak it to?
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
"I've had nothing yet", Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I ca'n't
take more."
"You mean you ca'n't take *less*. It's very easy to take *more* than nothing."
the Mad Hatter's response to Alice (Lewis Carroll)
Come quickly, I am tasting stars!
Dom Perignon (1638-1715)
at the moment of his discovery of champagne
"Oh well, it's six dozen of one, half the other."
-Bus Driver, NYC, 19 Dec 1990
(overheard by my sister)
"A donut without a hole...is a danish."
-Chevy Chase on "SNL's Weekend Update"
"Never play leapfrog with a unicorn."
-Benny Hill
"I'm not drunk. I can see perfectly well that cat coming toward me
has only one eye."
-Benny Hill
"That cat's not coming toward you, he's walking AWAY from you."
-The little old man from the Benny Hill show.
People are far more sincere and good-humored at
speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
Holidays are an expensive trial of strength.
The only satisfaction comes from survival.
Jonathan Miller
Gifts are like hooks.
Martial (40?-102?)
Eat as much as you like - just don't swallow it.
Steve Burns
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want,
drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
Robert Orben
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
Frank Zappa ( -Dec 4, 1993)
Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank
where they have no account.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a
therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist.
Truman Capote (1924-1984)
Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
New York is the only city in the world where you can get
deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
Russell Baker
Happiness, noun. An agreeable sensation arising from
contemplating the misery of another.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat
is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
Peter De Vries
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I knew her before she was a virgin.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more
a virtue than malnutrition.
Alex Comfort
Celibacy is not hereditary.
Guy Goden
"Virginity is in the lies of the beholder."
The Clown Prince of Darkness
Aliter catuli longe olent, aliter sues.
("Puppies and pigs have a very different smell.")
Plautus
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
H.P. Lovecraft
A host is a host from coast to coast & no one will talk to a host that's close
Unless the host (that isn't close) is busy, hung or dead
wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu
"Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman?
"Hell no!"
Hunter S. Thompson
"Swat my hind with a mellon rind,
That's my penguin state of mind."
Opus
History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are
brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Stay outta churches son, all they got the key to is the shithouse.
last words of Mortimer Carsons
I was, and still am, the world's first Atheist. Can anyone else make
that claim? I thought not! That's why I am who I am!
God
Reality is the original Rorschach.
??????
A philosopher once said 'It is necessary for the very existence
of science that the same conditions always produce the same results'.
Well, they do not. You set up the circumstances, with the same
conditions every time, and you cannot predict behind which hole
you will see the electron.
Richard Feynman
When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree
trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they
just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later,
Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism,
Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards
rather than in present realities.
Tom Robbins
What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough
to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a
cigarette out of my pocket.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man
never worshipped anything but himself"
Sir Richard F. Burton
"Justice is incedental to law and order."
J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)
"Reading musses up my mind."
Henry Ford
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Ursula K. LeGuin
If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave.
Cato, Roman statesman and historian (234 b.c. - 149 b.c.)
Proof by example:
The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that
it contains most of the ideas of the general proof.
Proof by intimidation:
'Trivial.'
Proof by cumbersome notation:
Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols.
Proof by exhaustion:
An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.
Proof by omission:
'The reader may easily supply the details.'
'The other 253 cases are analogous.'
'...'
Proof by obfuscation:
A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless
syntactically related statments.
Proof by wishful citation:
The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization
of a theorem from the literature to support his claims.
Proof by funding:
How could three different government agencies be wrong?
Proof by eminent authority:
'I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-complete.'
Proof by personal communication:
'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete
[Karp, personal communication].'
Proof by reduction to the wrong problem:
'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is
decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.'
Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a
privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
Proof by importance:
A large body of useful consequences all follow
from the proposition in question.
Proof by accumulated evidence:
Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.
Proof by cosomology:
The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless.
Popular for proofs of the existence of God.
Proof by mutual reference:
In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3
in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2
in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in
reference A.
Proof by metaproof:
A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness
of the method is proved by any of these techniques.
Proof by picture:
A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well
with proof by omission.
Proof by vehement assertion:
It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience.
Proof by ghost reference:
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears
in the reference given.
Proof by forward reference:
Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author,
which is often not as forthcoming as at first.
Proof by semantic shift:
Some standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for
the statement of the result.
Proof by appeal to intuition:
Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here.
(With apologies to G. Polya and contributions form the Yale Computer
Science department.)
Science is good furniture for one's upper chamber, if there
is common sense below.
Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)
It is better to be hated for what you are
than to be loved for what you are not.
Andre Gide (1876-1951)
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the
matter with the rich is uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without
working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this
sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom
of choice, but nothing to choose from.
Peter Ustinov
America is a large friendly dog in a small room.
Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)
The United States is like the guy at the party who gives
cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him.
Jim Samuels
"When I get smitten, I stay smut." -- Charlie McCarthy
The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
Quentin Crisp
I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts
and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that
I already belonged to the Diner's Club.
Gore Vidal
War is the biggest ego trip of all time.
Molly Wiest
Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Didn't I ever tell you? Bumbles Bounce!
Yukon Cornelius.
The main thing is you and I should exist, and that we should be you and I.
Apart from that let everything go as it likes. The best order of things to my
way thinking, is the one I was meant to be part of, and to hell with the most
perfect of worlds if I am not in it. I would rather exist, even as an impudent
argufier, than not exist at all.
Jean-Francois Rameau
...all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no
difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward
dreamings, and (there is) no cause to value one above the other."
H.P. Lovecraft
You have dreamed too well, O wise archdreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods
away from the world of all men's vision to that which is wholly yours,...
H.P. Lovecraft
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain
of being a damned fool.
Bellamy Brooks
On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created jerks.
H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow"
Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples;
in others, sex laws.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not
have any significant first person, present indicative.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Florynce Kennedy
Disney, of course, has the best casting. If he
doesn't like an actor, he just tears him up.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.
It's already tomorrow in Australia.
Charles Schultz
Responsiblity is a unique concept. It can only reside and inhere in a
single individual.
You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished.
You may delegate it, but it is still with you.
You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it.
Admiral Hyman Rickover
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
John Galsworthy
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've
always worked for me.
Hunter S. Thompson
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light
so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
Maurice Chevalier
Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting
of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum
shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man,
which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
G. Gordon Liddy
After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not
for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have
simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
P. J. O'Rourke
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had
to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
It's a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
My Early Life - 1930
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
All children are essentially criminal.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Thank God kids never mean well
Lily Tomlin
Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect
that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible.
I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend
to be too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They
keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults
have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well,
they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor
heard, and no one must make another one.
Gore Vidal
Conversations With Gore Vidal - 1981
Dentist, n.:
A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls
coins out of one's pockets.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)"The Devil's Dictionary"
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's very funny--
Did you ever try buying them without money?
Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
You kids today have it easy. When I was a kid everything was HUGE.
My dad was nearly four times bigger than me. You couldn't even see
the tops of counters.... Then gradually everything became smaller
until it was the manageable size it is today.
Bizarro (comic strip)
Lactomangulation, n.:
Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly
that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.
Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy?
I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire
Shut up he explained.
Ring Lardner (1885-1933)
The Young Immigrants, 1920
Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility
that religion is powerless to bestow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), quoting a friend
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.
Jay Leno
Some of the greatest love affairs I've known have
involved one actor - unassisted.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't
want to shake hands with him.
Jacqueline Susann (1921-1974)
after reading Portnoy's Complaint
I'll probably never have children because I don't
believe in touching people for any reason.
Paula Poundstone
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The family is a court of justice which never shuts down for night or day.
Malcolm De Chazal
Do not try to solve all life's problems at once -- learn to dread each
day as it comes.
Donald Kaul
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to
have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood
and you find the real tinsel underneath.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract
instead of under observation.
Walter Winchell (1897-1972)
The Hollywood tradition I like best is called "sucking up to the stars."
Johnny Carson
"Hello," he lied.
Don Carpenter quoting a Hollywood agent
However, never daunted, I will cope with adversity in my traditional
manner ... sulking and nausea.
Tom K. Ryan
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into
the smallest amount of thoughts.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Higgeldy Piggeldy,
Hamlet of Elsinore
Ruffled the critics by
Dropping this bomb:
"Phooey on Freud and his
Psychoanalysis --
Oedipus, Schmoedipus,
I just loved Mom."
Anon.
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty
I don't have to take this abuse from you -- I've got hundreds of people
waiting to abuse me.
Bill Murray, "Ghostbusters"
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him.
They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Beckett
I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Once the people begin to reason, all is lost.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the
faithless who know love's tragedies.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It is well to write love letters. There are certain things for which it
is not easy to ask your mistress face to face, like money for instance.
Henri De Regnier
What is more enchanting than the voices of young people
when you can't hear what they say?
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
George Washington as a boy was ignorant of the commonest
accomplishments of youth - he could not even lie.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"All I ask for is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy"
I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.
Charles Schultz
I can't mate in captivity.
Gloria Steinem
on why she never married
Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
Savielly Grigorievitcyh Tartakower (1887-1956)
Exit, pursued by a bear.
Stage direction in Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale (1611)
The trouble with Oakland is that when you
get there, there isn't any there there.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
In San Francisco, Haloween is redundant.
Will Durst
Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angles to San Francisco live there?
Herb Caen
There are two million interesting people in New York and
only seventy-eight in Los Angles.
Neil Simon
in Playboy, Feb. 1979
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number
of people around whom you shouldn's make a sudden move.
David Letterman
From "Late Night with David Letterman"
Feb. 9, 1984
The trouble with Oakland is that when you
get there, it's there.
Herb Caen
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom
that he can no longer be led by the nose.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple
declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
on the death of Warren G. Harding, 1923
Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980) Teddy Roosevelt's daughter
from Mrs. L. Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.
Ralph Nader
The Pacific Sun, March 21, 1981
"Who's Virginia?"
Rose Kennedy when asked why her
daughter-in-law Joan lived in Boston
while her son Ted lived in Virginia.
"No"
President Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy when
asked by a reporter if she had any message
for the children of America.
I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
A bore is a fellow talking who can change the subject back to his
topic of conversation faster than you can change it back to yours.
Laurence J. Peter
Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but
anything can get dirty without something else getting clean.
Laurence J. Peter
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant (1885-1981)
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of
a stone was the founder of civilization.
Attributed to Sigmund Freud (1871-1922)
I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) when asked
what he thought of Western civilization
Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their
hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.
Plato (427?-348? BC)
There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas
whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal
The National, Paris, 1850
The prelude to Tristan and Isolde sounded as if a bomb had fallen into
a large music factory and had thrown all the notes into confusion.
The Tribune, Berlin, 1871
The prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the Italian painting of the
martyr whose intestines are slowly being unwound from his body on a reel.
Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904) 1868
Wagner drives the nail into your head with swinging hammer blows.
P.A. Fiorentino (1806-1864)
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Bill Nye (1850-1896)
(some say Mark Twain)
"9W"
Answer to the question: Do you spell your name with a V, Mr. Vagner?
Steve Allen, from the Question Man segment on the Steve Allen Show
Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks,
the more you beat them, the more tender they become.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Manners are especially the need of the plain.
The pretty can get away with anything.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.
Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
Anatole France (1844-1924)
We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
There are very few people who don't become more interesting
when they stop talking.
Mary Lowry in the Pacific Sun, November 15, 1985
LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food;
sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his
stomach flunked geography.
Robert Byrne
A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.
James Beard
It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers
have been all over it.
Julia Child on nouvelle cuisine
Obscenity is what happens to shock some
elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Under certain circumstances, profanity
provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It has been my experience that folks who
have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
Every man thinks God is on his side.
The rich and powerful know He is.
Jean Anouilh
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen
at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Herodotus (484-425 B.C.)
Optimist, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five
years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.
Every class is unfit to govern.
Lord Acton
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as
they are, not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage -
he won't encounter many rivals.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way
by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
A paranoid is a man who kno