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Showing posts from 2008

H.L.Mencken

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Jimmy Buffet

If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.

Lynda Barry

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

Adrienne E.Gusoff

Any woman who thinks the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach is aiming about 10 inches too high.

Granville Hicks

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Oscar Wilde

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Robert Bryne

Getting caught is the mother of invention.

Terry Pratchett

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

John F. Kennedy

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Plato

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Abraham Lincoln

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Louis Vermeil

The prime purpose of eloquence is to keep other people from talking.

H.L.Mencken

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Augusten Burroughs

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.

David Russell

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.

Rick Cook

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

Bill Cosby

A word to the wise ain’t necessary, it’s the stupid ones who need the advice.

Friedrich Von Schiller

With stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Sam Levenson

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite.

Ernest Benn

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Joe Martin

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there’s no law against wacking them around a little.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Charles McCabe

Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.

J.D.Salinger

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Casey Stengel

The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.

Albert Camus

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Gustave Flaubert

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Plato

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Bill Vaughan

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.

Evan Esar

Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.

Tallulah Bankhead

Here’s a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.

Clement Atlee

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.

Hubert H.Humphrey

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

J.W.Eagan

Never judge a book by its movie.

Norman Mailer

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Oscar Wilde

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Carl Sagan

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Franklin P.Jones

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Wernher von Braun

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

Don Marquis

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

Evan Esar

Play: Work that you enjoy doing for nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.

Anon

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and the rest.

Jules Renard

Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.

James Branch Cabell

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

G.H.Hardy

It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

Oscar Wilde

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Jonathan Winters

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.

Evan Esar

Statistician: A man who believes figures don’t lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won’t stand up either.

Ellen Goodman

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Lily Tomlin

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Evelle J. Younger

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.

Mark Twain

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

Clive Barnes

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

Anon

Time is that quality of nature which keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t seem to be working.

Wendell Johnson

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.

Will Rogers

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

Lucille S.Harper

The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.

Robert McCloskey

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Jackie Mason

Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.

Max Beerbohm

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

Evan Esar

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

Philip K. Dick

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

Jerry Garcia

Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

Ernest Haskins

Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you’ll be surprised at how little you have.

B.F.Skinner

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

Ogden Nash

Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Exercise relieves stress. Nothing relieves exercise.

Arthur Honegger

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Abraham Lincoln

' Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Jerry Seinfeld

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

Ogden Nash

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.

George Orwell

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Tom Lehrer

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

Bruce Grocott

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

Anon

It is far easier to ask for and receive forgiveness than it is permission.

Kin Hubbard

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Shirley Chisholm

I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish.

George Bernard Shaw

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

Alan Corenk

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Sir Winston Churchill

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

Dan Barker

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.

Bertrand Russell

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Sacha Guitry

You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.

Thomas Szasz

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.

Queen Juliana

I can’t understand it. I can’t even understand the people who can understand it.

Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Walter Bagehot

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Father Larry Lorenzoni

The average person thinks he isn’t.

John J.Plomp

You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

Thomas Sowell

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth—anonymously and posthumously.

Oscar Wilde

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Fran Lebowitz

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.

Jay Leno

I went into a McDonald’s yesterday and said, ‘I’d like some fries.’ The girl at the counter said, ‘Would you like some fries with that?’

Jerry Seinfeld

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Totie Fields

I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and all I’ve lost is two weeks.

Henry James

She had an unequalled gift… of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Charles de Gaulle

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

Russell Green

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.

Ellen DeGeneres

Procrastination isn’t the problem, it’s the solution. So procrastinate now, don’t put it off.

Peter Drucker

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

Richard Lewis

I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.

Laurence J.Peter

Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Barbara Tober

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.

H.L.Mencken

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Robert Frost

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Ronald Reagan

The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Jessica Alba

My theory is that if you look confident you can pull off anything - even if you have no clue what you’re doing.

Margo Kaufman

The only thing worse than a man you can’t control is a man you can.

Robert Benchley

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Oscar Wilde

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

CE Montague

To be amused by what you read—that is the great spring of happy quotations.

Joan Klempner

To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep.

Terry Pratchett

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Burt Bacharach

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.

Alfred E. Newman

Crime does not pay … as well as politics.

Laurence J. Peter

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

PJ Plauger

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.

Mary Chase

I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.

Marquis de Vauvenargues

The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.

Randall Jarrell

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Ambrose Pierce

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Biil Vaughan

An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist waits to make sure the old one leaves.

Orson Welles

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

Ellen DeGeneres

I don’t understand the sizes anymore. There’s a size zero, which I didn’t even know that they had. It must stand for: ‘Ohhh my God, you’re thin.’

Cullen Hightower

There’s always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it’s always somebody else.

Evan Esar

Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose.

Herbert Hoover

About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

Anon

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

Al Capone

You get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word alone.

Oscar Wilde

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Emerson Pugh

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.

Anon

Men who treat women as helpless and charming playthings deserve women who treat men as delightful and generous bank accounts.

Le Rouchefoucauld