Posts

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

An old man gives good advice in order to console himself that he can no longer set a bad example.

Anton Chekov

Love, friendship and respect do not unite a people as much as hatred for a common thing.

Margaret Thatcher

In politics, if you want something said, ask a man, if you want something done, ask a woman.

George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man insists on changing the world to suit him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Abba Eban

History teaches us that men and nations live wisely, once they have exhausted all other options.

Anon

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They’re wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster

Aldous Huxley

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

Robert Frost

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Anthony Burgess

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

George F.Will

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

Andy Rooney

Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.

Doug Larson

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.

Ethel Mumford

Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person.

Beryl Pfizer

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.

Mark Twain

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.

Dame Edna Everage

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.

Flloyd Dell

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

Evan Esar

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.

Saki

He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

David T. Wolf

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

Helen Rowland

The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity.

EB White

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

Faith Whittlesey

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.

Laurence J.Peter

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

Leo Tolstoy

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

Bertrand Russell

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.

Billy Crystal

Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place

Willie Tyler

The reason lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn’t there the second time.

James M. Barrie

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

Samuel Goldwyn

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

Rita Mae Brown

I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.

Aneurin Bevan

Virtue is its own punishment.

Isaac Asimov

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

Stanislaw J.Lec

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.

Larry Hardiman

The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’, meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’, meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.

Charles M. Schulz

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Where have I gone wrong?”/ Then a voice says to me, “This is going to take more than one night.”

Abraham Lincoln

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

Robert Newton Anthony

Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.

Douglas Noel Adams

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Noel Adams

Man [has] always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason.

Franklin P. Adams

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

Franklin P. Adams

The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

Pauline Frederick

When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up, people look; then, if they like what they see, they listen.

Robert Lee Frost

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Man has his will - but woman has her way

Anon

THREE wise men - are you serious?

Anon

Sure God created man before woman. But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece.

Anon

There are much easier things in life than finding a good man. Nailing Jell-O to a tree, for instance.

Anon

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.

Anon

Women get the last word in every argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

Anon

Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember

Germaine Greer

Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?

Mae West

Brains are an asset, if you hide them.

Homer Simpson

When will I learn? The answer to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle, they’re on TV!

Homer Simpson

Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose: it’s how drunk you get.

Homer Simpson

Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.

Doug Larson

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

George Bernard Shaw

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Fletcher Knebel

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Mae West

Too much of a good thing is wonderful.

Michael Pritchard

You don’t stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.

Abraham Lincoln

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Alfred Hitchcock

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

Rita Rudner

In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.

Mark Twain

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Bill Nye

Humor is everywhere, in that there’s irony in just about anything a human does.

William Feather

Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age.

Flip Wilson

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

Robert Orben

There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all.

George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

Leon Lederman

Physics isn’t a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.

MichelDe Montaigne

Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.

Jilly Cooper

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

GK Chesterton

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Niels Bohr

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Franklin P. Jones

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.

Milton Berle

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.

George Carlin

Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.

Howard Aiken

Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

David Friedman

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

Abraham Lincoln

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

Patrick Young

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.

Nora Ephron

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

Peter De Vries

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

Mark Twain

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

Elias Schwartz

Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it.

Theodore Roosevelt

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not guilty.’

Clyde B. Aster

When someone tells you something defies description, you can be pretty sure he’s going to have a go at it anyway.

Robert Frost

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

Christopher Hampton

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

John Russell

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

Doug Larson

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own.

Dick Cavett

If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t, either.

Jean Giraudoux

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made

Edgar Bergen

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?

Katharine Whitehorn

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.