Favorite Quotes

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
-- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in winter and happier in summer.
-- Brendan Behan

What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so that we wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our country. Nice try anyway, George.
-- D.J. on KSFO/KYA

If I'm going to have a past, I'd prefer it to be multiple choice.
-- The Joker

I saw a sign that said, 'Kill your idols' and I thought, 'Suicide is bad'.
-- Kevin Hemenway

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."
-- Vine Deloria, Jr.

Excuse me for not answering your letter sooner, but I've been so busy not answering letters that I couldn't get round to not answering yours in time.
-- Groucho Marx

If God is watching us, we might as well be interesting.
-- Solomon Short

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
--P.J. O'Rourke

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
-- Harry Truman

Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it.
-- Jack Wagner

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

The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
-- Lily Tomlin

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.
-- Picasso

It's inherently difficult to get reliable information about an event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information.
-- unknown

We don't talk about planes flying, we talk about them crashing.
-- unknown

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
-- Anatole Broyard

At 100 mph,. you're not driving a car, you're aiming it.
-- Col. G. Paul Corbin, chief of the Nevada Highway Patrol, on the prospect of higher speed limits in Western states.

I want to announce to the world that I am very happy. As long as you don't take the pills away.
-- unknown

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that.
-- Tom Lehrer

I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.
-- Charles Schulz

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
-- Daffy Duck

In Vegas I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.
-- Steven Wright

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain

If you can't laugh at yourself, you may be missing the colossal joke of the century.
-- Dame Edna

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals. I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
-- A. Whitney Brown

It doesn't matter what temperature the room is; it's always room temperature.
-- Steven Wright

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
-- Steven Wright

I was going 70 miles an hour and got stopped by a cop who said, 'Do you know the speed limit is 55 miles per hour?' 'Yes, officer, but I wasn't going to be out that long.
-- Steven Wright

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving.
-- Steven Wright

I have an inferiority complex...but it's not a very good one.
-- Steven Wright

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, `Well, what do you need?'
-- Steven Wright

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately. Extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas. I just think about it.
-- Steven Wright

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
-- Robert Heinlein, Logic of Empire, 1941

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing the right thing.
-- Isaac Asimov (Salvor Hardin, "Foundation")

Destiny is something we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.
-- Meg Ryan, 'Sleepless in Seattle'

Just because an idea is popular don't make it right.
-- Jim from 'Huck Finn'

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
-- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987

My sense of adventure is firmly planted behind my sense of longevity.
-- Kevin Hemenway

Statistics released in 1996 show that we are murdering less in America. But it's not for the lack of trying. We are gunning our fellow citizens down more than ever but high tech trauma centers are bringing them back to life. It's not that we are killing less but that medical advances are making it harder to keep them dead.
-- Spencer Hughes, KSFO Radio

Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.
-- Woody Allen

She's descended from a long line that her mother listened to.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee

The things that come to those who wait are probably the things that left over from the people who got there first.
-- Steven Tyler

Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases.
-- The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior

If you don't think that logic is a good method for determining what to believe, make an attempt to convince me of that without using logic. No one has even bothered to try yet.
-- Brett Lemoine

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
--Ernest Hemingway

A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.
--W.C. Fields

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?
--W.C. Fields

If God had intended us to drink beer, He would have given us stomachs.
--David Daye

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
--Oscar Wilde

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
--Henny Youngman

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
--Tom Waits

24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?
--Stephen Wright

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
--Frank Zappa

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
--Benjamin Franklin

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.
--Dave Barry

There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
-- Ross MacDonald

If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
-- Albert Einstein

If a camel flies, no one laughs if it doesn't get very far.
-- Paul White

Never eat more than you can lift.
-- Miss Piggy

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
-- Winston Churchill

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
-- Heisenberg

It is not enough that we should succeed, but our friends must fail as well.
-- La Rochefoucauld

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
-- The Call of Cthulhu

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
-- Salvador Dali

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
-- George Patton

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-- Mark Twain

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

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
-- Katherine Hepburn

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

Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.
-- John Wayne

Don't be irreplaceable; if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
-- unknown

Let anger's fire be slow to burn.
-- George Herbert

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
-- Will Rodgers

An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes.
-- Cato

Anger is momentary madness, so control your passion, or it will control you.
-- Horace

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
-- Robert Frost

You can't fight darkness with darkness; you don't get light that way.
--

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.
-- Buddha

If ever you and your friends are being chased by a pack of rabid wolves, you don't have to be faster than the wolves, only your friends.
-- unknown

People need discriminating annoyances like us to correct their perfection.
-- Kevin Hemenway

Let's say I committed this crime. Even if I did do this, it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right?
-- OJ Simpson

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
-- Kilgore Trout

The only way to stop this suicide wave is to make it a capital offense, punishable by death.
-- Legislature in Ireland

It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain -- from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration. (itals belong to me, not Gene - ed. note)
-- Gene Weingarten