- A
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- It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
--Aeschylus
- It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy.
It's only necessary to be rich.
--Alan Alda
- When you're as great as I am, it's hard to be humble.
--Muhammad Ali
- Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.
--Woody Allen
- My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
--Woody Allen
- Money can't buy happiness; it can, however, rent it.
--Anonymous
- American professional athletes are bilingual: they speak English and profanity.
--Anonymous
- Business conventions are important because they demonstrate how many
people a company can operate without.
-- Anonymous
- If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it with a computer.
-- Anonymous
- American is a very difficult language mixed with English.
-- Anonymous
- If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it
over.
--Anonymous
- Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
--Anonymous
- The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.
--Anonymous
- Life is short. Smile while you still ahve teeth.
--Anonymous
- I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.
--Edward Appleton
- Macho: The genetic defect that makes men want to teach toddlers to box.
Joyce Armor
- No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing.
--W. H. Auden
- B
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- Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do
it.
--Russell Baker
- You never realize how short a month is until you pay alimony.
-- John Barrymore
- Except for an occasional heart attack I feel as young as I ever did.
-- Robert Benchley
- Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
--Hector Berlioz
- We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road.
They get run over.
--Ambrose Bierce
- The covers of this book are too far apart.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- When a young man begins to go down hill everything seems to be greased for the occasion.
--Josh Billings
- As scarce as the truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
--Josh Billings
- Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt, not swallowed.
--Josh Billings
- Its not only the most difficult thing to know one's self, but the most inconvenient.
--Josh Billings
- Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.
--Otto von Bismarck
- I have only one ambition left: I should like to have a good epitaph.
-- Prince Bismark
- The only reason I would take up jogging is so I could hear heavy
breathing again.
--Erma Bombeck
- Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
--Erma Bombeck, author
- History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teachh us vice.
--Ludwig Borne
- Few minds wear out; more rust out.
--Christian Nestell Bovee
- We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
--Wehrner von Braun
- Nothing more clearly show how little God esteems his gift to men of wealth,
money, position and other wordly goods, than the way he distributes these,
and the sort of men who are most amply provided with them.
-- Jean De La Bruyere
- An athiest is a man with no invisible means of support.
--John Buchan
- If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people
die past that age.
-- George Burns
- It takes a lot of money to die comfortably.
--Samuel Butler
- All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of
every organism to live beyond its income.
--Samuel Butler
- C
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- The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
-- James Branch Cabell, from The Silver Stallion
- The trouble with sports officials is they just don't care who wins.
--Tommy Canterbury
- Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.
--Orson Scott Card
- People love to admit they have bad handwriting or that they can't do math. And they will readily admit to being awkward: I'm such a klutz! But they will never admit to having a poor sense of humor or being a bad driver.
--George Carlin
- Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
--George Carlin
- Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time
for Christmas.
-- Johnny Carson
- Society is made up of two great classes: those who have more dinners than apppetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
--Nicolas Chamfort
- If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.
--Chinese Curse
- Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face
you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.
-- Coco Chanel
- The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
--G.K. Chesterton
- 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
- Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
--Sir Winston Churchill
- The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
--Sir Winston Churchill
- An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that have
been permanently discontinued.
-- Irvin S. Cobb
- The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to
those of us who do.
--Harold Coffin
- I have never seen pessimism in a Company prospectus.
-- Sir William Connor (Cassandra)
- It is extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
-- Noel Coward
- A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten
that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset.
-- James Gould Cozzens
- An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last chapter missing.
--Quentin Crisp
- D
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- Never vote for the best candidate, vote for the one who will do the
least harm.
-- Frank Dane
- History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
--Clarence Darrow
- Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the
copies I give away.
-- Clarence Darrow
- I am a friend of the workingman, I would rather be his friend than
be one.
-- Clarence Darrow
- When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence Darrow
- Football is not a contact sport. Its a collision sport
--Duffy Daugherty
- Avoid fruits and nuts. You are what you eat.
--Jim Davis (Garfield the Cat)
- My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to royalty, you should lay
it on with a trowel.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- E
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- Be the first to say what is self-evident, and you are immortal.
--M. Ebner-Eschenbach
- When Solomon said that there was a time and a place for everything
he
had not encountered the problem of parking an automobile.
--Bob Edwards
- Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.
--Albert Einstein
- An atheist is a guy who watches a Notre Dame-SMU football game
and doesn't care who wins.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- The years betwen 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always asked to
do
things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
-- T S Eliot
- People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Men are what their mothers made them.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy -- and Jill a wealthy widow.
--Evan Esar
- F
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- Once, during prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing
but food and water.
-- W. C. Fields
- I like children. Properly cooked.
--W.C. Fields
- A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.
--Martin H. Fischer
- As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people don't.
--Carrie Fisher
- A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
--Anatole France
- To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjectures.
--Anatole France, from The Revolt of the Angels
- The books that everybody admires are those nobody reads.
-- Anatole France
- A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather
and ask for it back when it rains.
-- Robert Frost
- The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get
up and does not stop until you get into the office.
-- Robert Frost
- G
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- Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.
--Serge Gainsbourg, French vocalist
- Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
--John Kenneth Galbraith
- Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of
bleeding, sings.
--Ed Gardner
- You know you're getting old when everything hurts. And what doesn't
hurt doesn't work.
-- Hy Gardner
- Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only
survivors.
--Frank Gifford
- A clever man commits no minor blunders.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have
guesses enough of my own.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- I always get the better when I argue alone.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
- Television has raised writing to a new low.
--Samuel Goldwyn
- As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists.
--Joan Gussow, 1986
- Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.
-- Edmund Gwenn, last word
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