Rob Lopresti's
Unfamiliar Quotations r
"Be sure to leave your underpants with someone you can trust." Ian Andersen.
"The earliest Christians get the hungriest lions." John M. Floyd
"Never swear at a parrot." Kevin McLoughlin
"It is impossible to wrap ones arms around a whale, a fleeing fox or a sunken ship" Judge Kevin M. McCarthy, Popov v. Hayashi
"If you hear any sinister background music, run like hell." -Carol Cail
"Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry." -Spanish Proverb
"Forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them more." -Oscar Wilde
"Beware of barking at underdogs; don't fight with people who have nothing to lose." -Dory Previn
"Rather than easy answers, search for clearer contradictions." -Lorrie B. Potters
"If all the people of the world would just join hands, three quarters of them would drown." -attributed to Pete Seeger
"Marketing is what made America great. " -Jeffrey Dronkin, NPR Ombudsman
"America has left the building." -Chris Chandler
"There is in American history a species of ignorance, absurdity, and imbecility unknown to the annals of any other." -James Callendar, 1797 (a few years before he published a story reporting that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings' children, was grooming one of them for the presidency, and had a harem of African slaves. Callendar later drowned in a mud puddle.)
"I'd like to leave America for someplace where they would not know a word of English and I might be understood." -Dan Bern
"The reason American cities are prosperous is that there is no place to sit down." -Albert J. Tally, 1924
"The number of drug addicts in the United States is variously estimated...at from 1,000,000 to 4,000,000." -L.F. Kebler, 1910 (A1.9:393)
Animals (See also Cats and Fish)
"The squirrels don't hate you. They talk about everyone." -Kim Barlow
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun." -Dan Rather
"If a chicken had grammar, it wouldn't have anything interesting to say." -David Premack
"Rats are gifted with charm, imagination, and generosity." -U.S. National Highway Traffic SafetyAdministration, TD 8.31:Z7/ENG./CHINESE
"The dog who bites you may have his reasons." -James E. Ricketson
"Consider the mouse before he considers you." -Herb Sargent
"The fact that monkeys have hands should give us pause." -R.D. Malloy
"I can sleep through anything but beauty." -Flip Breskin
"Some paintings would be easier to appreciate if the artists were hung next to them." -Lorrie B. Potters
"I don't burn bridges behind me, I nuke them." -Jacqueline Bartha
"I will place my paper hat on my concussion and dance." -Leonard Cohen
"Gift-horse dentistry is an unrewarding hobby." - Tom Holt
"Some days I don't know if I should laugh or call the police." -Cecil Adams
"Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization....The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath." -H. Allen Smith, 1947
"It's probably too late to do anything about it now, but the next best thing is to complain about it, which is what we're good at." -David Williams, Citizens Against Government Waste
"Sometimes joy slips in ." -Richard Matoon
"I couldn't feel so I learned to touch." - Leonard Cohen
"Yes, I am insane. Thanks for asking." -Harlan Coben
"Dylan Thomas, asked what he thought of Welsh Nationalism, replied in three words, two of which were 'Welsh Nationalism.'" -Avram Davidson
"They can't break you if you don't have a spine." -Scott Adams
"The last freedom is choosing your attitude." -Victor Frankel
"If that indifference was originally a defense, it had consumed what it had once defended." -Ursula K. Le Guin
"They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known." -Billy Joel
"We all wanted to be existentialists. None of us knew what the hell it meant." -Michael Smith
"Whoever thought the sixties would be called the good old days?" -Si Kahn
"heaven protect us from all the things / to which we can become accustomed" -Gloria McElroy
"A man is what he does with his attention and mine is not for sale." -John Ciardi
"Gifts make slaves like whips make dogs." -W.P. Kinsella
"Of course, this is only my personal opinion and I may be old-fashioned, but I would rather be old-fashioned than terribly, terribly ill with fever and have to wear ice-packs for weeks on end." -Robert Benchley
"Good manners are a sign of strength." -Dick Francis
"A Spaniard will seek to persuade you that the bull-ring is an institution got up chiefly for the benefit of the bull." -Jerome K. Jerome
"Love means having something to betray." -John LeCarre
"Five years ago I was a four stone apology. Today I am two separate gorillas." -Vivian Stanshall
"The expression 'dead serious' is a self-fulfilling prophesy." -C.W. Metcalf
"Most people would rather stand on hot coals than stand corrected." -Lorrie B. Potters
"Your home is where your cat lives." -Nevada Supreme Court, 2002.
"Cats have no handles." -Bud Herron
"Before you imitate a mouse, find out about cats." -Lorrie B. Potters
"Never try to outstubborn a cat." -Robert A. Heinlein
"Couples must conspire to hide things from one another; it's too difficult for either party to do alone." -Lawrence Shames, Florida Straits
"He was so far out of the loop, he hadn't even known there was a loop." -Margaret Coel, The Ghost Walker
"The squeaky wheel gets put on the oil committee." -Lorrie B. Potters
"Or perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?" -Amy Weiss, Senior VicePresident for Communications, RIAA
"Where there's smoke, there's bound to be mirrors." -Garry Trudeau
"When a man's grief makes him so incoherent as that, we must at least give him credit for sincerity." -J.P. Dunn
"Unfortunately, he was not very skillful at expressing himself in Russian (although he knew no other language)." -Feodor Dostoevsky
"What people really need is a good listening to." -Mary Lou Casey
"It doesn't matter that everything has been said, because no one was listening." -A. Gide
"May my silences become more accurate." -Theodore Roethke
"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, creep." -Calvin Trillin
"Silence is the art of keeping three monkeys in your heart." -Michael Smith
"This sentence no verb." -D. Hofstader
"If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud." -Will Strunk
"A true holy book could fit on an index card, but most of the words on it haven't been invented yet." - Will Ludwigsen
"The second law of thermodynamics, simply put, is as follows: left to themselves, things tend to go to hell in a handbasket." -Cecil Adams
"Fate likes to tease paranoids.'" -Mark Kurlansky
"In eternity, there will be no underground beatnik intellectual dive cafe's hashing phony, ambiguous 'word art' for you to lounge in and laugh it up with your cheap wine coolers and funky sexually-vague groupies." - An anonymous correspondent of the Kook's Museum.
" Fate prefers the unexpected." -Frederick Waterman
"The universe is all farms." -U.S. Census Bureau, C3.2:T22/4
"Fate takes its cut." -Lord Buckley
"Our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." -Edward Tryon, physicist
"Everyone knows at the end of the dream there's a hell of a chance that you'll finally awaken." -Andrew Ratshin
"There's the nightmare kind where you fall and fall, and you wake and find you haven't been dreaming at all." -Malvina Reynolds
"There are known unknowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” - Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
"Somewhere in the classroom is maybe one person who will learn this stuff if it kills him, and if it kills him enough he'll become a professor." -Joe Adamson
"My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating." -Ashley Brilliant
"Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable." -Larry Wall
"Where fraternities are not allowed, communism flourishes." -Senator Barry Goldwater
"Education: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." -Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
"The proper goal of education is to get one confused about more interesting things." -Lorrie B. Potters
"Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter." -Mark Twain
"Everybody knows more than anybody." -Lorrie B. Potters
"I thought I had all the answers. It's a good thing I was writing in pencil." -Geof Morgan
"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them." -Umberto Eco
"Trust everyone, but cut the cards." -Anonymous
"Whenever I see a 'Question Authority' bumpersticker, I think, 'says who?'" -Roy Zimmerman
"Unrecorded verbal agreements have a half-life of three months." -Jim Britell
"'She believes things' he said, 'that a mud turtle would blush to believe.'" -H. Allen Smith
"A lying man produces more plausible excuses." -Dave Gordon
"The head of my fan club lives under the Hollywood freeway in a cardboard box" - John Carpenter
"Don't make faces at the crowd when you're being hung." -Dave Gordon
"I persuaded myself that I owed it to my vanity to be interviewed." -John Diamond
"The public yawned in amazement." -James (The Amazing) Randi"
“Of course your parents know which buttons to push.They installed them.”-Mitch Gallaher.
"In a family argument, if it turns out you are right - apologize at once." -Robert A. Heinlein
"Our marriage is like the Electoral College: it works okay if you don't think about it." -Garrison Keillor
"The best thing I can say about my generation is that at least it isn't burdening its children with a tough act to follow." -Andrew Ward
"I now pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution." - The Ship's Captain, The African Queen
"I was raised by a pack of wild corn dogs." -Toni Price
"'Shut up,' Daddy Explained." -Ring Lardner
"Parents once taught their children to talk; today children teach their parents to be quiet." -Talmud
"There was good fishing in the bars, all winter." -Stephen Leacock
"It is our position the benefits to fish from dams may outweigh potential negative aspects. Natural rivers have always presented certain hazards." -The Whatcom County (Washington) Council
"You won't find one fish in a million that has enough sense to come in when it rains." -Robert Benchley
"The books all say that barracuda rarely eat people, but very few barracuda can read." -Dave Barry
"I've never seen turkey being sold as imitation tofu." -Lorrie B. Potters
"It is not immediately obvious that comets are good to eat." -Carl Sagan
"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior." --Leon Kass, advisor to George W. Bush on bioethics
"The biggest enemy is tap water." -Robert S. Morrison, Vice Chairman, Pepsi-Co
"The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly..." -from U.S. Patent 6,004,596, for a crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich
"Airline food has probably done more than Leo Tolstoy to persuade our neighbors to pass up meat." -Steven G. Kellman
"Always store beer in a dark place." -Robert A. Heinlein
"Whatever this stuff was, it sure is sauerkraut by now." -Peter and Lou Berryman
"My experience is that many corporate decisions are arrived at by a process not far removed from consulting sheep entrails." -Cecil Adams
"There's doubt for those with evidence and faith for those with none." -Michael Smith
"In an era of circuses, the one with the most clowns wins." -Richard Kadrey
"There is probably no more gullible group in the world than the scientists of today, according to the scientists of tomorrow." -Robert Benchley
"I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth." -Bill Bryson
"When in doubt, doubt." -John R. Henderson
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
"My problems start where the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect" -Steve Thompson, Yosemite Park official
"He's got muscles in his head he's never even used." -John Prine
"Let me think about that. Ouch!" -Susie Weiner
"Here I was, swimming in paperwork with my hands tied, and out on the street were jerks on parade: unassuming, pleasant, perfectly normal people except that they had an extra bone in their head and less moral sense than God gave badgers." -Garrison Keiller, "The Current Crisis in Remorse"
"You can't fix stupid." -saying of the St. Louis Fire Department
"So many people know the answers before they know the questions." -Judge Thomas Burke, "the man who built Seattle."
"Puddingheads should never grant premises." -Herman Melville
"While the heritability of intelligence is a matter of scientific controversy, stupidity comes down in an unbroken line." -William DeAndrea
"The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -A.W. Griswold
"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late." -Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Any man can learn to learn from the wise, once he can find them, but learn to learn from a fool and the whole world's your faculty. -John Ciardi
"Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." -Bob Seger
"It is well not to know the future. If one did, often one wouldn't go." -Harvey Manning
"In retrospect, Mr Feingold's vote was largely predictable." -Frank Bruno, New York Times Reporter
"I'm not trying to PREDICT the future. I'm just trying to PREVENT it." -Ray Bradbury
"There is no emissary for an evil deed." -David Twersky
"Every sinner has a future...Every saint has a past." -Kinky Friedman
"There's too many strong to do nothing wrong and not enough strong to do right." -Dave Gordon, "Slip of the Hand"
"To our friends, the good guys. And to our enemies, the bad guys. And to the hope that someday we'll be able to tell which are which." -Keith Laumer (slightly edited)
"If the bad guys don't get you, baby, then the good guys will." -Buffe Saint-Marie
"Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications." - John Ashcroft, 1997
"In terms of the American taxpayers contribution, [$1.7 billion] is it for the US. The American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this." - USAID Director Andrew Natsios, on rebuilding Iraq, April 23, 2003. When the cost estimate was raised to $166 billion, Natsios' statement was deleted from the State Department's website.
"A new organization of uncertain makeup using the name 'Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge' plans to sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole... Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus has been notified and security precautions are being co-ordinated worldwide." - from the CIA Weekly Situation Report on International Terrorism, presented to President Ford in December 1974. It was classified secret for 25 years and blacked out when the report was declassified.
"The FBI, however well-intentioned, is not in the business of providing emergency road services, and might well have better things to do when listening in than respond with such services..." -Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturning an FBI request to eavesdrop via cars' onboard navigational systems.
"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority." -Mayor Giuliani, New York Times, March 17, 1994
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -Thomas Paine, "Dissertation on the First Principles of Government," 1795
"This was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways.” -Secretary of Defense Donald M. Rumsfeld, discussing the Office of Strategic Influence, 11/18/02
"THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE... We as members of the Senate, have come to look forward to the quality food prepared by Jean Pierre and Kerri, as well as the quiet camradery (sic) of our fellow Senators in a private setting." -Washington State Senator Don Benton (R-Vancouver) in a letter signed by 35 of his fellow senators, complaining about plans to close the Senate's private dining room, and eliminate their French chefs. March 2002.
"I want you to know that I can prophesy. I can communicate with the dead." -Dorothy B. Pelote, Georgia State Representative, September 4, 2001
"There is a very fine line between freedom of speech and censorship." -Anne Steele, FBI spokesperson, May 2001
"Democrats taking over the committees in the Senate is the equivalent of the Bolsheviks taking over from the czar during the Russian revolution." -Marshall Wittmann, the Hudson Institute, May 2001
"Truth is very scarce in official documents. It is not expected by the public, and it would be utterly thrown away upon Congress." -J. Ross Browne, U.S. Treasury official, 1858
"Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced." -The Connecticut Courant reacting to Thomas Jefferson's election to the presidency
"The heavens may fall, the earth may be consumed, but the right of a congressman to lie and defame remains inviolate." -George Creel, 1920
"This bill isn't going anywhere. This (hearing) seemed to me to be held for campaign purposes so I brought my signs and bumper stickers, but I misinterpreted the context." -Representative Barney Frank
"There needs to be some plan whereby the unequal and sometimes crushing burden of medical expenses can be distributed." -Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, 1932
"When you deny something your power is much more conspicuous than when you approve it." -Vladimir Voinovich
"If God is in the details, then the Code of Federal Regulations and especially the Federal Register are leading candidates for secular deification." -Joe Morehead
"If a pen is lost, a certificate to that effect must be furnished...and filed with the custodian. This certificate must give in detail specific circumstances attending the loss." -U.S. Geological Survey memo, 1913
"You don't want to read the Book of Revelation and the federal budget in one sitting. It is pretty scary." -Gene Goldsmith, (former) state representative, 42nd District of Washington
"If deeds and consequences could be thus equated, our view of human nature would have to be more pessimistic than it is." -David M. Potter
"Not to criticize the Creator, but you have to think when he created Man on--what was it, Friday?--his mind was definitely on the weekend." -Cecil Adams
"I bet you came from the wrong end of the primoridal ooze." -Chris Chandler
"It is in the absence of others that I love others most." -Scott Condon
"The main quality that sets humans apart from other animals is the human desire to set itself apart from other animals." - Peter Berryman
"You can't win the human race." -Mike Marker
"We are each, in the end, a minority of one." -Jane Kurtz
"Maybe its only when we're babies and when we're dead that other people see that we're only human with nothing but promises at one end and regrets at the other." -Robert W. Campbell
"Basically, all we are is mobile stomachs." -Jack Horner, paleontologist
Law (See also Government)
"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media." -Governor Sarah Palin, October 31, 2008.
"What the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years" Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) on the Military Commissions Act, which he then voted for.
“The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them." - House Mahority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX)
“In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitiations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." - Alberto Gonzales, White House Counsel, on the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War
“No reasonable speaker of modern English would find it likely that Wal-Mart would identify itself using wal-martsucks.com.” -Daniel H. Bernstein, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. MacLeod.
"President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it." -Ann Beeson, ACLU associate legal director
"I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned." - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explaining why he will not recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney, with whom Scalia has recently dined and spent a weekend duck-hunting.
"The Patriot Act was not meant to be just for terrorism." Mark Corallo, Justice Department spokesman.
"Well, you can fool some people some of the time, but you can't fool people with subpoena power all that often." -Matthew Herrington
" The law is like rope...useful, necessary, strong, but it can be bent and twisted into all kinds of shapes depending on the occasion." - W.P. Kinsella
" Clowns were humanity's first 'policemen.'" -Joy Thompson
"Sometimes we may rely too much on law and Constitution and statutes." -Robert Ray, special prosecutor
"State troopers will go on driving Fury IIs until some car company puts out a car called Kill." -Donald E. Westlake
"If a man stopped me in the street and demanded of me my watch, I should refuse to give it to him. If he threatened to take it by force, I feel I should, though not a fighting man, do my best to protect it. If, on the other hand, he should assert his intention of trying to obtain it by means of an action in any court of law, I should take it out of my pocket and hand it to him, and think I had got off cheaply." -Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men On The Bummel
"Copyright law does not protect sightings. However, copyright law will protect your photo (or other depiction) of your sighting of Elvis." -Copyright Office, FAQs
"Drug conspiracy cases may be just the answer for budget-conscious (government) agencies." -Gregory D. Lee, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 10/94
"How dare you stand there with every evidence of a criminal nature showing in your attitude and demeanor and conceal from the authorities the reason for your arrest?" -Don Marquis
"Don't write with your mouse." -Andy Bunn
"Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library." -Barbara Tuchman
"Only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find." -Roy Tennant
"If the Smithsonian is the nation's attic, the (National) Archives is the nation's sock drawer." -Linton Weeks
"Google lives in the gray area of copyright infringement, but the Internet is the modern-day Wild West and, until someone makes a fuss, it's a free-for-all.." -Nisa Asokan
"Historically, terrorists and spies have used libraries to plan and carry out activities that threaten our national security." -Department of Justice
"No offense to the American Library Association, but we just don't care." -Attorney General John Ashcroft, stating that the FBI is not interested in searching library records.
“I’d like to get to a state where people think that if you’ve Googled something, you’ve researched it, and otherwise you haven’t and that’s it.” -Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google
"We must conceive of the library as a channel through which books pass on their way from the publisher to the incinerator." -G. Hardin
"I no longer have any encyclopedias, any dictionaries, or any reference materials anywhere in my office, whatsoever, I don't need them. I've stopped using all reference materials because you don't need it. All you need is a search engine." - Secretary of State Colin Powell
"If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen." -Roger Rosenblatt
"Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librariansare the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides." - James Quinn
"Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by packrats and vandalized nightly." -Roger Ebert
"I'm a frustrated librarian. Instead of a banjo picker or a riverboat pilot I'd like to be a man who sits behind a counter and says: 'shhh!'." -John Hartford
"(Librarians have) got their radical factions, like the Ruby Ridge or Waco types." -Judith Platt, spokesperson for the Association of American Publishers, 2001
"Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?" -Fran Lebowitz
"In 1988 the United States spent 15 billion dollars on horses and 6.4 billion dollars on libraries." -Library of Congress Information Bulletin 6/15/92
"Historians make distrustful mates and scarce can trust each others dates." -Rhymes of Research
"I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud." -Kurt Vonnegut, jr. Cat's Cradle
" Even if we don't know
what there is to live for, we all want to carry on living." -John
Diamond"
"More flesh, more worms." -Rabbi Hillel
"Life is so dangerous that there's nothing to fear." -Libby Roderick
"So good to be alive when the eulogies are read." -Phil Ochs
"I used to feel sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met a man who was dead." -John R. Christianson
"Life really does go on whether you're enjoying it or not." -Kendall Morse
"In lives as in works of art there are few masterpieces." -Michael Novak
"Life is not fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all." -William Goldman
"Life is lethal but the cure is worse." -Zeke Hoskin
"Don't wake the dead. They won't like it." -Michael Avallone
Literature (See also Writers)
"If it's for kids, it's a fairy tale. If it's for grown-ups, it's magic realism!" -Colson Whitehead
"You can't tell a book by it's movie." Louis A Safian
"The more people who die in Chapter Two, the fewer names you have to keep track of in Chapter Three." -Kurt True
"The road to hell is paved with adverbs." -Stephen King
"I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow." -General Wesley Clark.
"Unless you count Saint Paul, book tours are a recent phenomenon." -Lawrence Block
" Writing well is the best revenge." -Sylvia Tyson
"It was not the most intelligible piece ever written, but it had words in it." -H. Allen Smith
"Even the fictional dead deserve respect ." -Rob Reuland
"When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'" - Hilaire Belloc
"When I see a book that's supposed to be 'gut-crunching suspense' I always ask myself, do I sincerely want my guts crunched this week?" -William DeAndrea
"What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?" -Rex Stout
"The detective story developed as a form of science fiction." -Aaron Marc Stein
"A novel is a machine for generating interpretations." -Umberto Eco
"It is estimated that electronic publication will cost as much as paper publication in 1996, and will cost less thereafter." -J.W. Senders, et al. 1975.
"Beware of a man of one book." -English proverb
"I don't have time to read nonfiction." -W.P. Kinsella
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time." -Joachim Krueger
“Almost all dogs don't talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored." -Terry Pratchett
"Mankind has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table." - W. Somerset Maugham
"The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the n-th power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases." - an anonymous English judge, quoted by Sir Josiah Stamp, 1929
"In numbers there is quantity." -Richard Connolly
"A lottery is a taxation on all of the fools in creation." -Henry Fielding
"Data is the plural of anecdote." -Senator Patrick Moynihan
"There is no better fun than community singing." -George Bernard Shaw
"When in doubt, sing 'John Henry.'" -Bob Gibson
"Folk music is a bunch of fat people." -Bob Dylan
"American movie makers have always held a deep reverence for composers whose works lie in the public domain." -Cecil Adams
"If any person has sung or composed against another person a song which is slanderous and insulting he shall be clubbed to death." -The Twelve Tables (first laws of Rome, 494 B.C.)
"In any invasion you'll find at least one soldier hitting the beach at H-Hour with a banjo slung over his shoulder." -Ernie Pyle
"Even sailors have a right to sing the blues." -Gordon Bok
"Soon, nasal laments of untrustworthy lovers met in bars filled the car with the sorrows of trying to get through life while unutterably stupid." -Donald E. Westlake
"If singing the blues is some kind of gift, next time I'd rather have a toaster." -Bob Snider, "Ordinary Day"
"There was no song on the radio too stupid for my heart." -Walter Mosley
"Both films are offered for preservation on the grounds that they preserve Sinatra. Why not preserve a good case of the mumps instead?" -Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, 1943
"Don't let me catch you laughing when the jukebox cries." -Kinky Friedman
"It just never occurs to me until it's too late that Learn Banjo in Five Minutes a Day means five minutes a day for the rest of my life." -John Diamond
"This next song is a little more direct and main stream. It's called 'My Heart Is Not A Poodle.'" -Tom Robbins
"I have never known a member of royalty, although I did once meet Fats Domino." -Bob Greene
"13 percent of households whose residents have never played an instrument still own one." -American Demographics 3/96
"There are five basic emotional states an autoharp can express: Sad, Happy, Angry, Peaceful, and Out-of-Tune." -Tom Schroeder
"More lemons. Oh great." -Richard Posner
"No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." -Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
"We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice." -I.B. Singer
"It must just be some local fisherman out for a pleasure cruise alone at night through shark-infested waters." -William Goldman
"We just keep coming up with new ways of going down." -Eric Bibb
"The light at the end of the tunnel was nothing but a burglar's torch." -John C. Fogerty
"Who can resist Crackerjack, in the final evaluation?" -Jean Shepherd
"I'm still here, how 'bout that? I may have lost my lunchbox but I'm still here." -John Hartford
"The green is worth the gray." -Val D'Alessio
"Spring weather was usually even more dismal than fall weather, only better lighted." -Annie Dillard, describing life around Bellingham, WA
"I never knew the sky could hold so many shades of gray." -Linda Allen, Bellingham, WA songwriter
"He looked like Gandhi, dreamed like Edison, and planned like Custer." -Jeff Taylor
"It is the nature of emergencies to be inconvenient." -Terri Weiner
"I didn't go immediately, of course, as I hadn't made up enough reasons." -Don Berry
"As master plans go, this was the equivalent of a guy on the Titanic calling room service for more ice." -Jerry Izenberg
Pseudoscience, Flying Saucers, etc.
"The hardest thing about being a skeptic is maintaining a level of politeness.” - Phil Platt
"The moon landings were real but the moon LAUNCHINGS were faked." -pesch
"Fairies, assuming for the sake of argument that they exist, are not within the protection of the law ofmurder." - Granville Williams, Law Quarterly Review, 1949
"There may be aliens visiting Earth, but I can't figure out why they only seem to abduct the schizophrenics." -Martha A. Churchill
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket." -Isaac Asimov
"When science falters, spooks are hypothesized." -Harvey Manning
"It is difficult, if not impossible, to use UFO research for tenure." -Mark Rodeghier
"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right." -Robert L. Park
"It is unquestionable that certain words and ceremonies will effectually destroy a flock of sheep, if administered with a sufficient portion of arsenic." -Voltaire
"It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid." -Stephen Fry
"Even for those of us who don't see black helicopters under our beds, conspiracy theory has become the horoscope of the late 1990s." -Mark Dery
"Bigfoot then, seems to be an alien shape-shifting being that may possibly be able to slip into alternate dimensions or worlds. We think." -Eric Beckjord
"The graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely. But sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody." -Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies, slightly paraphrased.
"Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?" -Frank Scully
"An adventure is a sign of incompetence." -Vilhjalmur Stefansson
"Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest of materials." -Gerald White Johnson
"Monsters work seven days a week and don't take vacations." -Geoffrey Canada
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." -Robert A. Heinlein
"Desperate times call for desperate analogies." -John Diamond
"Can a man kindle fire in his bosom without burning his clothes?" -Proverbs 6.27
"'Listen, three-eyes,' he said, 'don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." -Douglas Adams
"Let Lawyers, Parsons, and Physicians loose, to rob, impose on, and to kill the World." -Henry Fielding, in Tom Thumb
"If you will only consent to being saved by an angel, you may have a long time to wait." -Marc Edmunson
"Lightning never strikes twice at the same time." -Elaine Stallworth
"All things are never equal." -Robert L. Wolke
"Sometimes you saw it twice and it's still too short." -Howard Mohr
"Little things come in small packages." -Mrs Emile Renan
"The bigger the front, the bigger the back." -Loudon Wainwright III
"Surrounding yourself with dwarfs does not make you a giant." -Yiddish proverb
"Every time I ask someone for the moon, it gets larger and farther away." -James Thurber, Many Moons
"He drank to drown sorrow, the strongest swimmer in the world" -Henry Lawson
"It's a sad man...who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company." -Bruce Springsteen
“I don't even think you could put photographs in newspapers in those days." -Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), referring to 1787.
“You can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example, you think about something and your cellphone could whisper the answer into your ear" -Larry Page, co-founder of Google. February 2004.
"Everything that cuts wood prefers to cut flesh." -Zeke Hoskin
"How could anything so sublimely complicated not be the simple answer?" -John Diamond
"The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second." -Douglas Adams
"Sooner or later everything becomes a third-class lever." -Terri Weiner
"We would like to be rich enough to throw our venerable typewriter out the window and buy a brand newone of the same make, and throw it out of the window, too." -Arthur Perry
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." -Ani DiFranco
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." -Pablo Picasso
"TiVo is god in my household." -Michael Powell, Chairman of the FCC, January 2003.
"Books are overrated. Watch TV." -proposed ABC advertising slogan, dropped at the request of affiliated stations
"I am convinced that Mars was once inhabited by rational human beings like ourselves, who had themisfortune, some thousands of years ago, to invent television." -Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1951
"It's not the size of your TV that counts. It's what you do with it." -Coco Love Alcorn
"Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda. Entertainment without moral passion is television." -Rita Mae Brown
"All television is children's television." -Richard P. Adler
"Thank you. You've been a great laugh track." -Kermit the Frog
"Confound him, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small pieces." -Plautus
"Pretending about the past isn't pragmatism, it's madness." -Mat Coward
"All these clocks and no time." -Jeanette Winterson
"It is never too late to ask what time it is." -Henry Slesar
"Good news doesn't travel in the middle of the night." -Richard Brautigan
"It's been Tuesday all week." -Greg Brown
"The worst beginning is better than the best ending." -Sholem Aleichem
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order." -The Doctor (British version)
"Time isn't a clockwork thing." -James Powell
War, Military, Terrorism, etc.
"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. The 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." -Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953.
"It is irresponsible to suggest we shouldn't have that debate (about the military), that we should ignore what is a major, major concern." -Dick Cheney, 2000
"For security reasons, there are no security reports." -Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. Iraqi occupation government) webpage 4/26/04
"One of the things we don't want to do is destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country." -Tom Brokaw
"Why not go to war for oil? We need oil." -Ann Coulter
"It's a shame the French are not with us, as we could get them to advise the Iraqis on the best means of surrender." -Congressman Pete King (R-NY)
"Here comes a minivan full of tourists. I mean terrorists." -John Hartford
“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." - Ann Coulter
"Already, the media myth-making machine is spewing out alarming reports of the 'shadowy force' of Taleban 'fundamentalists' in Darth Vaderish black turbans who want to impose 'purist Islamic' rule. That's scary stuff. But it's not true, and may even be dangerous in this case. Because the Taleban could be the best thing that's happened to Afghanistan in years, and they are counting on Western support for their efforts to restore Afghanistan's independence, and free it from drug smugglers and visiting terrorists. If the policy makers get too hung up on those black turbans, they're going to miss some white hats underneath." -Nancy deWolf Smith, Wall Street Journal, 1995
"A typical U.S. navy cruiser puts to sea with no less than 26 tonnes of manuals for its weapon systems." -John W. Grace
"When you get right down to it, you have to protect the manliness of war." -General Robert Barrow, USMC
"The fist starves the hand." -Noah Ben Shea
"Essentially the United States is the big daddy rabbit of NATO." -Admiral R. James Woolsey
"We don't win unless CNN says we win." -General George Shalikashvili, Chairman of the US JointChiefs of Staff
"When a war is over neither the dead nor the living can ever go home." -Archie Binns
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment or diversions but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." -Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations
"The creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times." -Benjamin Franklin
"This particular American view of 'success' ...as near as I can make it out, is the ability to keep out of jail." -Charles Dudley Warner, 1896
"He owns a private yacht that he can sail on any time, because he never wants to miss the boat again."-Maury Meulheisen, 'Mr Bainbridge'
"Poverty buys me stranger things than money." -Ethel Romig Fuller
"Money can't buy off the lightning." -Stephen King
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attraction asthat from which they draw their gains." -Thomas Jefferson
"Wealth is a great predicter of topography." -Patrick Irelan
"I know of no word, other than possibly 'toilet,' that has more euphemisms than 'fired.'" -Will Manley
"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within." Leonard Cohen
"Even living legends have to live." -Shel Silverstein
"Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Boney fingers." -Hoyt Axton
"I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." -Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men In A Boat
"Bumming and gestating look a lot alike." -Daniel Pinkwater
"It is far better to sit idle than to just do nothing at all." -Joen Ellen Kanze
"I'm perfectly capable of wasting my own time -- I no longer allow others to do it for me." -Mitchell Fox
"You don't live in an ideal world, largely because there are people like you in it." -Scott Adams
"Nature bats last." -Kinky Friedman
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -Anne Frank
"I've seen the greatest minds of my generation writing ad copy." -Chris Chandler
"An editor's job is to take something great and make it good." -Kinky Friedman
"Much is forgiven anyone who relieves the desperate boredom of the working press." -William F. Weld, former Governor of Massachusetts
"A writer who claims to have a small ego is either not telling the truth, or lying." -William DeAndrea
"Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and...you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money." -Edna Buchanan
"All babies are incoherent, but they grow up. That is the principle difference between an infant and a poet." -Sharyn McCrumb
"I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity." -G.K Chesterton
"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it." -Oscar Wilde
"It's fun to be immortal. Too bad it doesn't last." -Terri Weiner
"These young people are really with it." -Tony Bennett
"I am too old and stiff-necked to change my memories now." -Willard R. Espy
"You are about to be told, again, that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what this country does to its valuable natural resources?" -Utah Phillips, addressing a high school class.
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