When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.

 Edward R Murrow

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

 George Orwell

The believable lie is often the best defense in court. Where would lawyers be if all we had to work with was the truth?

 William Lashner

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

 George W Bush

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

 Tom Stoppard

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.

 Herb Caen

Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

 Unknown

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

 Miss Piggy

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

 Timothy Leary

I caught her full on the shoulder, jarring her grip free of me, and away she went, canoe and all, the gunwale rasping against my legs as it was whirled downstream. One glimpse I had of the white water foaming over those long beautiful legs, and then she was gone. Damnable altogether, cruel waste of good womanhood, but what would you? Better one should go than two, and greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down someone else’s life for his own.

 Brigadier-general Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.: Chevalier, Legion of Honour, U.S. Medal of Honor, etc., etc.

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.

 John Cleese

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

 Rita Mae Brown

This administration is doing everything we can to end the stalemate in an efficient way. We're making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end.

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

 Laurence J Peter

I still miss being out under that Texas sky, the party and picnic atmosphere drive-ins had, and dammit, I even miss that foul mosquito coil you bought at the concession to ward off the little bloodsuckers. You were supposed to light it and in theory the smoke from it had something in it the mosquitoes hated, and they wouldn't come around. This bit of advertisement was in line with the drive-in previews. It lied. You lit that thing and put it on your dash, and about the only way it stopped a mosquito was if the ignorant sonofabitch sat on the coil and caught fire.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

 HL Mencken

Just at this modish moment, everybody under thirty and his idiot brother wants to be a film director. And why not? Let it be whispered that film directing (the very job itself) is often grossly overrated. Good paintings don’t come from a bad painter, but good motion pictures are often signed by directors of the most perfect incompetence. Writers, editors, and actors do his work for him. His only task is to speak the words “action” and “cut” and go home with the money. Such a man can, as we have seen, wing his way through fifty years of film directing and never be found out.

 Orson Wells

I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.

 Shelley Winters

My problem with Chandelier Wells was not her work, my problem was with her person. She was a celebrity, and most celebrities inhabit nothing beyond the universe of their own desires, which is a swell definition of boring.

 Stephen Greenleaf

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

 Ring Lardner

I hope one day I can clone another Dick Cheney. Then I won't have to do anything.

 George W Bush

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

 Jim Hightower

I might beweep a bit too much my outcast state, but there are admitted joys in this job. Chief among them is cashing a retainer check. I also like cross-examining fools, reading deposition transcripts—that’s a little sick, I know, but there it is—and instructing my secretary to hold all calls. I especially like the way people recoil when I tell them I’m a lawyer. Try it sometime at a party or on the street, tell someone you’re a lawyer and watch as they dance away. It almost makes me want to work for the IRS.

 William Lashner

Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

 Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

The Blue Hawaii was cold and too sweet, but it looked good in the glass. The thing I love about a blue drink is that it isn’t pretending to be anything other than a prissy, made-up concoction for people who can’t drink their whiskey straight. A cocktail with the courage of its convictions.

 William Lashner

Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.*

 Chuckles the Clown

*Translation: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.

I can cheerfully say I don’t give a damn. I don’t have to believe in my client; I just have to believe in the legal tender he’s tendering. A lawyer is really nothing more than a mechanic. Bring in your life, with all its troubles, and I’ll open the hood, poke around, see if any legal tricks at my disposal can fix the problem. It isn’t personal, I don’t make judgements about the quality of the car. I just roll up my sleeves. When was the last time your auto mechanic took it personally when your engine needed a valve job? He shakes his head, sure, and clucks his tongue, and says all the right things when he tells you the bad news, like an oncologist with really dirty hands, but trust me, he doesn’t take it personally. Instead he takes Visa or MasterCard.

 William Lashner

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

 Franklin D Roosevelt

President Bush gave the Medal of Freedom to Muhammad Ali yesterday. Yeah, it was sort of embarrassing. He could barely speak, he wasn't making any sense ... but Muhammad was very understanding about it.

 Jay Leno

Speak when you are angry  and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.

 Laurence J Peter

In the beginning there was nothing. God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.

 Ellen DeGeneres

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

 Orson Welles

The police brass also believed, deep down, that the goat very likely deserved what he was getting--not for the stated crime but for a dozen others they assumed he had got away with earlier in his career. A narrow, mean view of life, Teddy thought, that came from the hundred-year domination of the department by the Irish, who knew that we are all sinners and must pay for it sooner or later. It was a sentiment he didn't share, not least because he had been raised Italian, among people who also believed we are all sinners but that there is no good reason not to get away with it forever.

 Vincent Patrick

You know what a promise is to a politician? It's what a dog turd is to a dog, something that you drop every so often that's got no practical use.

 Dick Lochte

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

 Dan Quayle

It is sobering to remember that for four years this man was one gunshot away from the Presidency.

 John Varley

He was a nose-picker, and about the best I've ever seen at it. He didn't do it like a lady will do, like she ain't really doing it, but just scratching, and her finger will shoot in and scoop out the prize and she'll flick it away before you can say, "Hey, ain't that a booger?" He didn't even do it like some men do, which is honest, but unpolite. They'll turn sort of to the side and get in there after it in a businesslike manner, but you don't really have to witness the work or what come of it. No, Checkers Chauncey went about digging his front-on and open. And when he got what he was looking for, he always held it up just to see, I guess, if he'd accidentally found something other than what he expected, and when he thumped it away you have to be kind of fast on your feet, because he didn't care who or what it stuck to.

 Joe R Lansdale

Note from Lee: Varley picks the quotes, too.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"

 Quentin Crisp

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

 Mark Twain

The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of the day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick thriving for the anal gulch.

 Joe R Lansdale

History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

 Ronald Reagan

Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.

 John Lithgow

There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again.

 George W Bush

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to believe.

 Laurence J Peter

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

 Blaise Pascal

Getting caught is the mother of invention.

 Robert Byrne

To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

 Ambrose Bierce

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

 Dave Barry

Certain people have said that the world is like a calm pond, and that any time a person does even the smallest thing, it is as if a stone has dropped into the pond, spreading circles of ripples further and further out, until the entire world has been changed by one tiny action. If this is true, then the book you are reading now is the perfect thing to drop into a pond. The ripples will spread across the surface of the pond and the world will change for the better, with one less dreadful story for people to read and one more secret hidden at the bottom of a pond, where most people never think of looking.

 Lemony Snicket

Now here's some sad information coming out of Washington. According to reports, President Bush may be drinking again. And I thought, “Well, why not? He's got everybody else drinking."

 David Letterman

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

 Abraham Lincoln

The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.

 John Adams

"My father spent the greater part of his life campaigning to have respelt those words that look as though they are spelt wrongly but aren't."

"Such as ..."

"Oh, skiing, vacuum, freest, eczema, gnu, diarrhea, that sort of thing. He also thought that 'abbreviation' was too long for its meaning, that 'monosyllabic' should have one syllable, 'dyslexic' should be renamed 'O' and 'unspeakable' should be respelt 'unsfxpxkable.'"

 Jasper Fforde

The Nursery Crime Division offices were cramped and untidy. No. They were worse than that. They had gone through cramped and untidy, paused briefly at small and shabby before ending up at pokey and damp.

 Jasper Fforde

Q: Your Wikipedia entry defines you as author, screenwriter, and accordionist. Is that how you would describe yourself?

A: I find that nothing makes people back away faster at a social gathering than "accordionist." Except perhaps "screenwriter." And, even "author" always makes people nervous, so I usually say "writer."

 Daniel Handler

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

 Voltaire

I'm like King Midas in reverse. Everything I touch turns to shit.

 Tony Soprano

I have a fwiend in Wome called Biggus Dickus. Stwike him, Centuwion, vewy woughly! And have him fwown in the Awena! I want him fighting wabid animals wiffin the week! Now... would anyone ewse wike to make fun of my fwiend, Biggus... Dickus?

 Pontius Pilate

Spring had choked off pretty much for good, it seemed. It was late April and unseasonably hot, like two rats in caps and sweaters fucking in a wool sock under a sun lamp.

 Joe R Lansdale

Life's like a bowl of chili in a strange cafe. Sometimes it's pretty spicy and tasty. Other times, it tastes like shit.

 Jim Bob Luke

I didn't have long to wonder as a knock at the door revealed an untidy man wearing a hat named Wyatt.

"Sorry," he said sheepishly, apologizing for the misrelated grammatical construction almost immediately. "Wyatt is my name, not the hat's."

"I kind of figured that," I replied.

Wooden and worn with use, he was holding a clipboard.

"Oh, bother!" he said in the manner of someone who had just referred to George Eliot as "he" in a room full of English professors. "I've done it again!"

"Really, I don't mind," I repeated. "What can I do for you?"

"You're very kind. As a Character Exchange Program member, I would like to ask you to get yourself into Reading." He stopped and his shoulders sagged. "No, I'm not the Character Exchange Program member, you are. And you need to get into Reading."

"Sure. Do you have an address for me?"

Dog-eared and grubby, he handed me a note from his clipboard.

"Don't worry," I said before he could apologize again. "I understand."

His condition was almost certainly permanent.

"The last Character Exchanger didn't take it seriously at all. Had to send him dusty and covered in asphalt on the road out of here."

He thanked me, and small, brown and furry, the man with the hat named Wyatt raised it and vanished.

 Thursday Next

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

 Will Rogers

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

 Thomas Paine

Thursday, this is for your own good. You told me you heard them yourself, and officers Hurdyew, Tolkein, and Lissning heard you talking and listening to someone in the upstairs corridor.

 Jasper Fforde

Capitalists are hanged by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader knight in search of the True Cross returns from Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes, inside of which is a plague-infested mouse.

 Dave Robicheaux

“My father taught me that. He had simple admonitions: 'Feed your animals before you feed yourself ... Take care of your tools and they'll take care of you ... Put your shotgun through the fence, then crawl after it.' My favorite was 'Never trust a white person black people don't like.'"

All the meteorologists predicted Katrina would hit New Orleans head-on, at category 5 wind speeds of 175 mph. No knowledgeable person had any doubt about the consequences. New Orleans would have been nothing but a smudge in the storm's aftermath, the levees reduced to serpentine traces in the silt. Instead, the storm shifted toward the northeast, and dropped in velocity by 35 mph, reducing itself to a category 4 storm by landfall.

Two days after the city was flooded, the president stated, on television, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." The disingenuousness of the statement, or its disconnection from reality, is, to my mind, beyond comprehension.

I was on a seismograph drill barge during Hurricane Audrey in 1957 and, as a news reporter, I covered Hurricane Hilda when it hit Louisiana in 1964. But nothing I ever experienced compares with the suffering of the people in Orleans and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and southern Mississippi during recent weeks. That the elderly and the infirm could drown in retirement homes and hospitals in the U.S. has forced us into an introspection that I hope will lead people from dismay to anger.

For the rest of my life, however, I want to remember not only the faces of Katrina's victims but the images of the Coast Guard rescuers hanging from cables under helicopters; firefighters and cops who threaded boats through the darkness while being shot at; the medical personnel who used hand ventilators to keep their patients alive for six days; the soldiers and ministers and ordinary people who gave up all thought of themselves in service to their fellow human beings. In their anonymity, they glow with the aura of Byzantine saints.

 James Lee Burke

We're all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

 Dan Quayle

It is sobering to remember that for four years this man was one gunshot away from the Presidency.

 John Varley

They dropped me off by the side of the road, and I thanked them before running up the street. It was already quite dark and the streetlamps were on. It didn't look like the world was about to end in twenty-six minutes, but then I don't suppose it ever does.

 Tuesday Next

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

 Robert A Heinlein

Yesterday President Bush made his fifth visit to the area that received the most damage from Hurricane Katrina. In other words, the White House.

 Conan O'Brien

Hurricane Rita is supposed to make landfall in Texas, which is good for Barbara Bush because she can insult survivors closer to home.

 Bill Maher

Bush is keeping track of Hurricane Rita as it hits his home state of Texas. That's Bush's worst nightmare: an electric chair with no power.

 Jay Leno

The president believes the government should be limited not in size, Jon, but in effectiveness. In terms of effectiveness, this is the most limited government we've ever had.

I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating.

 George W Bush

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

 Jim Hightower

There's no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.

 Joe R Lansdale

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

 Emo Philips

An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.

 Tom Wolfe

Now, I kid, but seriously, Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you anymore. There's no more money to spend. You used up all of that. You can't start another war because you also used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people.

Yeah, listen to your mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit card's maxed out, and no one is speaking to you: mission accomplished! Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service. And the oil company. And the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or spaceman?!

Now, I know what you're saying. You're saying that there's so many other things that you, as president, could involve yourself in…Please don't. I know, I know, there's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela, and eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote. But, sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man.

Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes.

On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two Trade Centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans…Maybe you're just not lucky!

I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you, and what he's saying is, “Take a hint.”

 Bill Maher

Uncle Junior and I, we had our problems with the Business. But I never should have razzed him about eating pussy. This whole war could have been averted. Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this.

 Tony Soprano

It's time for the human race to enter the solar system.

 Dan Quayle

It is sobering to remember that for four years this man was one gunshot away from the Presidency.

 John Varley

The real horror is not in the shadows, but in that little twisted world inside our own skulls.

 Robert Bloch

This guy looked like a grown-up, but actually he had the mind of a dumb little kid inside. Like that guy in Sling Blade, or the president.

 Christopher Moore

If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them. The key is to find someone whose insanity dovetails with your own.

 Christopher Moore

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

 Don Marquis

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

 Kurt Vonnegut

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

 Winston Churchill

Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment.

 George W Bush

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

 Jim Hightower

“Let’s go, let’s go!” cried Moxie.

“Yes, let’s!” added Pepsi, who promptly took one step, fell directly on his flat head, and managed to bloody his nose.

Frito rolled his eyes heavenward. It was going to be a long epic.

 Bored of the Rings

Arabian horses everywhere are living in fear, again, that Michael Brown might soon be coming back to manage them.

 Email read on CNN

This is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection - or at least amelioration - against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological. It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.