For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom?" Blessed at the merciful" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

Kurt Vonnegut

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

Kurt Vonnegut

And how come people in countries we invade can't fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Kurt Vonnegut

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

Kurt Vonnegut

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't the TV news, is it? Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

Kurt Vonnegut

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

Kurt Vonnegut

I don't know what to do! I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy! I am as giddy as a drunken man! A merry Christmas to
everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo! I don't know what day of the month it is. I don't know how long I've been among the
Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby! Never mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby! Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!

Ebenezer Scrooge

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, "If what he said was good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"

Kurt Vonnegut

Trying to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy—he plunged us into war.

Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then the FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped.

Kurt Vonnegut

I was coming home from kindergarten--well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves.

Ellen DeGeneres

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.

John Cleese

Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

Thomas Harris

TWENTY-THREE years after the birth of what became AOL, a decade after Yahoo's IPO, eight years after the dawn of Google, five years after the Time-Warner/AOL merger, a year after the founding of YouTube, all but the most calcified corners of the media world (what's black and white and read all over … ) awoke to the fact that the Internet was not just at the doorstep, it had unpacked its bag, raided the liquor cabinet and taken the family for a joyride down to Baja.

Sometimes I enter prayer and I intend to prolong it, but then I hear a child crying, and I shorten my prayer thinking of the distress of the child's mother.

Muhammad

It reminded her of her ex-husband, Jason, now retired from the LAPD and living in Idaho near lots of other coppers who had fled to wilderness locales. Places where cops only write on their arrest reports under race of suspect either "white" or "landscaper."

Joseph Wambaugh

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Bertrand Russell

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

Cary Grant

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Stephen Jay Gould

If you worry about the future of Iraq, don't. It will remain what it's always been: a violent, angry land of warring tribes only occasionally beaten and bludgeoned into submission by a homegrown despot like Saddam Hussein.

If you worry about added turmoil and instability in the Middle East, pull some of those departing American forces back to Kuwait and leave them there on standby. Then redirect thought, energy and effort into salvaging Afghanistan, finding Osama bin Laden, saving Lebanon, negotiating peace between Israel and its enemies, rebuilding the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and, oh yes, ending the uncivil war between Republicans and Democrats.

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there's only one way to leave Iraq: Load our people up on their trucks and tank transporters and Bradleys and Humvees and head for the border. Now.

Joseph L Galloway

I do not know why ghosts feel solid to me, why their touch is warm instead of cold, yet they walk through walls or dematerialize at will. It's a mystery that I most likely will never solve—like the popularity of aerosol cheese in a can or Mr. William Shatner's brief post-Star Trek turn as a lounge singer. 

Dean Koontz

Unlike God, Victor Frankenstein saw no value in giving his creations free will. Like all utopians, he preferred obedience to independent thought.

Dean Koontz

Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.

Groucho Marx

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy, the United States Of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Naval and Air Forces of the Empire of Japan. It is obvious that planning the attack began many weeks ago, during the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American military forces, I regret to tell you that over three thousand American lives have been lost. No matter how long it may take us to over come this pre-meditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. Because of this unprovoked, dastardly attack by Japan, I ask that the congress declare a state of War.

Franklin D Roosevelt

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

In western Kansas, amid an ocean of green wheat, two sociopaths invade a home looking for a money cache that doesn't exist and end up butchering a farm family whose members possess all the virtues we admire. The story shocks us and captivates the entire country because the farm family is us. A black ex-football player appears to be dead-bang guilty of slicing up two innocent people but skates because the jury hates the Los Angeles Police Department. A female culinary celebrity who profits from insider stock-trading information takes the bounce for Enron executives who ruined the lives of tens of thousands of retirees. That's the nature of theater.

James Lee Burke

Nihilism is best done by professionals.

Iggy Pop

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it. True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

Philip Caputo

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

Elvis Presley

"Did you ever hear the story about Robert Mitchum getting out of the Los Angeles City Prison?" I said. "Mitchum spent six months there on a marijuana bust and figured his career was over. The day he got out, a reporter shouted at him, 'What was it like in there, Bob?' Mitchum said, 'Not bad. Just like Palm Springs, without the riffraff.'"

James Lee Burke

Our appointment in Samarra is made for us without our consent, and death finds us of its own accord and in its own time. Cops rarely die in firefights with bank robbers. They're shot to death during routine traffic stops or while responding to domestic disturbances. As a rule, their killers couldn't masturbate without a diagram.

James Lee Burke

I think I would have been published in the years before the war except for the existence of one Robert Heinlein. As fast as I could work out the plot of a story and sit down to write it, it would appear under his name. This happened not once, but several times. ... I finally became convinced that I was on the lag end of a telepathic hook-up and there was no help for it. I gave up trying to write science fiction until after the war. Then, a few years after my first story appeared, Heinlein came out with a story which used one or two touches I had applied in that first yarn. I knew he hadn't copied them: all that had happened was that he had been caught in the lag end himself. It was small of me, but I tell you I rejoiced.

William Tenn

This is why I'm not religious. If and when we do learn the true secret of the universe, some kind of religion will be there to hide it. To cover it up. To persecute and shred, to burn and destroy. They stay in business by keeping us in the dark ages. Darkness is what they sell.

John Dunning

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

Isaac Asimov

A brief roundup of ideas for what to do next [in Iraq]: Staying is a bad option; leaving immediately is a bad option. Adding troops is a bad option; reducing troops is a bad option. Partitioning Iraq is a bad option (possibly leading to a civil war); not partitioning is a bad option (possibly leading to civil war). 

Mike Littwin

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.

WC Fields

Ashley was a Rambosian, an alien visitor from a small planet 18 light-years away who had arrived quite unexpectedly along with 127 others four years previously. Every single one of the 70 billion or so inhabitants of Rambosia were huge fans of Earth's huge output of television drama and comedy, and Ashley had been part of a mission to discover why there had never been a third season of "Fawlty Towers" and to interview John Cleese.

Jasper Fforde

The old Murphy's Law derivative ran through my head. If something jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.

John Dunning

Some Fox affiliates said they wouldn't air the interview [with OJ Simpson], and two of the Fox News Channel's heaviest hitters condemned it. Bill O'Reilly slammed his Fox bosses, said he wouldn't watch the show or look at the book and threatened to boycott any product that was advertised during the interview. And, as if to remind us that the burden of irony rests lighter on some than on others, Geraldo Rivera himself got on TV and railed against the evils of exploiting the victims.   

Mark Miller, Andrew Murr & Weston Kosova, Newsweek

Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.  

Lenny Bruce

Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were...more trouble than they were worth. 

Worf, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Raymond Chandler

Of all the tragic losses since the 1950s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating. Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system's willing slave for up to seven hours. Go to any crack house and ask the people where their dependency started and they will tell you, I'm certain, that it was with mimeograph paper in the second grade.

Bill Bryson

Ed the bear: "Any creature that wants to be the equal of a human has set its sights way too low. We have an ursine saying, Inspector, that goes something like this: 'If you crap with your ass in the mountain stream, the poo won't stick to your fur.' Do you see what I mean?"

"Not really."

Ed frowned. "Yes, I guess it loses something in the translation."

Jasper Fforde

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Sherlock Holmes

Allah will not be merciful to those who are not merciful to people.

Muhammad

Speaking to you all again is a bit like being Larry King's newest wife-- I know what I'm supposed to do here, I'm just not sure how to make it interesting.

Robert Gates

The true conservative is the man who has a real concern for injustices and takes thought against the day of reckoning.

Franklin D Roosevelt

Big Jim laughed and said, "I can get you some Oxycontins if you want."
"Oxy what?"
"Hillbilly heroin," Big Jim said. "You know, that stuff Rush likes."
"Oh, yeah," Crail said. "What is 'at stuff?"
Without resorting to large words or facts, Big Jim explained, in his own way, that Oxycontin was a Schedule II controlled substance roughly as addictive as morphine. It blocked the transmission of pain messages by attaching to opioid receptors in the brain. Or, as Big Jim put it, "You take one of those, you won't mind if I hit you with a baseball bat."

Bill Bryson

Willoughby discovered a film-splicing kit and spent hours editing the films [in the A.V. Department] for his own amusement, putting goose-stepping Nazis into movies about the Oregon Trail and so on. His finest moment was in a sex-education film when the narrative line "Johnny has just had his first nocturnal emission" was immediately followed by a shot of Naval Academy cadets throwing their hats in the air.

Bill Bryson

There was a horse in the fourth race called Going Postal. That didn't have anything to do with stamps, Keller knew, but was a reference to the propensity of postal employees to exercise their Second Amendment rights by bringing a gun to work, often with dramatic results.

Lawrence Block

My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”

Christopher Buckley

That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.

Aubrey Menen

C'mon people, is everyone really that sensitive? OK, Kerry told a bad joke, but really, the joke is on us and he lives in the White House.

Desiree Cooper

In 1968, the only thing that stood between one's soft tissue and a Vietcong bullet was the American education system and its automatic deferment from the draft. A quarter of young American males were in the armed forces in 1968. Nearly all were rest were in school, in prison, or were George W Bush.

Bill Bryson

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

Stephen Hawking

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.

Clint Eastwood

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Robert Byrne

A constant refrain, invariably imposed by smug boomers, asks when the new generation will create "their Beatles." The answers are: never, and, they already have. Marshall McLuhan's prophecy in the '60s was right: the medium and the media have reached parity. The Web is Generation Y's Beatlemania.

Michael Walker

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

Gerry Spence

Folk and rock may have made sense as a hybrid musically, but philosophically they could scarcely have been further apart. Though no clear-cut definition exists, folk is generally accepted to comprise music that is populist, lyrically dense, and simple enough to be played by amateurs on whatever instruments are at hand. ... Anybody with an autoharp and a third-grade singing voice can pull off a passable rendition of "Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore"; it takes Chuck Berry to sing "Johnny B. Goode."

Michael Walker

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

James M Barrie

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A Edison

Dedication to Beatrice—

Darling, dearest, dead.
My love for you shall live forever. You, however, did not.
You will always be in my heart, in my mind, and in your grave.
When we met my life began; soon afterward, yours ended.
When we were together I felt breathless. Now you are.
Our love broke my heart, and stopped yours.
When we first met, you were pretty, and I was lonely. Now I am pretty lonely.
No one could extinguish my love, or your house.
I cherished, you perished, the world's been nightmarished.
We are like boats passing in the night—particularly you.

Lemony Snicket

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.

Lemony Snicket

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

Evelyn Waugh

When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.

Bob Dylan

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Keith Olbermann

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

Francois Truffaut

America, Frank thinks--we're the only country in the world afraid of our food.

Don Winslow

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Poul Anderson

I used to be fond of telling people that blaming Bush for everything that has gone wrong is like blaming Mickey Mouse when Disney screws up.

William Rivers Pitt

Religion is very easy and whoever overburdens himself in his religion will not be able to continue in that way. So you should not be extremists, but try to be near to perfection and receive the good tidings that you will be rewarded. 

Muhammad

I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks.

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.

Samuel Goldwyn

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Hunter S Thompson

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.

Clarence Darrow

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. Take religion, it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but science is based on pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, excludes metaphysics. I don't think I would believe in anything if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.    

Steve Martin

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.   

Will Rogers

Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.  

George Bernard Shaw

Whenever you want to marry someone, go have lunch with his ex-wife. 

Shelley Winters

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them.

Lily Tomlin

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.

Pliny the Younger

I never dared to be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.

Robert Frost

He had covered the trial of Laurena Layla, then a twenty-seven-year-old beauty, mistress of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay, a con that had taken millions from the credulous, which is, after all, what the credulous are for.

Donald E Westlake

She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, which she would have if she'd lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial, and the various crank theories of physics). All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.

Michael Shermer

While on hold, Rick was subjected to a Muzak version of a Janis Ian song. Why would you do that? he wondered. Was the original too raucous?

Bill Fitzhugh

The "patients' bill of rights” is to health-care reform what a gnat is to aviation.

Gail Collins

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car.

Laurence J Peter

When I started, I knew I was no actor and I went to work on this Wayne thing. It was as deliberate a projection as you'll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn't looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. I practiced in front of a mirror.

John Wayne

"Ah," he said. "Your civil war, you mean."

"The War Between the States," the lad promptly corrected him.

"Well, yes," he said. "One has heard that it wasn't actually all that civil."

Donald E Westlake

How to Be a Good Republican

You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

You have to believe that the nation's current 8-year prosperity was due to the work of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but yesterday's gasoline prices are all Clinton's fault.

You have to be against all government programs, but expect Social Security checks on time.

You have to believe...everything Rush Limbaugh says.

You have to believe God hates homosexuality, but loves the death penalty.

You have to believe that pollution is OK as long as it makes a profit.

You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don't pray to Allah or Buddha.

You have to believe speaking a few Spanish phrases makes you instantly popular in the barrio.

You have to believe government has nothing to do with providing police protection, national defense, and building roads.

You have to believe a poor, minority student with a disciplinary history and failing grades will be admitted into an elite private school with a $1,000 voucher.

Ann Richards - 1933 - 2006

Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Kurt Vonnegut

When armies are mobilized and issues are joined,
The man who is sorry over the fact will win.

Lao-tzu

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.

John Cleese

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson

There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.

David Letterman

I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

Oscar Levant

For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.

Eric Ambler

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

Russell Lynes

The British lost the Revolutionary War because we were leading 8 nil at halftime and we lost interest.

John Cleese

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

John Morley

If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen? 

Steven Wright

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

Laurence J Peter

People come up to me and say, "Emo, do people really come up to you?"

Emo Phillips

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

Frank Zappa

Time is my particular downfall. Once something moves into the past tense, I lose all track of it. My sincerest dread in life is to be arrested and asked: "Where were you between the hours of 8:50 A.M. and 11:02 A.M. on the morning of December 11, 1998?" When this happens, I will just hold out my wrists for the handcuffs and let them take me away because there isn't the remotest chance of my recalling. It has been like this for me for as long as I can remember, which of course is not very long.

Bill Bryson

On the streets of Baghdad, the British are referred to as the Beni Naji ["Sons of Naji"]. Exactly who Naji was remains lost in the mists of time, but it is believed he was a wise and holy man. The Americans are referred to as the Beni el Kalb. Kalb in Arabic is a dog, and the dog, alas, is not a highly regarded creature in Arab culture.

Frederick Forsyth, The Fist of God, 1994

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters. 

HL Mencken

It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.

Tom Wolfe

Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.

Joe Theismann

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Franklin D Roosevelt

I'm a godmother, that's a great thing to be, a godmother. She calls me god for short, that's cute, I taught her that.

Ellen DeGeneres

If you do nothing, how do you know when you’re finished?

Nelson DeMille

There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on.

Robert Byrne

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

George Carlin

Plato is boring.  

Friedrich Nietzsche

William Faulkner lived in Oxford for the whole of his life, and his home is now a museum, preserved as it was on the day he died in 1962. It must be unnerving to be so famous that you know they are going to come in the moment you croak and hang velvet cords across the doorways and treat everything with reverence. Think of the embarrassment if you left a copy of Reader's Digest Condensed Books on the bedside table. 

Bill Bryson

I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy.

John Waters

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?

Vince Lombardi

Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day. 

Mickey Rooney

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.

Wilson Mizner

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.

Clarence Darrow

Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.  

Jerry Garcia

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.  

Bertrand Russell

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.  

Woody Allen

I'm still an atheist, thank God. 

Luis Bunuel

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

Al Capone

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

Matt Groening

Like every major-party presidential candidate, Senator Check had to raise three thousand dollars every hour every single day for eighteen months in order to buy a shot at the White House. It didn't leave much time for legislating per se, but such was the cost one paid to live in a free country.

Bill Fitzhugh

No one wanted to watch a writer perform his craft, since it pretty much looked like typing. But girls did like a handsome man with a guitar. For that matter, they seemed to like any sort of man with one. Even Keith Richards had groupies, for Christ's sake.

Bill Fitzhugh

Unfortunately, the number also led to cheerful inhuman-yet-female voices offering menus. If you want to shit, press 1; if you want to go blind, press 2; that sort of thing.

Donald E Westlake

A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.

Jean de la Bruyère

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

A drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts.

Sure I wanted to be a superhero when I was a kid, but only the guy superheroes got cool costumes, massive capes and scary masks. All Wonder Woman got were hooker boots and a bathing suit. What the fuck was that about?

I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb when I say that if people get unhealthier when you pray for them, maybe you shouldn’t call God’s attention to the sick. Sometimes it’s better to get him focusing someplace else with his mysterious ways.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

You can con God and get away with it, my Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you will do next. He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.

Life sucks and then you die. And then it still sucks.

I wouldn't mind being in an American film for a laugh, but I certainly don't want to be in Thingy Blah Blah 3, if you know what I mean.

I've found that you don't need to wear a necktie if you can hit.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

When you're down and out and everybody thinks you're finished, that's the time to stand up on your two feet and shout: "Who do you have to fuck to get a break in this stinking town?"

People say the lord works in mysterious ways, as if that makes the shitty things in life any sweeter. Death is equally mysterious, but there's no sugar-coating that turd.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

"We need to see his apartment," Pauling said.

"I'm not sure I should let you," the guy said. "There are rules in America."

"Homeland Security," Reacher said. "The Patriot Act. There are no rules in America anymore."

Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me.

If you wish in this world to advance, your merits you're bound to enhance; You must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet, or trust me, you haven't a chance.

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.

I have an existential map. It has "You are here" written all over it.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

[W]e desecrate what our flag symbolizes [when] a handful of corporate CEOs … loot the companies they lead and leave employees, pensioners, shareholders, and the rest of us holding the bag, [when] some politicians who sought three deferments during an earlier war question the patriotism of those of us who served three tours of duty there or left three limbs on the battlefield of that war, [and when] we call on other nations to abide by the Geneva Conventions in providing humane treatment of the war prisoners they hold while we do not.

Human beings ... just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-die jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.

It is better for a leader to make a mistake in forgiving than to make a mistake in punishing.

All creatures must learn to coexist. That's why the brown bear and the field mouse can share their lives in harmony. Or course, they can't mate or the mice would explode.

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you're trying to think of.

Unknown

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Lord, what authors have not influenced my work? Some have shown me errors I might have made if they hadn't made them first, for which I'm so grateful I won't mention their names. Others have wowed me with specifics: Theodore Sturgeon, Peter Rabe, Anthony Powell, many more.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

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

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.

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.

Marin County newspaper's TV listing for The Wizard of Oz

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

When the Alpha Males were out charging after mastodons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what essentially was an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.

There are three side effects of acid. Enhanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

For us, there is a house brand of bullshit that black cops have to take when they lock up black people, and another brand for when they lock up white people, and the same for white cops locking up white, black, or brown, and so too for Hispanic cops—not to mention what female cops go through, when accused of harboring hidden agendas. If you lock up someone who looks like you, you're a race traitor; if you lock up someone who doesn't, you're a racist.

I don't care how little your country is, you got a right to run it like you want to. When the big nations quit meddling then the world will have peace.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Moving from the position of United States poet laureate to New York State poet laureate might seem like a demotion or a drop in rank to the military-minded. It might even appear that I am heading toward eventually being crowned laureate of my ZIP code. But in fact, it is very gratifying to be honored again as a representative of poetry, this time by my native state where I grew up — more or less — and continue to live.

I am not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men, whether in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or anything else. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

U.S. soldiers who die in Iraq knew they would. Most of them couldn't get a decent job in the private sector anyway, so what does it matter? Someone has to die in a war, why not the poor?

I've seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I've seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head.

According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined.

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

I'd like to take a two-page spread in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety and I'd let go the goddamnedest blast, let people know who the real subversives are. I wrote this out last night: "You loudmouthed self-styled patriots in this business had better wake up. I was in the Party for six months. I know a bit about what goes on. You think people are trying to subvert your precious Hollywood? They're not. They happen to believe in planned social order. They look up to Russia as the leader of the world socialist movement ... Now, you people allegedly believe in free competition. You want the world to follow in your footsteps, so you invest billions of bucks all over hell and gone trying to influence people. Yet when the socialist world does this you scream 'foul'" ... That's what I'd like to say.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.

The thing about my jokes is that they don't hurt anybody. You can say they're not funny or they're terrible or they're good or whatever it is, but they don't do no harm. But with Congress — every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they make a law it's a joke.

Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, "I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em!"?

I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

I wrote a song, but I can't read music. Every time I hear a new song on the radio I think, "Hey, maybe I wrote that."

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

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?

The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I've always thought that a lot of the problems in the world would be solved if a spaceship did arrive, then anyone with one head and two arms and two legs would be your brother! It wouldn't matter where they were from or what they believed or anything. It might be good for us.

The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.

So I did a betrayal-revenge-tough guy story, with a cold-blooded lead who got caught at the end. Pocket Books bought it and asked if the guy could escape at the end and appear in more books, and it turned out he could, and Parker was born. If I'd known he'd be back in more than 20 books, I'd have given him a first name.

Thomas Pynchon simply chooses not to be a public figure, an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with that of the prevailing culture that if Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet — the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining — the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.

When someone tells me that “the Almighty told me to do this,” I want to see the transcript.

Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid.

I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning. I think about it all day and I dream about it at night. The only time I don't think about it is when I'm playing it.

A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.

We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there's not this kind of federal-federal cufflink.

We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.

Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will out sell the other.

If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

 Carl Sagan

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice.

 George W Bush

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

In the beginning there was nothing and God said, “Let there be light,” and there was still nothing but everybody could see it.

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

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

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

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.

Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

 Kurt Vonnegut

I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.

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

I suppose that if you want to be famous and suddenly it happens and you don't like it, it's nobody's fault but your own.

A minor league Joe McCarthy named Reynolds Schultz, an ex-marine, ex-farmer, likes to refer to himself as an uneducated but canny man of the people ... a self-made man. (Thereby, once again, demonstrating the horrors of unskilled labor.)

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My mind is my own church.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

I've always followed my father's advice: he told me, first to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be goddamn sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble.

You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order. But we will.

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

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked "Brightness," but it doesn't work.

The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

Most imports are from outside of the country.

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

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

It's organized religion. It's religion with a label. That's what stinks. It's what keeps all those old Jewish men on Fairfax from having a nice bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. It's what sends all those young women into the ghoulish lives of nuns. It's what twists men's minds.

 Harlan Ellison

Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, once observed that it is possible to judge the level of a civilization by the amount of religion it needs to sustain it. The closer to barbarism, the more religion the culture needs.

Father Coughlin and his Church of the Little Flower in Detroit, spreading anti-Semitic poison.

Sirhan Sirhan, murdering Bobby Kennedy because he supported the Israelis against the Arabs. The Hebraic faith against the Mohammedans.

The Catholic Church saying give me your children for the first ten years, and they are mine forever.

Christian Scientists letting their children die rather than allowing a surgeon to operate.
The Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada torturing women and children for doubting. The Salem witch trials. The Dan Smoots and the Paul Harveys who coat their bigotry and evil with the sanctimonious jelly of religion. Pope Pius, allowing Hitler to gas the Jews and the Catholics, and turning his head away. All the martyrs who ever were. Christ, who would shrink in horror at what his faith and kindness has become.

There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people.

I remember a naturalist who, having come to despise humanity and to despair of it, set out to make a documentary about the moral superiority of animals, particularly of bears. He saw in them not only a harmonious relationship with nature that humankind cannot achieve, but also a playfulness beyond human capacity, a dignity, a compassion for other animals, and even a mystical quality that he found moving, humbling. A bear ate him.

The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.

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

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

 Friedrich Nietzsche

I remember once reading that that tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughters' homes, announced in consternation at the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the Duke was unaware that dental implements didn't foam up spontaneously.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of putting it into practice.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.

This guy has got a great question, because, really, what he's talking about is transparency in pricing. When you go buy a car, you know exactly what they're going to charge you. (laughter) Well, sometimes you don't know. (laughter) Well, you negotiate with them. (laughter) Well, they put something on the window that says price. His point is, is that the more you know about price, the better you can make better decisions, and I appreciate that. Listen, you're paying me a lot of money to work, and so I think I'm going to have to head back home. But I'm honored. Got any more questions, I'll be glad to answer them.

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

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.

Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them “elitists” for nothing.

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.

I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

According to a leaflet I picked up at the Royal Pump Museum in Harrowgate, as late as 1926 the spa was still dispensing as many as twenty-six thousand glasses of sulfurous water in a single day. You can still drink the water if you want. According to a notice by the tap, it is reportedly good for flatulence, which seemed an intriguing promise, and I very nearly drank some until I realized the notice meant it prevented it. What an odd notion.

We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make — it would hope — put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see.

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

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."

My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], "Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball?" Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

I have never understood what Ohio was thinking when it called itself the "Buckeye State" or Indiana the "Hoosier State," and I haven't the faintest idea what New York means by dubbing itself the "Empire State." As far as I am aware, New York's many undoubted glories do not include overseas possessions. Still, I can't criticize because I live in the state with the most demented of all license plate slogans, the strange and pugnacious "Live Free or Die." Perhaps I take these things too literally, but I really don't like driving around with an explicit written vow to expire if things don't go right. Frankly, I would prefer something a little more equivocal and less terminal—"Live Free or Pout" perhaps, or maybe "Live Free or Bitch Mightily to Anyone Who'll Listen."

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.

 Gloria Steinem

I believe that a prosperous, democratic Pakistan will be a steadfast partner for America, a peaceful neighbor for India, and a force for freedom and moderation in the Arab world.

 George W Bush

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

 Tom Lehrer

My prediction from the sixties finally came true: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, "In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous."

 Andy Warhol

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

 GK Chesterton

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.

 Clare Booth Luce

 Alice Roosevelt Longworth

[MTV] changed it from being about the music to being about what you look like. And that was a terrible blow to music, because now you've got all these people who look great and can't write, sing, or play.

 David Crosby

Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

 George W Bush

A certain merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market to buy some provisions. A little while later, the servant returned looking white in the face. In a trembling voice he said, “Just now in the market place I was jostled by a man in the crowd, and when I turned I saw it was Mr. Death. He looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Please lend me your horse, because I want to go to Samara where Mr. Death will not be able to find me.”

The merchant agreed and lent the scared man his horse. The servant mounted the horse and rode away as fast as the animal could gallop. Later that day, the merchant went down to the market place and saw Mr. Death standing in the crowd. He approached him and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture,” said Mr. Death. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samara.”

 John O'Hara

As you can imagine, I was particularly attracted to all those things that might hurt me, which in an Australian context is practically everything. It really is the most extraordinarily lethal country. Naturally they play down the fact that every time you set your feet on the floor something is likely to jump out and seize an ankle. Thus my guidebook blandly observed that "only" fourteen species of Australian snake are seriously lethal, among them the western brown, desert death adder, tiger snake, taipan, and yellow-bellied sea snake. The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: "I say, is that a sn—."

 Bill Bryson

 Frank Harris

Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is. I am forever doing that with the Australian prime minister—committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less instantly), then feeling terribly guilty. My thinking is that there ought to be one person outside Australia who knows.

 Bill Bryson

In the 1950s a friend of Catherine's moved with her young family into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to build a house on the lot. Catherine's friend had a four-year-old daughter who naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door. She hung around on the margins and eventually the construction workers adopted her as a sort of mascot. They chatted to her and gave her little jobs to do and at the end of the week presented her with a little pay packet containing a shiny new half crown.

She took this home to her mother, who made all the appropriate cooings of admiration and suggested they take it to the bank the next morning to deposit it in her account. When they went to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her own pay packet.

"I've been building a house this week," she replied proudly.

"Goodness!" said the teller. "And will you be building a house next week, too?"

"I will if we ever get the fucking bricks," answered the little girl.

 Bill Bryson

I had come to realize that I didn't have any feelings toward the Appalachian Trail that weren't thoroughly contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but captivated by it; found the endless slog increasingly exhausting but ever invigorating; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. All of this together, all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.

 Bill Bryson

 George W Bush

However many months I spend writing a screenplay, I never feel as if I've been writing at all. I've been constructing a story---that's true---but without language. It's like building a castle (and the characters who inhabit and/or attack the castle) with blocks. The scenes are the blocks. I always write a lot of letters when I'm working on a screenplay, doubtless because I miss using language. When I'm writing a novel, I write very few letters; my language is used up.

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

In early 1981 a pewter canister had been found by scavengers in the muddy banks of the Thames near London Bridge. Instead of coins or jewelry, the canister had contained twenty-four ornate dice dating back over five hundred years. Close examination of the dice revealed that eighteen were loaded with quicksilver, while the remaining six were misspotted, and marked with only three numbers on each die.

During the same year, a team of archaeologists on a dig in Pompeii had found similar gaffed dice, only their heritage was several thousand years earlier.

Valentine had heard about both discoveries and hadn't been terribly surprised. While there were hundreds of ways to cheat at cards, there were only three surefire ways to cheat at dice: loading them, misspotting them, or shaving them.

Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have achieved greater fame with less useful activity in the brainbox than General Thomas J. Jackson. His idiosyncrasies were legendary. He was hopelessly, but inventively, hypochondriacal. One of his more engaging philosophical beliefs was that one arm was bigger than the other, and in consequence he always walked and rode with that arm held straight up, so that his blood would drain into his body. He was a champion sleeper. More than once he fell asleep at the dinner table with food in his mouth. At the Battle of White Oak Swamp, his lieutenants found it all but impossible to rouse him and lifted him, insensible, onto his horse where he continued to slumber while shells exploded around him. ... His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he had a couple of small victories when other Southern troops were being slaughtered and routed, and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever enjoyed.

First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill.

 George W Bush

Now that the vice president has accidentally shot and wounded a companion on a quail hunt at the elite Texas ranch where rich men play with guns -- spraying his 78-year-old victim, er, friend, in the face and chest with shotgun pellets and sending the man to the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital -- it has become clear that Cheney was doing the country a service when he avoided service.

 John Nichols

 Bill Bryson

And God said to Moses,
"Moses, come forth."
And Moses came fifth,
And it cost God
Two hundred and fifty bucks.

 James Swain

Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills you go through a series of staged transformations—a kind of gentle descent into squalor—and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day disgustingly so; by the third you are beyond caring; by the fourth you have forgotten how it is not to be like this. Hunger, too, follows a defined pattern. On the first night you are starving for your noodles; on the second night you are starving but wish it wasn't noodles; on the third you don't want the noodles but know you had better eat something; by the fourth you have no appetite at all but just eat because that is what you do at this time of day. I can't explain it, but it's strangely agreeable.

 Bill Bryson

Herrero describes an incident that nicely conveys the near indestructibility of the grizzly. It concerns a professional hunter named Alexei Pitka, who stalked a big male through snow and finally felled it with a well-aimed shot to the heart with a large-bore rifle. Pitka probably should have carried a card with him that said: "First make sure bear is dead. Then put gun down." He advanced cautiously and spent a minute or two watching the bear for movement, but when there was none he set the gun against a tree—big mistake—and strode forward to claim his prize. Just as he arrived, the bear sprang up, clapped its expansive jaws around the front of Pitka's head, as if giving him a big kiss, and with a single jerk tore his face off.

Miraculously, Pitka survived. "I don't know why I set that durn gun against the tree," he said later. Actually what he said was, "Mrffff mmmpg nnnmmmm mffffffn," on account of having no lips, teeth, nose, or other vocal apparatus.

 Bill Bryson

Kolya dealt with this situation with time-honored Soviet technique, stepping back with snake eyes examining each article as if it were a tub of rancid butter, an excellent attitude in the Soviet Union, where the shelf for items "broken when bought" was sometimes fuller than the display case; no experienced Soviet shopper left a store with his purchase until he'd taken it out of its box, turned it on and made sure it did something. Soviet shoppers also searched for the date of completion on the manufacturer's tag and hoped for a day in the middle of the month, rather than at the end, when the factory management was trying to meet its quota of TV's, VCR's, or cars with or without all the necessary parts, or at the beginning of the month, when the workers were in a drunken stupor from having met the quota.

 Martin Cruz Smith

The more laws and order are made prominent,
The more thieves and robbers there will be.

 Lao Tzu

Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.”

 Kurt Vonnegut

I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

 Peter Townshend

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.

 Peter O’Toole

On the long walk to the elevator Valentine took stock of the carpet's muted orange and red checkerboard design. He'd read several studies conducted by casinos to quantify the effects of really bad carpet. The goal was to find out which patterns were so upsetting to the human eye that it actually coaxed a customer into looking up from the floor and into the eyes of a dealer or a gleaming slot machine. The idea was to trigger impulse play. No one had ever determined if it really worked.

 James Swain

The line inched forward. As if by magic, the big board turned into a digital screen. Holyfield and the Animal were in the ring being introduced by the announcer. When the announcer was done, a bloated Wayne Newton look-alike belted out the national anthem. Reaching the betting cages, Valentine saw that the singer was Wayne Newton.

 James Swain

America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.

 Laurence J Peter

A peasant goes to Paris and when he comes back all his friends get together to welcome him home. "Boris," they say, "tell us about your trip." Boris shakes his head and says, "Oh, the Louvre, the paintings, fuck your mother." "The Eiffel Tower?" somebody asks. Boris stretches his hand as high as it can go and says "Fuck your mother." "And Notre Dame?" somebody else asks. Boris bursts into tears remembering such beauty and says "Fuck your mother!" "Ah, Boris," everybody sighs, "what wonderful memories you have."

 Martin Cruz Smith

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

 Penn Jillette

"To your coffin, Arkasha." Misha raised his glass. "Which will be lined with embroidered silk, your name and titles on a gold plate, have a satin pillow, and silver handles set in the finest cedar one hundred years old from a tree I will plant in the morning." He drank, pleased with himself. "Or," he added, "I could just order it from the Ministry of Light Industry. That should take about as long."

 Martin Cruz Smith

We have fossils... We win!

 Lewis Black, on creationism

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

 George Bernard Shaw

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

 Dorothy Parker

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.

 Mario Andretti

Whether they be Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, people have heard the universal call to love a neighbor just like they'd like to be called themselves.

 George W Bush

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 Welles

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.

 Willem de Kooning

The nearer to the church, the further from God.

 John Heywood

 Tom Stoppard

I might have made a tactical error not going to a physician for 20 years. It was one of those phobias that didn't pay off.

 Warren Zevon

Actually, I...this may sound a little West Texan to you, but I like it. When I'm talking about...when I'm talking about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking about me.

 George W Bush

She couldn’t add with all that blood rushing to her brain. She couldn’t even add when blood wasn’t rushing to her brain. She used to think she was just bad at math until she convinced herself she had math anxiety, which upgraded basic stupidity to disability level and made her feel better about herself.

 Lisa Scottoline

 Mark Twain

Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.

 David Letterman

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

 PJ O'Rourke

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

 Tom Lehrer

I appreciate that question because I, in the state of Texas, had heard a lot of discussion about a faith-based initiative eroding the important bridge between church and state.

 George W Bush

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.

 Robert Wilensky

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

 George Bernard Shaw

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

 A.A. Milne

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

 Jerry Garcia

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

 Jack London

This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought

Should contrive our fees to pilfer, on who for his native land

Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand.

 Aristophanes

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.

 George Will