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