I feel a bit nervous encroaching on Palin territory by writing a travel diary. I want to avoid any unpleasant sense of stealing Michael's thunder, but most of the Pythons have been involved in documentaries recently: Jonesy walked halfway to Jerusalem in Crusader armor; Gilliam is the tragic hero of a classic documentary about the nonmaking of a movie; and even Cleesy went to Madagascar to invade the privacy of lemurs. Only Graham has remained quiet. Death will do that to you. That's one of the reasons why I'm so against it.

Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.

The best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter--he's got to just know.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

I was so cold the other day, I almost got married.

As we climbed aboard the driver was giving us a rundown on marine stingers, with vivid descriptions of people who had failed at their cost to heed the warning signs. He assured us, however, there were no jellyfish on the reef. Unaccountably he failed to mention reef sharks, boxfish, scorpion fish, stinging corals, sea snakes, or the fat and infamous grouper, a nine-hundred-pound monster that occasionally, through a combination of testiness and stupidity, chomps off a swimmer's arm, then remembers that it doesn't like the taste of human flesh.

It’s Christmas Day. I haven’t missed it. The spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow. Do you know the Poulterer’s, in the next street but one, at the corner? … An intelligent boy! A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there? Not the little prize turkey: the big one? … No, no, I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell ‘em to bring it here, that I might give them the direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I’ll give you half-a-crown!

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa

A divinely inspired book, admirably suited for the needs of one’s neighbors.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde

Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then? I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course. I wish to be left alone. Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen,  that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned--they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there. If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!

Ebenezer Scrooge

The geometry of judgement is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.

Dean Koontz

Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be a lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of those illusions.

Dean Koontz

Like children, dogs want discipline and are most secure when they have rules to live by. The happiest dogs are those with gentle masters who quietly but firmly demand respect. Nevertheless, in dog training as in war, the better part of valor can be discretion.

Ian Rankin

In Rebus’s experience, Christmas was about sham get-togethers, about pretending that all was well with the world. A celebration of one man’s birth, carried out with tinsel and wrappings, and conducted in a haze of white lies and alcohol.

Or maybe it was just him.

Ian Rankin

Mrs. Bonnaventura believed in the imminence of the Rapture. Housebound by emphysema, she kept two things close to her: a wheeled tank of oxygen, and a small bag that she had packed for the miraculous ascent. In the bag were a Bible, a change of underwear, photos of dead loved ones—family and friends—whom Mrs. Bonnaventura intended to track down without delay upon reaching Paradise, and breath mints. She knew she wouldn’t need the oxygen tank in Heaven, where she would be restored to her youth, and she couldn’t explain why she packed the underwear or the breath mints. She’d said, “I just don’t want to take any chances, it would be so embarrassing.”

Dean Koontz

I'm a character actress, plain and simple...Who can worry about a career? Have a life. Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.

Frances McDormand

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

Nikola Tesla

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Bertrand Russell

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

Frank Zappa

We live in a time where increasingly our national leaders act more like the dons of crime than statesmen where notions of plausible deniability replace the truth, and claims that politicians never knew of the evil done in their own names by others are commonplace. It is the age of unbridled arrogance and video showmanship, where the challenge “prove what I knew and when I knew it” has now become a national motto.

Steve Martini

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde

In the 1980s I was on holiday with Paul Simon in the West Indies when, late at night, we heard that John Lennon had been shot. Paul later wrote a song ("The Late Great Johnny Ace") saying he was standing on the streets of New York when he heard John Lennon had died, and I teased him about this. I said I could understand that it didn't make such a good lyric to say "I was in Barbados on holiday with Eric Idle when I heard John Lennon had died."

Eric Idle

Harry is of that school of social thought that believes most victories in criminal courts are fashioned from the preponderance of perjury. You spin yours and they do theirs, and in the end the side that is most adept at invention wins; the thought that throughout history truth has withered and died of loneliness in most courtrooms.

Steve Martini

The really strange thing about this is that it was one of the Fog Facts. That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or a historian, they knew about it. If you went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if President Scott [read, Bush] who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and driving armored vehicles and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if Scott had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldn’t have a clue, and, unless they were anti-Scott already, they wouldn’t believe it.

Larry Beinhart

We are a society that sheds spouses and takes on new lovers faster than a rajah can work through his harem. We dissolve entire families on a whimsy of lust. We pursue bald ambition as if it were the true religion, leaving our children to come home to empty houses, to fix their own meals, to cope with the crippling insecurities of adolescence, while we engage in an endless chase after the grail of possessions. And we have the audacity to wonder who killed the innocence of childhood.

Steve Martini

THE ONION: Apparently [James Cameron] wrote an extensive letter about how he felt [Kenneth] Turan should be fired because he gave a negative review to Titanic, arguing that everyone loves Titanic and Turan was out of touch.

ROBERT ALTMAN: He should get a negative review. It was a shitty picture. For him to criticize anybody for what they say about that picture proves he’s as crazy as he advertises.

This was the late seventies. My generation was busy slithering through the corporate jungle, trying to shed its social conscience. The Mercedes hood ornament had replaced the peace symbol as the icon of the moment.

Steve Martini

Maybe there is a God, and he’s a terrific guy—or girl, or hermaphrodite, or whatever the fuck people want to believe. I’ve got no objections to that. What pisses me off is when people think believing in a certain God gives them a license to crap on other people, or even kill ‘em—Christian or Muslim, it makes no difference.

Richard North Patterson

Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.

Steven Wright

Even if Roman drivers see you, they won't stop. There is nothing personal in this. It's just that they believe that if something is in the way they must move it, whether it is a telephone pole or a visitor from the Midwest. The only exception to this is nuns. Even Roman drivers won't hit a nun—you see groups of them breezing across eight-lane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like scraps of black and white paper borne along by the wind—so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia, your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty T-shirt.

Bill Bryson

Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I’ve only seen that one HBO special he did. He’s one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff. I like Jon Stewart. He’s not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, who I really can’t stand.

Tom Lehrer

Those who enjoy Daffy obviously recognize Daffy in themselves. And with the heroes, like Bugs Bunny, what you have there is that that’s the character you’d like to be like. You’ll dream about being Bugs, and then you wake up, and you’re Daffy Duck.

Chuck Jones

Liberal, schmiberal. That should be a new word. Schmiberal: one who is assumed to be liberal, just because he’s a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you read the subtext for many of [my] old strips, you’ll find the heart of an old-fashioned libertarian. And I’d be a libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

Berkeley Breathed

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tom Lehrer

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

Christopher Morley

When fascism comes to this country it won’t be wearing jackboots; it’ll be wearing sneakers with lights in them, and it’ll have a smiley face and a Michael Jordan T-shirt on. They learned the mistake of overt control. They’ve learned to be much subtler.

George Carlin

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

Carl Reiner

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy

It is not conservative to turn one group of Americans against another.

It is not conservative to saddle our children with debt.

It is not conservative to despoil the environment that our children’s children will inherit. Nor is it conservative to squander the lives of our soldiers in a war that degrades our military strength. To conserve means not only to honor the past, but to meet the challenges of the future, leaving our country better than we found it.

Richard North Patterson

Atheism’s too much trouble. Why put that level of energy into something you can’t know? Anyone who tells you they’re sure that there is a God—or isn’t one—is smoking dope.

Richard North Patterson

In the last presidential election, our [Republicans’] slogan came down to “Vote for us or die.” But our foreign policy was run by the dumbest, most self-satisfied bunch of white guys who ever fucked up a savings and loan—except they fucked up an entire war. So now our slogan’s “Only we can save you from the consequences of our own disaster.”

Richard North Patterson

Ever look at those old pictures of lynchings—upright white folks with their good day’s work hanging from some tree? What you’ll notice is that a lot of these mobs were dressed in their Sunday best. They were fresh from church, you see.

Richard North Patterson

America was becoming Paraguay, but not that fast. Gore Vidal said that, a long time ago, back when he was explaining why Ronald Reagan could never be elected president.

Larry Beinhart

Adam Smith had also said, “Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.” If Scott’s [Bush’s] people were men of vice, there would be limits to what they might do. If they were men of virtue, there were no limits, no point at which they would stop. There was no lie they would not tell, no fraud they would not perpetrate. No murder they would not commit.

Larry Beinhart

Tempted by power and ego and greed, he had gone over to the dark side. His goodness, actually, had been his ultimate weakness. He had been so certain of himself that he had become self-righteous. The self-righteous believe that all that they themselves do must be right, for they are Good, and that which issues from the Good must also be Good.

Larry Beinhart

The right has spent so many years castigating the New York Times as the flagship of the liberal media that everyone believed it, including the Left, including the people at the Times itself. But the truth was that the Times was the house organ of the establishment. It was committed, both editorially and in its presentation of the news, to the interests of an Establishment: continuity, security, and legitimacy. Therefore they generally supported business and finance, the American version of empire, the government, and the president, until, and unless, some excess was so egregious that it posed a threat to continuity, security, or legitimacy. Then the Times would turn on the destabilizers, as they did, at last, on the Vietnam War, on Nixon, and on Enron, in the interests of restoring continuity, security, and legitimacy.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do — well, that’s Memoirs.

Will Rogers

No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.

Lily Tomlin

You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.

Anita Esterday, the waitress Hillary Clinton did NOT stiff

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Dwight D Eisenhower

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"

I handed in a script last year and the studio didn't change one word. The word they didn't change was on page 87.

Steve Martin

You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

Will Rogers

I wander down Michigan Avenue, doing some early Christmas shopping. I can't think what to buy Nicole Kidman. Or for that matter Halle Berry. And what do I get Cameron Diaz? Panties again? I always get Hugh Grant panties, he's easy to please, and I'm getting Russell Crowe a tool kit with his name on it. Mel Gibson, well, a copy of The Life of Brian, natch. Can you believe he's made the same story and missed all the jokes?

Eric Idle

She put the point to her father, as they hung around the court, waiting for their case to come up. He said: “I never trust anyone who proclaims his morality from the pulpit. That high-minded type can always find an excuse for breaking his own rules. I’d rather do business with an everyday sinner who thinks it’s probably to his advantage, in the long run, to tell the truth and keep his promises. He’s not likely to change his mind about that.”

Ken Follett

I live on a one-way street that's also a dead end. I'm not sure how I got there.

Steven Wright

I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff, because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up, that it's easy... and it's thrilling.

Steve Martin

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Dorothy Parker

By the way, I know Victoria's Secret. She's a slut.

Eric Idle

Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term “terrorist” has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to “Islamofascism.” A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

François Furstenberg

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

A practicing Roman Catholic for almost 40 years, I’d recently crossed over into the agnostic camp—which I think of as the “just-the-facts-ma’am” school of philosophy—so I wasn’t quite sure how to answer “What’s God?” I did want Caitlin to grow up open to God and spirituality. Which isn’t to say I hope she’ll run off with the first Jehovah’s Witness who bangs on the door. Quite the contrary: I want her to be able to look that Jehovah’s Witness right in the eye and say, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Christopher Buckley

Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place - the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

Mark Twain

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Blaise Pascal

Recently I met the lady who discovered the G-spot. She said she'd show me how to find it. She curled my fingers into an O, inserted two fingers into the fist, and from inside pushed real hard on the fleshy part of my palm. "That," she said, "is the G-spot." And I was surprised, because I'd always thought it was in the vagina. So be very careful, ladies, next time you shake hands with me.

Eric Idle

Cars had barely been equipped with seat belts when the Beatles played Shea Stadium. Now we must have not only dual airbags in our Volvos, but also side-impact air bags. Yes, I agree, I must have them, too, even if this means karmically aligning myself with crash-test dummies. If James Dean’s silver Porsche had been equipped with air bags, he’d now be alive and endorsing nicotine patches.

Christopher Buckley

One good thing about being a cowboy, you don’t have time for golf.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?

Blaise Pascal

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

Blaise Pascal

I never put on a pair of shoes until I've worn them at least five years.

Samuel Goldwyn

It does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous...The war is waged by the ruling group against its subjects.

George Orwell

I think it would be a good idea.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

Bill Watterson

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Robert Frost

God didn’t create the world in seven days. He fucked off the first six and pulled an all-nighter.

anonymous graffiti in Yale men’s room

President Bush says he’s going to take action now on global warning. Finally going to take some action on global warming. He became very alarmed when another chunk of ice broke off his mother.

David Letterman

President Bush says he’s going to fight global warming. He announced today that he is sending 20,000 troops to the sun.

David Letterman

Rebus glanced at the TV screen, saw the Stones hamming it up in their latest production. Jesus, they looked old. Stonehenge with a blues riff.

Ian Rankin

I was a teacher’s worst nightmare: a class clown who got straight A’s.

Cheech Marin

CAITLIN: (sweetly) Dad?

DAD: Yeah, honey?

CAITLIN: Does everybody die?

DAD: Say, how ‘bout a Flintstones pop-up ice cream bar?

CAITLIN: But Dad, am I going to die?

DAD: Well, I guess everybody dies. I mean, it’s part of … what’s your favorite part of The Rescuers Down Under?

CAITLIN: But what happens after you die?

You can postpone this moment, but you can’t avoid it. Ultimately, the important thing is to remain true to your convictions. If you lie, they’ll pick up on it and never trust you again. Which is why, as an agnostic dad—difficult as it was—I looked her right in the eye and said, “You go straight to heaven.”

Christopher Buckley

Like most normal Americans, I am mentally allergic to the subculture of the sea. Talk of cleats, propellers, sheets-to-the-wind, and astrolabes fill me with revulsion. I would be sorry, however, if such an admirable instinct had kept me from reading Christopher Buckley’s account of his fellow tramps on a tramp steamer. [Steaming to Bamboola] It is truly excellent. My delight in his writing and his fellow proletarians was exceeded only by my pleasure in not having been along.

John Kenneth Galbraith

After Admiral Dewey captured the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila, he received orders to give the ships collegiate names. He wired back two proposals: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Vermont Normal College for Women. Washington got the message and the admiral was not asked for further suggestions; but the idea was still alive two wars later, with the Harvard Victory, Wesleyan Victory and—most unmistakably—the C.C.N.Y Victory.

Christopher Buckley

The End of the Age [by Pat Robertson] is to Dante what Sterno is to The Inferno. When you have a hard time keeping a straight face while reading a novel about the death of a billion human beings, something is probably amiss.

Christopher Buckley

Hypocrisy is the night soil of satire.

Christopher Buckley

A friend of mine tells the story about a magistrate in Scotland. The town drunk was hauled before him for the umpteenth time. The magistrate looked down on him and said, “You have been found guilty of the crime of public drunkenness. It is the sentence of this court that you be taken from here to the place of execution and hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God Almighty have mercy on your soul.”

The drunk fainted. As they were reviving him, The bailiff looked up quizzically at the judge. The judge shrugged and said, “I’ve just always wanted to say that.”

Christopher Buckley

The fundamentalist mind-set is not so much a firm and rational set of beliefs based on thoughtful interpretation of strict Biblical screed as it is, well, a paranoid wallowing in fear. Fear of the Other, fear of change, of progress, of the new and different and young and the sexual and the truly spiritual. And as we all know from almost seven years of Bush, fear knows no reason. It knows no stability. Fear is simply insatiable, voracious, and about as un-Godlike as Jesus with a machine gun.

Mark Morford

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Mark Twain

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.

Ted Williams

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

Will Rogers

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

Malcolm X

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

Max Bialystok

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religions in it.

John Adams

I'd yield to the Devil instantly,

Did it not happen that myself am he!

J W von Goethe

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.

Ambrose Bierce

The hard truth was that Reagan had borrowed from Clinton, and Clinton was having to pay it back. I was impressed that he did not seem to be trying to fudge reality to the extent politicians ordinarily do. He was forcing himself to live in the real world.

Alan Greenspan

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

Mark Twain

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

Alan Greenspan

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Jonathan Swift

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

Bertrand Russell

The sad thing about the Sixties was the weak-mindedness of the so-called radicals and the way that they managed to get co-opted. I think one of the things that helped that happen was LSD. It's the only chemical known to mankind that will convert a hippie to a yuppie.

Frank Zappa

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I said "Maybe they could train a conscience dog for handicapped people like me. You even think about not behaving well, the dog nudges your leg."

Charlie made his snorting noise. "Nudges? Pisses on it. Eat your leg off, right up to the hip even, won't help."

Peter Temple

Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.

Edward Teller

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Albert Einstein

I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

Dorothy Parker

“My name is Abraham Lieberman. I came by to ask your grandson for a favor.”

“You are a Jew,” the woman said.

Her accent was distinct, but not thick.

“That I am.”

“We are Catholics,” she said. “We give money to that rabbi on television to get Russian Jews to Israel. You are the chosen people.”

“And an odd choice it is,” Abe said.

Stuart M Kaminsky

What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.

Shana Alexander

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.  

Ogden Nash

There's a powerful political faction in this country that's determined to draw exactly the wrong lesson from the Katrina debacle - namely, that the government always fails when it attempts to help people in need, so it shouldn't even try. ...The thing about conservative governance is that it can succeed by failing: when conservative politicians mess up, they foster a cynicism about government that may actually help their cause.

Paul Krugman

I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, “I'd like some fries.” The girl at the counter said, “Would you like some fries with that?”

Jay Leno

O Lord, Supreme Rewarder and Bestower of Bonuses, whose incentive package led Thy people through the wilderness, grant that when Thou showereth me with money that I have the strength to grasp it, the serenity to accept it without guilt, and the wisdom to recognize that this is Thy way of expressing gratitude.

Brother Ty

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Cormac McCarthy

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Mark Twain

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.”

Jay Leno

Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love, though I'd stepped in it a few times.

Rita Rudner

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junkyard falling down a staircase? If it’s the latter, how do you deal with it?

James Lee Burke

Probably a lot of you have become confused about the 17 ongoing presidential campaigns and the other one that's been postponed a few times so it can fall apart before it begins, all preparing for the tumultuous, constantly-changing schedule of primary elections and caucuses to help pick the candidates who will wait around for months until they accept their parties' presidential nominations at conventions that are still a year away to run in national campaigns that come after that and are only two months long but seem like 10 leading up to Election Day on Nov. 4, 2008.

Andrew Malcolm

Heavenly Father, Processor of all transactions, grant that my credit-card purchases be swiftly approved, no matter how humble my bank balance. Let me neither hoard my funds here on earth, nor hide my wallet under a bushel. And keep strangers from my door, lest they partake of the riches that would be better spent on myself. Let me be as the Prodigal Son, disbursing his father’s money with an open heart, living life to the fullest, eschewing thrift and employment, and when day is done and all the money is spent and clamorous creditors pursue me through the streets, welcome me back into Thy house with open arms.

Brother Ty

Supposedly we are a Christian society, or at least one founded by Christians. According to our self-manufactured mythos, we revere Jesus and Mother Teresa and Saint Francis of Assisi. But I think the truth is otherwise. When we feel collectively threatened, or when we are collectively injured, we want the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on the job and we want the bad guys smoked, dried, fried, and plowed under with bulldozers.

James Lee Burke

When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.

But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.

James Lee Burke

Gasoline is going -- alcohol is coming. And it's coming to stay, too, for it's in unlimited supply. And we might as well get ready for it now.

A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.

Ronald Reagan

It's Michael Kinsley.

Politics is just show business for ugly people.

Jay Leno

O Lord, Supreme Travel Agent, who rerouted Moses through the Red Sea, and found Mary and Joseph accommodations on Christmas Eve, when they had no reservation, grant that I should be upgraded into the celestial kingdom of ample legroom, where the beverages are complimentary and the flight attendants answer the call button.

Brother Ty

I improve on misquotation.

Cary Grant

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Will Rogers

“Oh,” said Landen, reading a letter. “A rejection from my publisher. They don’t think Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again was what they had in mind for self-help.”

Jasper Fforde

I was thinking of doing a self-help book for SF novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don’t.

Jasper Fforde

I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life.

Woody Allen

Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.

Will Rogers

O Lord, Creator of the sky and the cables that gird the earth, Router of all calls, grant that I shall always be in to receive Thy calls, and if I should not be in, grant me the wisdom to get back to Thee immediately. Grant, too, that I never play phone tag with Thee. Teach me to prioritize all my communications, business and personal, so that when the day is done, there will be no urgent calls left unmade. And may I always keep Thy private number programmed on my speed dial.

Brother Ty

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.

Ronald Reagan

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Redd Foxx

To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both.

Tom Wolfe

I act for free, but I demand a huge salary as compensation for all the annoyance of being a public personality. In that sense, I earn every dime I make.

Michelle Pfeiffer

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Laurence J Peter

Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant?? I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize, Oh my God....I could be eating a slow learner.”

Lynda Montgomery

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books.

Samuel Butler

Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?

Jay Leno

My school colors were clear. We used to say, "I'm not naked, I'm in the band."

Steven Wright

Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?

Peter Ustinov

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

George Bernard Shaw

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Robert Graves

This is a novel, that is, “a relatively long fictional prose narrative with a more or less complex plot or pattern of events, about human beings, their feelings, thoughts, actions, etc.” (Webster’s New 20^th Century Dictionary, unabridged, Collins World Publishers, 1978.) It is also satire, namely, “a literary work in which vices, follies, stupidities, abuses, etc. are held up to ridicule and contempt.” (ibid.) Finally, and just to belabor the now obvious, are characters herein are entirely the work of the author’s twisted imagination and have absolutely nothing to do with actual human beings invented by, say, God.

Christopher Buckley

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

Kurt Vonnegut

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde

“I don’t buy into boomer self-loathing. Our generation has accomplished many things.”

“Name one.”

“Disco, junk bonds, silicon implants, colorized movies, the whole concept of stress as a philosophical justification for self-indulgence. These achievements will tower above minor accomplishments like defeating Hitler, breaking the sound barrier, and inventing a vaccine for polio. Future historians will call us the Greatest Generation.”

Christopher Buckley

I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

George W Bush

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.

Theodore Roosevelt

The rule never failed: Forgive your enemies. It makes them madder than hell.

Christopher Buckley

As a wise man once said, You can fool some of the people some of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.

Christopher Buckley

Religious converts often try to make up for lost piousness with heightened fervor.

Christopher Buckley

Courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway.

John Wayne

In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.

Paul Harvey

I once tried to explain to a Norwegian woman why it was so hard for me to find health insurance. I’d had breast cancer, I told her, and she looked at me blankly. “But then you really need insurance, right?” Of course, and that’s why I couldn’t have it.

Barbara Ehrenreich

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde

Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis.

John Nichols

Another distinguished historian—there seemed to be no end of them—said on public television that France was no longer content to sit back  and watch the United States screw things up in the region. Did not France have its own proud history of screwing things up? Look at Algeria, Vietnam, Syria, Haiti—Quebec—all still reeling from their days of French rule. Clearly, France was ready and eager to show the world that she, too, could wreak disastrous, unforeseen consequences abroad, far more efficiently and almost certainly with more flair than America.

Christopher Buckley

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle---be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Mark Twain

There were those who urged caution, and those who urged that now was the time not for caution but for boldness. Then there were those who urged a middle course of cautious boldness. There were extremists on both sides; the neo-isolationists, whose banner declared, “Just sell us the damned oil,” and the neo-interventionists, who said, “Together, we can make a better world, but we’ll probably have to kill a lot of you in the process.”

Christopher Buckley

If you run away, you live to run away another day.

Mel Brooks

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

Dr. Seuss

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

Samuel Johnson

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

John Cleese

Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Harper Lee

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

Sean Wilentz

Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Thomas Jefferson

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.  You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.

Erma Bombeck

"When did the Gingerbreadman escape?"

"Ninety-seven minutes ago," replied Copperfield. "Killed two male nurses with his bare hands. The other three orderlies who accompanied him are critical in the hospital."

"Critical?"

"Yes. Don't like the food, beds uncomfortable, waiting lists too long—usual crap. Other than that they're fine."

Jasper Fforde

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

Bertrand Russell

If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.

Henry Ford

It really shows the weakness of this president, institutionally and politically, in his last two years in office. He's not just a lame duck any more. He seems more like a dead duck.

Stephen J Wayne

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.

Rita Rudner

If you treat people right they will treat you right - ninety percent of the time.

Franklin D Roosevelt

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

Albert Einstein

In my experience, when someone starts brandishing chapter and verse [of the Bible] like a blunt object, your best strategy is to run like hell. In fact, for my money we could throw out everything except the Sermon on the Mount.

Bill Fitzhugh

Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.

Dean Koontz

The planned assault on Iran will be cloaked as a defensive action to prot ect troops in Iraq. Bush sent one of his favorite lapdogs, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Likud-Conn., to carry the message. Lieberman -- who rivals Bush in the being so wrong, so often column -- went on CBS's "Face the Nation" and urged war with Iran. "I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq, and to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran," he said.

Bill Gallagher

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.

Chris Hedges

I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you've been playing poker for a half hour and you don't know who the patsy at the table is, you're the patsy.

Warren Buffett

Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself.

Kurt Vonnegut

I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.

Jack Benny

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

Mahatma Gandhi

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That's funny ...”

Isaac Asimov

No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.

Frank Zappa

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

Ludwig van Beethoven

I also learned the happy story of Mrs. Lillian O'Donahue, who was a telephone operator here in the days before automated telephone exchanges. At Carnarvon up the road was a big satellite dish that NASA used until the 1970s to track spacecraft as they traveled over the Indian Ocean. During a mission in 1964 the communications link between the Carnarvon dish and a tracking station near Adelaide broke down, and all messages had to be routed through Mrs. O'Donahue and her ancient equipment. Through one long, hot night Mrs. O'Donahue sat at her switchboard, carefully recording strings of coded messages from one outpost and passing them to the other. Each time the Gemini craft passed over the southern skies the fate of the mission—I just love this—was in the devoted hands of an unassuming little old lady sitting in a small white building miles down a dusty track on the west Australian coast. She made six dollars in overtime, Mike told me. I loved that, too.

Bill Bryson

At the very least, we were witnessing a coddled child having a severe allergic reaction to the real world. Hilton could certainly be losing her doughnuts in a medically authentic way, since by all appearances, she's never been punished, never been forced to eat anything she doesn't like, never had to sleep anywhere uncomfortable or wear anything unflattering. While the rest of us are more than passingly familiar with deprivations and things not going our way, Hilton could actually blow a fuse from what would look, to an outsider, like a mildly unpleasant experience. That pea under a stack of mattresses might not bruise you. but you don't sleep on 5 million thread-count sheets, now, do you?  Let's just pray that those bad prison sheets scratch her tender white ass enough to get her out of our faces for good.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

Andy Warhol

The British [Post World War I, 1919] occupation of Iraq drew heavy criticism at home almost from its inception. In 1920, a large-scale Shiite insurgency cost the British more than 2000 casualties, and domestic pressure to withdraw from Iraq began to build ... The result was what historians have called the "Quit Mesopotamia" campaign, which remained an issue in British politics until the end of the British mandate in Iraq in 1932. ...

The Conservatives got the message and in 1925 initiated a series of increasingly desperate measures to sell their Iraq policy to the public. Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery led the rhetorical charge. In speeches in Parliament and before audiences throughout England, Amery blasted critics for their "reckless disregard ... of the honour of their country." Calls by British newspapers to pull out of Iraq only emboldened the country's enemies, Amery said, and a "policy of scuttle" would expose the British to far greater dangers. ...

Amery claimed the situation in Iraq was significantly better than his critics realized. ... The whole Middle East was undergoing fundamental changes, he declared, and Iraq would soon be a model of development and democracy for the entire region.

Joel Rayburn

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

HG Wells

I remember when Daddy retired Mama told him: I said for better or worse but I didnt say nothin about lunch.

Cormac McCarthy

We followed a coastal route past broad estuaries and craggy hills beside the gray, flat expanse of Cardigan Bay. The towns along the way all had names that sounded like a cat bringing up a hairball: Llywyngwril, Morfa Mawddach, Llandecwyn, Dyffryn Ardudwy, Penrhyndeudreath.

Bill Bryson

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

Will Rogers

If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.

Voltaire

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

"I signed one of those do-not-resuscitate order." Iris shook her head. "I don't want to end up like a turnip. Life is too precious, and I can't understand people who have such a low opinion of it that being in a coma seems like an acceptable option."

All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.

The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute.

Reporter: Do you have any message for the children of America

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer "Present" or "Not guilty."

Theodore Roosevelt

The problem with intelligent design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet--a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school’s curriculum.

George F Will

The polls bore out the conventional wisdom that, given two candidates making roughly the same promises their parties had always made on which they'd never delivered, the American people tended to vote for whoever presented the better image.

Bill Fitzhugh

All movements go too far.

Bertrand Russell

I walked down the main street. In the afternoon light the clapboard buildings looked antique. The little mountain town, though, was so recently settled that the cemetery held only an unlucky few markers rising off-plumb from long grass, like death was an idea that had failed to catch on.

Charles Frazier

In a screening room the day before, this executive had casually mentioned to Dan that he'd just sold a pilot to NBC and was looking for a writer. The pilot concerned a boy who sails around the world in a sailboat. I had recently published a story in the Atlantic Monthly about a family who sails around Long Island Sound. Close enough.

April Smith

For the record, I'd been previously terminated as a busboy (I adamantly refused to clean up the women's washroom after something odd happened in it); a pharmacy clerk (the pharmacist overheard me telling a customer to "ease up on the quaaludes, dude"); a window washer (that was my fault, I had trouble showing up for work at 4 A.M.); a guitarist in a Samoan lounge band (creative differences); a guitarist in a Spike Jones cover band (also creative differences); and finally, as a husband (I'd love to chalk that one up to creative differences as well, but I have it on pretty good authority that I was just an asshole).

Chuck Lorre

Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.

Emo Phillips

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

In Tuesday's debate, only John McCain and Ron Paul bucked the collective swooning over enhanced interrogation. Paul mused about the way that torture has become "enhanced interrogation technique. It sounds like newspeak," he noted, referring to George Orwell's term for totalitarian doubletalk in his novel "1984." Paul obviously never got the memo. For most of the Republican primary candidates, "1984" isn't a cautionary tale, it's a how-to manual.

Rosa Brooks

AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

Jerry Falwell

It appears that America's anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men's movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.

Jerry Falwell

I agreed with him that there wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long.

Cormac McCarthy

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

George Santayana

[Tiptree's work is] proof of what she said, that men and women can and do speak both to and for one another, if they have bothered to learn how.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Despite being on a seemingly constant loop on all the music TV channels, the hype for the Paris Hilton single Stars Are Blind hasn't translated into album sales. This means that it's looking increasingly likely that Paris Hilton's musical career will flop badly, to the surprise of many. In other news today, the sky is blue and bears shit in the woods every now and again.

Stuart Heritage

Now, according to this report from the Senate ad hoc bipartisan blue-ribbon panel on erectile dysfunction, the occurrences, in clinical studies, of kidney damage among Mycoxaflopin patients were comparable to placebo.

Bill Fitzhugh

It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.

Denise Caruso

Shortly thereafter I was offered work directing a superstar, an international icon. Never mind that she was nine inches long and plastic. My job, at Mattel, was to pose Barbie for her industrial videos. Barbie loves her new outfit! Arms high! Barbie relaxes in her whirlpool. Legs up! Barbie gets into her pink Corvette. Ooops! Barbie fell down. Oh, well. To this day, she remains the most compliant actress I have ever worked with.

Audrey Wells

Years after he had retired from agenting and was in ill health, I had dinner with [my first agent] in New York. I asked him whatever possessed him to represent me, a 21-year-old with no credits or experience who walked in off the streets in white go-go boots.

"You looked like Kathleen Monahan."

"Who's Kathleen Monahan?"

"The first girl I ever schtupped."

"What!? What did that have to do with me?"

"Nothing."

My first agent taught me an important lesson. Very often in this crazy business what we think has to do with us, both the negative and positive, doesn't at all.

Anna Hamilton Phelan

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and have the two as close together as possible.

George Burns

The most important thing in acting [or politics] is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

George Burns

You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you're down there.

George Burns

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.

George Burns

Thirteen years earlier, during the war, I had been assigned to the U.S. Signal Corps where I was trained to be a teletype operator. Wondering if I could still type, I dusted off my wife's old, manual Smith-Corona, rolled in a sheet of paper and tested myself by quickly typing the traditional:

"Noq is thc time fr a;; goood mem to comr to the aaid of thier patty."

I was happy to discover that I had lost none of my typing skills.

Carl Reiner

New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.

Donald E Westlake

Life is funny, it's just a matter of editing out the boring parts ... or, hell, you can give up and go for a fart joke. That's funny, too. There will always be a glorious surprise, a happy accident that makes an audience laugh and saves a worried director's neck. It's a serious business, the honorable pursuit of those elusive moments. To quote Ernst Lubitsch himself: "A laugh is not to be sneezed at."

Cameron Crowe

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

HL Mencken

Indeed, the most frustrating day of my life (up 'til then; I've had worse since) was the afternoon I learned that the producer of Gunsmoke loved my spec, only to read that night in the trades that the show had been canceled. After only a century or two on the air. Impeccable timing, mine. That night, I got drunk and stabbed a clothes dryer with a Bowie knife. I didn't like the way it was looking at me.

T.S. Cook

May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you've handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don't have to sweat it anymore, you've taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.

Donald E Westlake

Spare no expense to save money on this one.

Samuel Goldwyn

No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.

Lily Tomlin

I was once in a museum with a rich man who after about 20 minutes said he wanted to leave because it was too irritating to see things that he couldn't buy. To us the world is a museum; to them it's a store.

Fran Lebowitz

It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do.

Andrew Greeley

A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of our humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another. I am an optimist about our species. I assume God is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over.

Dean Koontz

There is no such thing as “partial birth abortion” in medical literature. But there are times when a doctor is called upon to perform a late term abortion to save a woman's life or protect her from serious injury.

Howard Dean

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

Gloria Steinem

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

Hunter S Thompson

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage— and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still— I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

And stay clear of the Ten Commandments, as do the television evangelists. Those things are booby-trapped, because right in the middle of them is one commandment which would, if taken seriously, cripple modern religion as show business. It is this commandment: "Thou shalt not kill."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

1922 - 2007

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

James Thurber

I am a lawyer and what is a lawyer but someone hired to produce a work of fiction, which, in court, will be compared with opposing counsel's work of fiction by a judge or jury, and they will decide which fiction most closely resembles the fictional picture of the world in their respective brains and decide for one or another side and thus is justice done.

Michael Gruber

Thus, Mr Johnson running his witte largelie with many Latin tagges & drinking largelie too & hadde a meate pye & bye & bye he lifts haunch & letts a great blaste of winde & Will Shakespur upon the instant sayes, so speakes a Batchelor of Fartes, list well & learne; and all laugh, even Mr Johnson. But I did not understand the jest.

Richard Bracegirdle

John C. Calhoun said French was without a doubt the nastiest-sounding tongue practiced by any known people on the round globe and he himself spoke very little of it, only what he could remember from his classes at Yale many years ago. But he would pass along a trick he had learned, which was this: you couldn't go far wrong if you pronounced every single word of the language as if it were a child's euphemism for the private parts.

Charles Frazier

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Then another black woman, younger and darker than the one who had answered the door, came into the parlor carrying a wailing baby bundled in little white blankets. All you could see was a face like a barn owl's, just as round and flat and pale and fierce. Like all babies. If they had the physical means, they'd kill you without conscience to fulfill their slightest immediate desire. Same as house cats, which if they weighed two hundred pounds would not accede to our existence for a single day.

Charles Frazier

The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good.

Michael Gruber

I'm in love with my animal friends. I'm in love with my animal friends! In love with my animal friends. I'm very, very troubled. It's very emotional. It's probably not cool even looking like this. I'm so in love with them, and they're so fucked over, which so sucks.

Timothy Treadwell

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.

Werner Herzog

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.

Tom Stoppard

I am a deeply religious unbeliever.

Albert Einstein

Someone once said, Paul Goodman I think, that stupidity was a character defense and had little to do with intelligence, one reason the so-called best and brightest got us into Vietnam and why people who are smart enough to accumulate huge piles of wealth persist in doing things that get them major jail time.

Michael Gruber

The fact is, we sometimes fall in love with unsuitable people, which is why Cupid carries a bow and arrow and not a clipboard with a stack of personality tests.

Michael Gruber

Mark Hanna, who shook down the corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896 - once said there are two important things in politics. "One is money, and I can't remember the other one."

Bill Moyers

I have actually a great deal of sympathy for the increasingly common sort of person, often one in a high position, who is caught fabricating. You mean I didn't go to Harvard Med School? I did not have sex with that woman . ... It's not the collapse of morality (for I think there has never been truth based on memory) but rather the triumph of intellectual property, that blizzard of invented realities—artificial lives, Photoshopped photos, ghosted novels, lip-synched rock bands, fabricated reality shows, American foreign policy—through which we daily slog. Everyone, from the president on down, is a novelist now.

Michael Gruber

A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study but war and its organization and discipline, for that is the only art that is necessary to one who commands.

Niccolo Machiavelli

We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

Louis Brandeis

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Tennessee Williams

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

Chuck Yeager

When I meet a man I ask myself, “Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?”

Rita Rudner

The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.

Laurence J Peter

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

Evelyn Waugh

Stupidity is the primary wellspring of crime, as well as politics, religion, romance, and so many of the other elements of our lives.

Donald E Westlake

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Orson Welles

My parents didn't raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn't Santa Claus.

Dean Koontz

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

Edward R Murrow

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match.

Bill Bryson

I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short.

Shelley Winters

I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

Cormac McCarthy

Everybody gets the same amount of ice -- the rich get theirs in the summer and the poor get theirs in the winter.

Bat Masterson

With Billy Don you had to take things kind of slow or the big man would flip out. You had to work up to important stuff one step at a time. Hell, half the battle was just getting the man's attention, getting him to focus for just a few minutes. It was like he had that attention-defecate disorder or something.

Ben Rehder

Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them. I'm not justifying it, but I do understand how it happened....The number of deaths attributed to Roe v. Wade — about 40 million aborted babies and seven abortion clinic workers; 40 million to seven is also a pretty good measure of how the political debate is going.

Ann Coulter

And hell, everybody knew that your average Eye-talian American was nothing but a street thug. From what Red could tell, watching cable TV shows, the wops who made it into the mafia were just the ones with the biggest balls, the ones willing to take the biggest chances. But none of them---whether they were in the mob or not---could be trusted. Oh, sure, you had a few exceptions to the rule. Real Italian American heroes, like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Ben Rehder

The Deja Vu Hotel was a popular venue in Reading for awards ceremonies. It was big enough to service a good-sized crowd, had excellent catering facilities and coupled a congenial atmosphere with a fine opportunity for a few daft jokes.

"Have you ever been to the Deja Vu before?" asked Madeleine as they entered the main doors.

Jack looked around the entrance lobby. "I don't think so," he answered, "but it does look sort of familiar."

Jasper Fforde

Everyone was inside [for the hurricane]. Just the satellite trucks and reporters in bright rain slickers lining the lips of the bay at Fort DeSoto and Anna Maria Island. Their job was to illustrate why nobody should be where they were.

Tim Dorsey

George Bush is losing a war to Arab teenagers.

Bill Maher

[Carly Simon] sings this entire song obsessing about this dude. Then, during the chorus, he's suddenly getting shit for thinking the song's about him. But it is, every word. Now the poor guy's confused, probably just wants to eat his dinner in peace. But no, she starts yapping about him again, and then he's wrong for thinking she's yapping about him ...

Serge Storms

Richard Kim

And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.

Thomas Jefferson

To quote F. Scott, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." So I'm a pro-life-choice NRA gun-control nut who wants schools to pray for the separation of church and state.

Serge Storms

Public-opinion polls consistently cite Walter Cronkite as the most trusted man in written history. Yet, curiously, those same polls place journalists, as a class, down with politicians, attorneys, used-car salesmen and ex-cons. The media has no one to blame but themselves. They're the media, after all. They're in the image business. It's like a chef dying from food poisoning.

Tim Dorsey

And I really hate cell phones. They should be treated like farts: Keep it short and take a few steps away from the herd to establish a courtesy zone.

Serge Storms

The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits there in his big high chair looking grand and yet kindly. There is a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head. I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him.

Bill Bryson

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Tom Wolfe

It's hard to overstate the speed with which the Internet can now make someone a cultural icon. A YouTube video, a flub on "American Idol," a stupid pet trick—virtually anything can become a fast track to celebrity. What that means is still working itself out; all that's clear is that it's become unbelievably easy to get and leverage attention. A nobody can become a somebody at a moment's notice, just because everybody is always watching everything.

Shawn Hubler

The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooist brutality, is patently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with the dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.

John Adams

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

Wilson Mizner

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Bertrand Russell

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Orson Welles

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

Bill Watterson

The example of Christianity is not encouraging, actually, since it was nothing but a poor people's religion, a servant's religion, a slave's religion, a woman's religion, a child's religion, and would have remained such if it hadn't stopped taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously and joined forces with the vain and rich and violent.

Kurt Vonnegut

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about “and.”

Sir Arthur Eddington

If you can't say "fuck," you can't say "fuck the government."

Lenny Bruce

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our models of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Albert Einstein

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

Lily Tomlin

Former US Marine Rep. John Murtha understands the value of firing back. The ink wasn't dry on the Washington Times [story about Nancy Pelosi's non-request for a bigger plane] before Murtha announced he was going to hold hearings on just that subject - how members of Congress and the administration have been using - and misusing - the fleet of Pentagon jetliners. The next sound you heard after Murtha's threat was the sound of 200 GOP assholes slamming shut.

Stephen Pizzo

The late Murray Kempton once described editorial writers as "the people who come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded." Nowadays, media analysts are the guys who follow behind them, going through the pockets of the dead looking for loose change.

Tim Rutten

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws.

John Adams

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Albert Einstein

There's no law against lying to the cops. They expect it. They feel much happier when you lie to them than when you refuse to talk to them. That's a direct challenge to their authority.

Raymond Chandler

I knew it was going to be one of those crazy days. Everyone has them. Days when nobody rolls in but the loose wheels, the dingoes who park their brains with their gum, the squirrels who can't find their nuts, the mechanics who always have a gear wheel left over.

Philip Marlowe

I listen to the ethical pronouncements of the leaders of the so-called religious revival going on in this country, including those of our President, and I am able to distill only two commandments from them. The first commandment is this: "Stop thinking." The second commandment is this: "Obey."

Kurt Vonnegut

In an age in which the five major religions are Bank of America, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Starbucks, Molly Ivins was an atheist.

Kinky Friedman

Jim Hightower's great line about Bush, “Born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth - he's been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn't admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn't just get a head start by being his father's son - it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy . . . He got into the Texas Air National Guard - and sat out Vietnam - through Daddy's influence.

Molly Ivins

The Tralfamadorians performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down there just ate that up!

Kurt Vonnegut

I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being 'un-American,' but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years. The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.

Molly Ivins

After a very pleasant lunch we take a quick look at the legendary Madonna Inn. I was there for the Nash bash a couple years back when Graham Nash turned sixty. (You haven't lived until you have seen David Crosby in a pink rabbit costume.)

Eric Idle

In 1799, when the former President of the United States, George Washington, was treated for a severe throat infection, he received state-of-the-art medical care from the best physicians of the day. They gave him a compound of mercury (a poisonous heavy metal) by mouth and by injection, administered a toxic white salt to induce sweating and vomiting, applied caustic poultices to blister his skin, asked him to inhale hot vinegar fumes that burned his throat, and bled him four times, taking a total of five pints. Then President Washington died. It is an open question whether his doctors might have saved his life by leaving him alone.”

Thomas Hager

The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong; usually, they are not smarter.

F Lee Bailey

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

Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

Kurt Vonnegut

Speaking of Atheism, I remember one time when Jack Patton and I went to a sermon in Vietnam delivered by the highest-ranking chaplain in the Army. He was a general. The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterward, and he said, "There's a chaplain who never visited the front."

Kurt Vonnegut

The fact is, all policy is inherently flawed. The resort to policy—particularly right-minded policy—is a concession to human failure. It seeks to install, pro forma, into our legal code what we as humans recognize as proper and necessary but fail to execute by our own moral code.

Lee Stringer

Successful leaders are pragmatic. Almost every choice they make is between bad options; the wisest of them, like Lincoln, pick out the least worst, consistently. And that's about all you can ask of them.

Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter

Personally I would like to see all judges and district attorneys made to do some time. Not for the crimes they commit from the bench. For those they commit out of ignorance. Which is precisely why time in prison should be part of their qualifications. So that they might come to know what they don't know they don't know.

Lee Stringer

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly a lot better than no drugs at all.

Kurt Vonnegut

Now then: Boston and Philadelphia both claim to be the cradle of liberty. Which city is correct? Neither one. Liberty is only now being born in the United States. It wasn't born in 1776. Slavery was legal. Even white women were powerless, essentially the property of their father or husband or closest male relative, or maybe a judge or lawyer. Liberty was only conceived in Boston or Philadelphia. Boston or Philadelphia was the motel of liberty, so to speak.

Kurt Vonnegut

I still think a fair amount about the sixties and trying to be a good hippie. I'm under no illusion that I know exactly what was going on back then, but there are a few things that need saying. We were not the spaced-out, flaky, self-absorbed, wimpy, whiny flower children in movies and TV shows alleging to depict the times. It's true that we were too young, too inexperienced, and in the end too vulnerable to bad advice from middle-aged sociopathic gurus. Things eventually went bad, drugs took their toll, but before they went bad, hippies did a lot of good.

Mark Vonnegut

Religions are ancient attempts by mankind to come to grips with some of the great moral questions of life, as we evolved from our animal state and before we had any clear idea of what was going on in the universe. I don't wish to be circumscribed by two-thousand-year-old philosophical ideas any more than I would want to be cured by two-thousand-year-old medical practices or forced to agree with the scientific ideas of Nought B.C.

Eric Idle

I was happily unmarried for a while, helped in my irresponsible behavior by Carinthia, my beautiful, leggy landlady. She, very kindly, told all her friends that I was gay, and, one after another, they slipped downstairs to see if they could rescue me. No one seemed to notice how easy it was.

Eric Idle

What can I accomplish but a decrease in American happiness if I say to a crowd, as I did, that an attack on a civilian population by clean, decent young men in enormously expensive and  complex flying machines is, when viewed from the ground, no different from the practice of the world's worst police departments, which is to make arrested nobodies watch the torture of innocent friends and relatives, young and old, with the intention of changing the nobodies' probable politics?

Kurt Vonnegut

I'm in Washington, D. C. I think Washington, B.C., might be more appropriate with the dreadful Bushites in power. This is the town where the attorney general covered up the tits on a statue of Justice. Highly appropriate when you think that this lot only came to power by mugging the Supreme Court.

Eric Idle

I love the fact that "spam" has come to mean unwanted garbage on the Internet. Every day I receive four or five offers to add three or four inches to my penis. All of which I accept. And now I have a nine-foot penis.

Eric Idle

Abbie Hoffman is high on my list of saints, of exceptionally courageous, unarmed, unsponsored, unpaid souls who have tried to slow down even a little bit state crimes against those Jesus Christ said should inherit the Earth someday. He did this with truth, anger, and ridicule.

Kurt Vonnegut

And then there's the business of George [HW] Bush being the first President in my lifetime to be elected after a campaign which was nakedly racist, using a black psychopath as a boogeyman. If he had done that with an Armenian or a Pole or a Jew, he would have been as despicable as Nazidom's Heinrich Himmler, the former chicken farmer who was the boss of all the death camps. But Bush knew the United States better than I have ever dared to know them, and he scared us with a black man, and he won, he won.

Kurt Vonnegut

George [HW] Bush making Dan Quayle the custodian of our nation's destiny, should Bush himself become seriously impaired, was proof to me that Bush didn't give a damn what became of the rest of us once he himself was gone. There's a bomber pilot for you.

Kurt Vonnegut

Unlike my Socialist grandfather, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think that any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do that day.

Kurt Vonnegut

Only this morning I, an old poop, got a letter asking me if I had any suggestions for a revision of the Pledge of Allegiance, and I answered by return mail: "I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and the flag which is its symbol, with liberty and justice for all."

Kurt Vonnegut

The Manson Family pretended to believe (the same thing as believing) that its murders would be blamed on blacks. Los Angeles would then be purified somehow by a race war. The myth at the core of the political family which calls itself "Neo-Conservatives" isn't that explicit, but I know what it is, even if most of them can't put it into words. This is it: They are British aristocrats, graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, living in the world as it was one hundred years ago.

Kurt Vonnegut

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are two things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

Kurt Vonnegut

When we passed a Pentecostal Church, he said, "The mental giants in there believe that every word is true in a book put together by a bunch of preachers 300 years after the birth of Christ. I hope you won't be that dumb about words set in type when you grow up."

Kurt Vonnegut

All marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.

Shelley Winters

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Bertrand Russell

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.

Hunter S Thompson

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

Alexander Pope