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