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Curmudgeon's Quotations

Humanity and Other Curiosities

• Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon. -- Paul Fussell

• Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
  -- Winston Churchill

• The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
  -- Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)

• It's not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you.
  -- Frank Zappa

• The problem with the gene pool is, there's no lifeguard. -- Steven Wright

• Why is "abbreviation" such a long word? -- Steven Wright

• We only use a third of our brain to think with. The question is: what do we do with the other third?
  -- Anonymous (submitted by Don Bannon)

• We already have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart instead? -- Anonymous (submitted by Don Bannon)

• The combination of foolishness in the heart and free will in the head is extremely volatile. -- John Rosemond

• You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. -- Aldous Huxley

• A lie goes half way round the world before the truth can get its pants on. -- Winston Churchill

• The enemies of the truth are always awfully nice. -- Christopher Morley

• Of those who say nothing, few are silent. -- Thomas Neill

• It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them. -- Dame Rose Macaulay

• He a cross between a godfather and a lawyer. He'll make you an offer you can't understand. -- Don Henley

• Some open minds should be closed for repairs. -- Anonymous

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James

• It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. -- Alfred Adler

• The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself. -- Vance Havner

• Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
  -- Joseph Heller

• The self-made man is often a horrible example of unskilled labor. -- Anonymous

• Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Nick Diamos

• The classes that wash most are those that work least. -- G. K. Chesterton

• Some people are like blisters; they never show up till the work is almost done. -- Anonymous

• We don't know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it. -- Will Rogers

• There are lots of folks who want the front of the bus, the back of the church, and the center of attention.
  -- Anonymous

• The only people who brag about having been poor are the rich. -- Frank B. Medor

• When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. -- Eric Hoffer

• Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity. -- Eric Hoffer

• Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
  -- Susan Ertz

Government and Politics

• The supply of government exceeds the demand. -- Lewis Lapham

• Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even when there's no river. -- Nikita Khrushchev

• A statesman is a successful politician who is dead. -- Thomas B. Reed

• The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize. -- Saul Bellow

• Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other. -- Oscar Ameringer

• Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television? -- Art Buchwald

• A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment. -- Willis Player

• A conservative is a person who does not think anything should be done for the first time. -- Frank Vanderlip

• Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
  -- John Kenneth Galbraith

• A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. -- George Bernard Shaw

• More is not always better. The fact that it takes one woman nine months to have a baby doesn't mean a nine-woman co-op can produce a baby in one month. -- Marilyn Ross

• The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein

• A billion here, a billion there; the first thing you know, you're talking about real money. -- Everett Dirksen

• Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
  -- Laurence J. Peter

• I'm not indecisive. Am I indecisive? -- Jim Scheibel (mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota)

Academia

• There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe. -- George Orwell

• Science is the orderly arrangement of what, at the moment, seem to be the facts. -- Anonymous

• Psychology: the science that tells you what you already know in words you don't understand. -- Anonymous

• A philosopher is a person who gives other people advice about troubles he hasn't had. -- William R. Lewis

• Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• I think I think; therefore, I think I am. -- Ambrose Bierce

• I have tried in my time to be a philosopher, but I don't know how -- cheerfulness was always breaking in.
  -- Oliver Edwards

• Psychiatry: enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings. -- Laurence J. Peter

• Sociology: the study of people who do not need to be studied by people who do. -- E. S. Turner

• Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus.
  -- Peter S. Prescott

• Teacher: "Johnny, do you know the meaning of 'apathy'?" Student: "I don't know and I don't care."

Books and Writers

• When ideas fail, words come in very handy. -- Goethe

• The multitude of books is making us ignorant. -- Voltaire

• Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me. -- Anatole France

• I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. -- Woody Allen

• Poets have been mysteriously quiet on the subject of cheese. -- G. K. Chesterton

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. -- Dorothy Parker

• The covers of this book are too far apart. -- Ambrose Bierce

• Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. -- Samuel Johnson

• Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum. -- P. G. Wodehouse

• Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. -- Flannery O'Connor

• I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific. -- David Mamet

• I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. -- Peter De Vries

• Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx

• Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor. -- Joyce Carol Oates

• I suppose some editors are failed writers -- but so are most writers. -- T. S. Eliot

• An expert frequently avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. -- M. Lincoln Schuster (the Schuster in Simon & Schuster)

• The world does not need more Christian writers. It needs more good writers who are Christians. -- C. S. Lewis

The Media

• A newspaper editor is a person who knows precisely what he wants but isn't quite sure. -- Walter Davenport

• In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. -- Oscar Wilde

• Television is a medium of entertainment that permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time and yet remain lonesome. -- T. S. Elliott

• Television: the bland leading the bland. -- Anonymous

• Television -- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done. -- Ernie Kovacs

• Why should people pay good money to go out and see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing? -- Samuel Goldwyn

• The secret of acting is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made. -- George Burns

• Television is for appearing on -- not for looking at. -- Noel Coward

• My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
  -- Peter De Vries

• Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. -- David Frost

• Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry. -- Natalie Sarraute

• 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

• Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. -- George Orwell

Home and Family

• There is nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won't aggravate. -- Anonymous (submitted by W. Frank Walton)

• Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped. -- Sam Levenson (submitted by W. Frank Walton)

• Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder. -- Abraham Lincoln

• Where there's a will, there's a relative. -- Groucho Marx

• You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, "You're right! I never would've thought of that!" -- Dave Barry

Life As We Know It

• What we need are some new cliches. -- Samuel Goldwyn

• An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure. -- Steven E. Clark

• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. -- Lisa Grossman

• Surly to bed, surly to rise. -- Anonymous

• Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. -- Steven Wright

• I don't make predictions. I never have and I never will. -- Tony Blair, British prime minister

• Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. -- Anonymous (submitted by Warren Berkley).

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

• Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. -- Christopher Lasch

• You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap. -- Dolly Parton

• Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious. -- H. L. Mencken

• "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth. -- Alfred North Whitehead

• In the battle of the sexes: woman fights from a dreadnaught and man from an open raft. -- H. L. Mencken

• Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. -- Bill Vaughn

• Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year. -- Victor Borge

• It's gotten to the point where most of us are spending way too much time with our seatbacks and tray tables in their upright and fully locked position. -- Anonymous

• We're all in this together -- by ourselves. -- Lily Tomlin

• For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. -- Alice Kahn

• What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. -- Havelock Ellis

• The purpose of the doctor is to entertain the patient while the disease takes its course. -- Voltaire

• If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation. -- Jean Kerr

• Life is a zoo in a jungle. -- Peter De Vries

• There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is "You never know." -- Joaquin Andujar

• Noah was a brave man to sail in a wooden boat with two termites. -- Anonymous

• Things are always darkest just before they go pitch black. -- From "I Spy"

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

• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
  -- James Branch Cabel

• My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists. -- Jean Rostand

• A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future. -- Sydney Harris

• Even paranoids have real enemies. -- Delmore Schwartz

• I'm worried that the universe will soon need replacing. It's not holding a charge. -- Edward Chilton

• A stale mind is the devil's breadbox. -- Mary Bly

• It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.
  -- Damon Runyon

• Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. -- Mark Twain

• When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done. -- Anonymous

• Remember, there is always hope. The ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by professionals. -- Anonymous