If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it will always do it.

Most Texans think Hanukkah is some sort of duck call.

Moneyliness is next to Godliness.

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.

Nasrudin returned to his village from the imperial capital, and the villagers gathered around to hear what had passed. "At this time," said Nasrudin, "I only want to say that the King spoke to me." All the villagers but the stupidest ran off to spr

Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.

We could do that, but it would be wrong, that's for sure.

Those who do things in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice are to be avoided at all costs.

"I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nos

You or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but we take stock next week, and it would not be fair on the company.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

The ideal voice for radio may be defined as showing no substance, no sex, no owner, and a message of importance for every housewife.

Let your conscience be your guide.

Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies.

Don't take a nickel, just hand them your business card.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

"Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends."

Some women should be beaten regularly, like gongs.

Necessity hath no law.

Alea iacta est. [The die is cast]

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at onc

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

One good turn asketh another.

Never have so many understood so little about so much.

A word to the wise is enough.

We're fantastically incredibly sorry for all these extremely unreasonable things we did. I can only plead that my simple, barely-sentient friend and myself are underprivileged, deprived and also college students.

Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.

To know Edina is to reject it.

It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.

Sin boldly.

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.

You are a wish to be here wishing yourself.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Don't overdo it.

Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever depths they were once able to plumb.

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.

Your wig steers the gig.

The Army needs leaders the way a foot needs a big toe.

"She said, `I know you ... you cannot sing'. I said, `That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.'"

Scratch the average female and you'll find a purring bundle... at the ready to love and honor, bake a torte and still produce quintuplets.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

"Rights" is a fictional abstraction. No one has "Rights", neither machines nor flesh-and-blood. Persons... have opportunities, not rights, which they use or do not use.

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Thin

Grub first, then ethics.

In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

The best portion of a good man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.

Some scholars are like donkeys, they merely carry a lot of books.

If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.

There are many of us in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer and the poor get it in the winter.

British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive it. If you can't there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps.

Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were

You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too.

Something better... 13 (sympathetic): Oh, What happened? Did your parents lose a bet with God? 14 (complimentary): You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on. 15 (scientific): Say, does that thing there influence the tides?

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old all down the unchanging days and die one day like any other day, only short

There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell

Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.

History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.

Rascal, am I? Take THAT!

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by our labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of property interests of the country, and upon the successful manag

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

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

I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing.

There are people who find it odd to eat four or five Chinese meals in a row; in China, I often remind them, there are a billion or so people who find nothing odd about it.

Why, every one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.

If you laid all of our laws end to end, there would be no end.

A woman's a woman until the day she dies, but a man's only a man as long as he can.

Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra and sank.

The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today.

The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. She is simply a woman who has done her best to snare a man and has failed.

Sho' they got to have it against the law. Shoot, ever'body git high, they wouldn't be nobody git up and feed the chickens. Hee-hee.

And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.

WE'RE GOING TO THROW THE MX AWAY AFTER WE BUILD IT. The MX is really [Don't tell anybody!] just a "bargaining chip" in the nuclear-arms- reduction talks with the Russians. See, we have a problem with the Russians. They look at our leaders and they

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I went to a party on Perry Lane in 1962, and the party spilled out of the house, and came down the street, and covered the world.

Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions: We think that we may take judicial notice of the fact that the term "bitch" may imply some feeling of endearment when applied to a female of the canine species but that it is seldom, if ever, so used whe

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."

One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is a

The only "ism" Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

Don't be humble ... you're not that great.

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

Every young man should have a hobby: learning how to handle money is the best one.

There is no sin but ignorance.

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

What is involved in such [close] relationships is a form of emotional chemistry, so far unexplained by any school of psychiatry I am aware of, that conditions nothing so simple as a choice between the poles of attraction and repulsion. You can meet

I paid a visit to my local precinct in Greenwich Village and asked a sergeant to show me some rape statistics. He politely obliged. That month there had been thirty-five rape complaints, an advance of ten over the same month for the previous year.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.

Plastic... Aluminum... These are the inheritors of the Universe! Flesh and Blood have had their day... and that day is past!

... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

Darth Vader! Only you would be so bold!