There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

I'm going to raise an issue and stick it in your ear.

I remember once being on a station platform in Cleveland at four in the morning. A black porter was carrying my bags, and as we were waiting for the train to come in, he said to me: "Excuse me, Mr. Cooke, I don't want to invade your privacy, but I h

Mandrell: "You know what I think?" Doctor: "Ah, ah that's a catch question. With a brain your size you don't think, right?"

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

He knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Being a miner, as soon as you're too old and tired and sick and stupid to do your job properly, you have to go, where the very opposite applies with the judges.

Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked down upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life.

In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment was expressed by Thomas K. Co

A good name lost is seldom regained. When character is gone, all is gone, and one of the richest jewels of life is lost forever.

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

Rascal, am I? Take THAT!

I never cheated an honest man, only rascals. They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.

Texas is Hell on woman and horses.

A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.

We're living in a golden age. All you need is gold.

The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

I understand why you're confused. You're thinking too much.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

Men freely believe that what they wish to desire.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Ben, why didn't you tell me?

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.

If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.

I didn't do it! Nobody saw me do it! Can't prove anything!

If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become president of Harvard.

The cart has no place where a fifth wheel could be used.

Yawd [noun, Bostonese]: the campus of Have Id.

In the long run we are all dead.

The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.

Grig (the navigator): ... so you see, it's just the two of us against the entire space armada. Alex (the gunner): What?!? Grig: I've always wanted to fight a desperate battle against overwhelming odds. Alex: It'll be a slaughter! Grig: That'

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Praise the sea; on shore remain.

Please try to limit the amount of "this room doesn't have any bazingas" until you are told that those rooms are "punched out." Once punched out, we have a right to complain about atrocities, missing bazingas, and such.

Eighteen goddess-like daughters are not equal to one son with a hump.

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

Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

The price of success in philosophy is triviality.

Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them... Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced only by Masters of the Universal Way of

All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun. Money's just the way we keep score.

An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him. "Well, zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a mi

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.

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

If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

It's easier to take it apart than to put it back together.

With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law; and every time they make a law it's a joke.

They can't stop us... we're on a mission from God!

Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.

If we don't survive, we don't do anything else.

To do two things at once is to do neither.

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die.

Look, we trade every day out there with hustlers, deal-makers, shysters, con-men. That's the way businesses get started. That's the way this country was built.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

By perseverance the snail reached the Ark.

After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought, and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon to be created." "This is true," He replied.

The only alliance I would make with the Women's Liberation Movement is in bed.

If a man stay away from his wife for seven years, the law presumes the separation to have killed him; yet according to our daily experience, it might well prolong his life.

The road to Hades is easy to travel.

Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr. Rippingille.

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.

To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have a Hardluckland.

I appreciate the fact that this draft was done in haste, but some of the sentences that you are sending out in the world to do your work for you are loitering in taverns or asleep beside the highway.

If I were a grave-digger or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.

I have ways of making money that you know nothing of.

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.

Prizes are for children.

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for even the greatest fool may ask more the the wisest man can answer.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

The pollution's at that awkward stage. Too thick to navigate and too thin to cultivate.

Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.

Why be a man when you can be a success?

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.

If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.

My tears stuck in their little ducts, refusing to be jerked.

One of my favorite jokes, a telling commentary on Jewish mothers' capacity to lay on guilt, involves the mother who gave her son two neckties on Chanuka. The boy hurried into his bedroom, ripped off the tie he was wearing, put on one of the ties his

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way a midget is good at being short.

Walking on water wasn't built in a day.

Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards."

A definition of teaching: casting fake pearls before real swine.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest r

Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.

The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense

A man's house is his castle.

"Hi, I'm Preston A. Mantis, president of Consumers Retail Law Outlet. As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney. Do you have a car or a job? Do you ever

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Imagine what we can imagine!

Maternity pay? Now every Tom, Dick and Harry will get pregnant.