NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.

The optimum committee has no members.

We should have a Vollyballocracy. We elect a six-pack of presidents. Each one serves until they screw up, at which point they rotate.

Do not use that foreign word "ideals". We have that excellent native word "lies".

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.

Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.

Time as he grows old teaches all things.

Hark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious offender. You stand convicted of sickness, hunger, wretchedness, and want.

... why should you waste a single moment of *your* life seeming to be something you don't want to be? Lord, that's so simple. If you hate your job, quit it. If your friends are tedious, go out and find new friends. You are queer, you lucky fool, a

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Man proposes, God disposes.

Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond your control. But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control. If you feel powerless over your fear

Very few blacks will take up golf until the requirement for plaid pants is dropped.

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.

"... I should explain that I was wearing a black velvet cape that was supposed to make me look like the dashing, romantic Zorro but which actually made me look like a gigantic bat wearing glasses ..."

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

If I made peace with Russia today, I'd only attack her again tomorrow. I just couldn't help myself.

If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

Cold is God's way of teling us to burn more Catholics.

I don't think they are going to give a shit about the Republican Committee trying to bug the Democratic Committee's headquarters.

I realize that the MX missile is none of our concern. I realize that the whole point of living in a democracy is that we pay professional congresspersons to concern themselves with things like the MX missile so we can be free to concern ourselves wi

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.

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.

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.

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

[Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

Honesty's the best policy.

Whatever doesn't succeed in two months and a half in California will never succeed.