Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

The Least Perceptive Literary Critic The most important critic in our field of study is Lord Halifax. A most individual judge of poetry, he once invited Alexander Pope round to give a public reading of his latest poem. Pope, the leading poet of h

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and

If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Recently deceased blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan "comes to" after his death. He sees Jimi Hendrix sitting next to him, tuning his guitar. "Holy cow," he thinks to himself, "this guy is my idol." Over at the microphone, about to sing, are Jim Mo

He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.

I think the world is run by C students.

If I had done everything I'm credited with, I'd be speaking to you from a laboratory jar at Harvard.

The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanent

I'll turn over a new leaf.

To have died once is enough.

An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Grub first, then ethics.

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

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.

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

No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he had only had good intentions. He had money as well.

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sl

"Plaese porrf raed."

The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep.

While there's life, there's hope.

Well, don't worry about it... It's nothing.

You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre! [It is magnificent, but it is not war]

A morgue is a morgue is a morgue. They can paint the walls with aggressively cheerful primary colors and splashy bold graphics, but it's still a holding place for the dead until they can be parted out to organ banks. Not that I would have cared nor

If the American dream is for Americans only, it will remain our dream and never be our destiny.

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soo

A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth.

Neckties strangle clear thinking.

The future is a race between education and catastrophe.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Lay off the muses, it's a very tough dollar.

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.

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

We Americans, we're a simple people... but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities.

The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped marker.

If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty.

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.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Every why hath a wherefore.

God helps them that help themselves.

Remember that there is an outside world to see and enjoy.

"It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side."

A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant, the second half still balmy and quite pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not c

I shot an arrow in to the air, and it stuck.