The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

A Polish worker walks into a bank to deposit his paycheck. He has heard about Poland's economic problems, and he asks what would happen to his money if the bank collapsed. "All of our deposits are guaranteed by the finance ministry, sir," the telle

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

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

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear,

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, "one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."

Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.

We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant. [...] I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk w

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

What excuses stand in your way? How can you eliminate them?

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

The price of success in philosophy is triviality.

If you lose a son you can always get another, but there's only one Maltese Falcon.

What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which nobody really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday Morning Time, whereby at 7 a.m. every weekday we go into a space-launch-style "hold" for two to three hours, durin

At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life.

I would have promised those terrorists a trip to Disneyland if it would have gotten the hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn't have to go to that extreme.

Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.

Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.

If you have seen one city slum you have seen them all.

Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.

Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.

The Least Successful Equal Pay Advertisement In 1976 the European Economic Community pointed out to the Irish Government that it had not yet implemented the agreed sex equality legislation. The Dublin Government immediately advertised for an equal

Human resources are human first, and resources second.

Nobody knows what goes between his cold toes and his warm ears.

True leadership is the art of changing a group from what it is to what it ought to be.

Well, I'm disenchanted too. We're all disenchanted.

"No job too big; no fee too big!"

Nothing recedes like success.

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason.

From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.

The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.

Man has made his bedlam; let him lie in it.

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.

In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the crunch he was all courag

Wishing without work is like fishing without bait.

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

I have always noticed that whenever a radical takes to Imperialism, he catches it in a very acute form.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Fortune's Guide to Freshman Notetaking: WHEN THE PROFESSOR SAYS: YOU WRITE: Probably the greatest quality of the poetry John Milton

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

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

That's where the money was.

Genius is pain.

The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants.

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

Love your neighbour, yet don't pull down your hedge.

A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.

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

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.

I am a deeply superficial person.

Suicide is the sincerest form of self-criticism.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

Mum's the word.

I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole.

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

Fear is the greatest salesman.

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

America is a stronger nation for the ACLU's uncompromising effort.

Man is a military animal, glories in gunpowder, and loves parade.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

It's all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.

I went to a Grateful Dead Concert and they played for SEVEN hours. Great song.

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

Mental power tended to corrupt, and absolute intelligence tended to corrupt absolutely, until the victim eschewed violence entirely in favor of smart solutions to stupid problems.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.

The great secret in life ... [is] not to open your letters for a fortnight. At the expiration of that period you will find that nearly all of them have answered themselves.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

"The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain."

The sky is blue so we know where to stop mowing.

America ... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesman with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

L'hazard ne favorise que l'esprit prepare.

He jests at scars who never felt a wound.

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

... the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call "inhuman."

Vote early and vote often.

Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?

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

Leave no stone unturned.

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

You can't play your friends like marks, kid.

She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.

We are giving instruction to FBI agents in the various Chinese dialects ... to handle present and likely future contingencies.

Steady movement is more important than speed, much of the time. So long as there is a regular progression of stimuli to get your mental hooks into, there is room for lateral movement. Once this begins, its rate is a matter of discretion.

XI: If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off. XII: I

In Hollywood, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it.

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

... "fire" does not matter, "earth" and "air" and "water" do not matter. "I" do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

You can't erase a dream, you can only wake me up.

Well, the handwriting is on the floor.

[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity: (1) Go down and raid all the lockers in the local high school and confiscate 53 marijuana cigarettes and put them in a

It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association is liked getting kicked out of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

I think we are in Rats' Alley where the dead men lost their bones.

For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into a hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

I go the way that Providence dictates.

When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.

There is a secret person undamaged within every individual.

If you aren't rich you should always look useful.

In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

No evil can happen to a good man.

Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

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

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS ag

If a man slept by day, he had little time to work. That was a satisfying notion to Escargot.

God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty [...] I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman... not enough to support a man and fiv

Many of the characters are fools and they are always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

Haste makes waste.