A yawn is a silent shout.

I love mankind ... It's people I hate.

"Is it just me, or does anyone else read `bible humpers' every time someone writes `bible thumpers?'

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behin

What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

"Listen to what I say, not what I mean. I mean ...."

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.

"Give me enough medals, and I'll win any war."

A priest asked: What is Fate, Master? And the Master answered: It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. It is that which has caused nations to build bywa

The future is a race between education and catastrophe.

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

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

Usually, when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell ... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.

But you shall not escape my iambics.

A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

When the going gets tough, everyone leaves.

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

You know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but not how to use it.

Our parents were of Midwestern stock and very strict. They didn't want us to grow up to be spoiled and rich. If we left our tennis racquets in the rain, we were punished.

The Worst Car Hire Service When David Schwartz left university in 1972, he set up Rent-a-wreck as a joke. Being a natural prankster, he acquired a fleet of beat-up shabby, wreckages waiting for the scrap heap in California. He put on a cap and lo

A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment.

I hate quotations.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.

What we do not understand we do not possess.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Nothing recedes like success.

Time as he grows old teaches all things.

Hope is a waking dream.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

I go the way that Providence dictates.

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.

Tempt not a desperate man.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.

He who renders warfare fatal to all engaged in it will be the greatest benefactor the world has yet known.

It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

A game can by God repent or we'll punish it. That's how they did it in Salem in the seventeenth century, and that's how we'll do it now.

"Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun."

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.

Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending t

The only thing that stops God from sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless.

It is better to have loved and lost

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Don't change the reason, just change the excuses!

Walking on water wasn't built in a day.

He who writes with no misspelled words has prevented a first suspicion on the limits of his scholarship or, in the social world, of his general education and culture.

Necessity hath no law.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon. Which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to.

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

"I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent ability and 25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when the reverse could be true."

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.

I'll never get off this planet.

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

Exceptions prove the rule, and wreck the budget.

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.

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.

The shortest distance between two points is under construction.

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never any good to oneself.

Three things have been difficult to tame: The oceans, fools, and women. We may soon be able to tame the ocean. Fools and women will take a little longer.

Divorce is a game played by lawyers.

I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting. I shall fall, Like a bright exhalation in the evening And no man see me more.

The way I understand it, the Russians are sort of a combination of evil and incompetence... sort of like the Post Office with tanks.

Beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.

Naked children have never played in _o_u_r fountains, and I.M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

"Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence"

Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness you send out for it.

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

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

I'm going to Vietnam at the request of the White House. President Johnson says a war isn't really a war without my jokes.

No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.

Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.

You cannot see the wood for the trees.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Ben, why didn't you tell me?

It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.

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

Satire is tragedy plus time.

Never take a resume seriously. Resumes only make money for the people who write the resumes. No resume ever tells an employer how many times a job applicant has had the clap. Why, indeed, would anyone hire a person based on a resume written by a

The very remembrance of my former misfortune proves a new one to me.