Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much.

Man proposes, God disposes.

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.

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

In dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, delve deep into the heart. In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In work, be competent. In action, be careful of your timing.

I do desire we may be better strangers.

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?

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

It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.

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.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

The Worst Jury A murder trial at Manitoba in February 1978 was well advanced, when one juror revealed that he was completely deaf and did not have the remotest clue what was happening. The judge, Mr. Justice Solomon, asked him if he had heard any

I BET WHAT HAPPENED was they discovered fire and invented the wheel on the same day. Then that night, they burned the wheel.

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

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

As long as there are entrenched social and political distinctions between sexes, races or classes, there will be forms of science whose main function is to rationalize and legitimize these distinctions.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.

As to Jesus of Nazareth... I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissent

Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry up is not nailed down.

In my end is my beginning.

Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's build a home center. And before long ho

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Plastic... Aluminum... These are the inheritors of the Universe! Flesh and Blood have had their day... and that day is past!

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

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.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

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

Lo! Men have become the tool of their tools.

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."

"We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call free enterprise," said Cash McCall, "but when one of our citizens show enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit, we do our best to make him feel that he ought t

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer.

Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.

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

All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.

All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas.

Most Texans think Hanukkah is some sort of duck call.

Big book, big bore.

"What are you watching?" "I don't know." "Well, what's happening?" "I'm not sure... I think the guy in the hat did something terrible." "Why are you watching it?" "You're so analytical. Sometimes you just have to let art flow over you."

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

It'll be just like Beggars' Canyon back home.

For thee the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers.

Historians have now definitely established that Juan Cabrillo, discoverer of California, was not looking for Kansas, thus setting a precedent that continues to this day.

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

I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.

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

There is no fool to the old fool.

To do two things at once is to do neither.

We are not a loved organization, but we are a respected one.

A good scapegoat is hard to find. A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.

There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell

Sic transit gloria mundi. [So passes away the glory of this world.]

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.

A man's house is his castle.

If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

How should they answer?

The eye is a menace to clear sight, the ear is a menace to subtle hearing, the mind is a menace to wisdom, every organ of the senses is a menace to its own capacity. ... Fuss, the god of the Southern Ocean, and Fret, the god of the Northern Ocean, h

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 0. integrated 0. management 0. options 1. total 1. organizational 1. flexibility 2. systematized 2. monitored 2. capability 3. parallel 3. reciprocal 3. mobility 4. functional 4. digital 4. programming 5. re

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

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

No good deed goes unpunished.

You get what you pay for.

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

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

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ances

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

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

Out of sight is out of mind.

Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.

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

Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.

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

We should be glad we're living in the time that we are. If any of us had been born into a more enlightened age, I'm sure we would have immediately been taken out and shot.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.

Facts are the enemy of truth.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting.

A word to the wise is enough.

A hundred years from now it is very likely that [of Twain's works] "The Jumping Frog" alone will be remembered.

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

Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?

God instructs the heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging.

The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven; The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change. These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

The nearer to the church, the further from God.

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

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

No two persons ever read the same book.

(1) Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. (2) If your stomach antagonizes you, pacify it with cool thoughts. (3) Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. (4) Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying on in society, as

"I only touch base with reality on an as-needed basis!"

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

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.

We're only in it for the volume.

The ultimate game show will be the one where somebody gets killed at the end.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

I just asked myself... what would John DeLorean do?

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

Life is like a 10 speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.

Some men are heterosexual, and some are bisexual, and some men don't think about sex at all... they become lawyers.

Awash with unfocused desire, Everett twisted the lobe of his one remaining ear and felt the presence of somebody else behind him, which caused terror to push through his nervous system like a flash flood roaring down the mid-fork of the Feather River

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

When you're in command, command.

Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing.

There are two ways of disliking art. One is to dislike it. The other is to like it rationally.

Once I belonged to a group that really had THE WORD. I fought like hell for them. But another group came along and exposed the word of my group as shallow and degenerate. They had a better word. So I quit the first group and lost all the friends

Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers and cheating on your income tax.

Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words since I first called my brother's father dad.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobb

Well, the handwriting is on the floor.

"I am not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it."

I always wake up at the crack of ice.

My father, a good man, told me, "Never lose your ignorance; you cannot replace it."

Facts, apart from their relationships, are like labels on empty bottles.

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.

Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot.

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags.

You can't run away forever, But there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start.

With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter.

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.

A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion.

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.

Plus ,ca change, plus c'est la m^eme chose. [The more things change, the more they remain the same.]

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore,

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labour. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each other's throat.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Every young man should have a hobby: learning how to handle money is the best one.

Every person, all the events in your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Certain passages in several laws have always defied interpretation and the most inexplicable must be a matter of opinion. A judge of the Court of Session of Scotland has sent the editors of this book his candidate which reads, "In the Nuts (unground

Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. [There is no great genius without some touch of madness.]

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

"I understand this is your first dead client," Sabian was saying. The absurdity of the statement made me want to laugh but they don't call me Deadpan Allie and lie.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

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."

I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

A drama critic is a person who surprises a playwright by informing him what he meant.

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.

Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.

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.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

When the sun shineth, make hay.

"The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around us in awareness.

"What's this? Trix? Aunt! Trix? You? You're after the prize! What is it?" He picked up the box and studied the back. "A glow-in-the-dark squid! Have you got it out of there yet?" He tilted the box, angling the little colored balls of cereal

God help those who do not help themselves.

If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour.

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

If happiness is in your destiny, you need not be in a hurry.

Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really."

What one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

If the ends don't justify the means, then what does?

Yes, I've now got this nice little apartment in New York, one of those L-shaped ones. Unfortunately, it's a lower case l.

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.

What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent? In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded that it takes a coinci

The Priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go. A voice, sweetened and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. A sleek brown head, a seal's,

Roumanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler.

Confucius say too much.

Charity begins at home.

... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.

There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.

A Tale of Two Cities LITE(tm)

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.

If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each

Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.

[Maturity consists in the discovery that] there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.

A snake lurks in the grass.

Innovation is hard to schedule.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne we

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

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