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

The optimum committee has no members.

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."

The Soviet Union, which has complained recently about alleged anti-Soviet themes in American advertising, lodged an official protest this week against the Ford Motor Company's new campaign: "Hey you stinking, fat Russian, get off my Ford Escort."

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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

[Americans] are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

If you want divine justice, die.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Sometimes, too long is too long.

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.

Once harm has been done, even a fool understands it.

Where there is much light there is also much shadow.

But if you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable nowdays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.

Like, if I'm not for me, then fer shure, like who will be? And if, y'know, if I'm not like fer anyone else, then hey, I mean, what am I? And if not now, like I dunno, maybe like when? And if not Who, then I dunno, maybe like the Rolling Stones?

Every country has the government it deserves.

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

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

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.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

There are people who find it odd to eat four or five Chinese meals in a row; in China, I often remind them, there are a billion or so people who find nothing odd about it.

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!

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.

Better the prince of some inferior court, Than second, or less, in beatific light.

The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.

I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by 4 o'clock.

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt

The shortest distance between two points is under construction.

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

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

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.

The first rule of all intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.

"... gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

There are ten or twenty basic truths, and life is the process of discovering them over and over and over.

My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.

The polite thing to do has always been to address people as they wish to be addressed, to treat them in a way they think dignified. But it is equally important to accept and tolerate different standards of courtesy, not expecting everyone else to ad

People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them.

Kiss me, Kate, we will be married o' Sunday.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Maryel brought her bat into Exit once and started whacking people on the dance floor. Now everyone's doing it. It's called grand slam dancing.

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

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

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.

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.

Business will be either better or worse.

To be or not to be.

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

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

One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists. But it has occurred to me that God has Alzheimer's and has forgotten we exist.

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

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

What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.

Water, taken in moderation cannot hurt anybody.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old all down the unchanging days and die one day like any other day, only short

The trouble is, there is an endless supply of White Men, but there has always been a limited number of Human Beings.

"I'm in Pittsburgh. Why am I here?"

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what rid

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

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

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

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

Events are not affected, they develop.

The best case: Get salary from America, build a house in England, live with a Japanese wife, and eat Chinese food. Pretty good case: Get salary from England, build a house in America, live with a Chinese wife, and eat Japanese food. The wo

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Things are more like they are today than they ever were before.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, to tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his

Nothing recedes like success.

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

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

You get what you pay for.

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

Art is anything you can get away with.

I used to be disgusted, now I find I'm just amused.

Nothing will dispel enthusiasm like a small admission fee.

Rascal, am I? Take THAT!

The distinction between Freedom and Liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have been unable to find a living specimen of either.

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.

If you sell diamonds, you cannot expect to have many customers. But a diamond is a diamond even if there are no customers.

If there is no wind, row.

The Poems, all three hundred of them, may be summed up in one of their phrases: "Let our thoughts be correct".

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

By the middle 1880's, practically all the roads except those in the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were still five feet between rails. It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard, in one day

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him.

"Hi, I'm Preston A. Mantis, president of Consumers Retail Law Outlet. As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney. Do you have a car or a job? Do you ever

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of matrydom to the reformers of error.

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive!

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.

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

If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of an oncoming train.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

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

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

Another day, another dollar.

It has been said [by Anatole France], "it is not by amusing oneself that one learns," and, in reply: "it is *____only* by amusing oneself that one can learn."

There has been a little distress selling on the stock exchange.

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

She applies her lipstick in spite of its contents: "greasy rouge, containing crushed and dried insect corpses for coloring, beeswax for stiffness, and olive oil to help it flow - the latter having the unfortunate tendency to go rancid several hours a

"Somewhere", said Father Vittorini, "did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happi

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

Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing.

With women, I've got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end of it. I slip the loop around their necks so they can't get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.

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

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

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

One picture is worth more than ten thousand words.

"...The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'!" "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The nam

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

Americans' greatest fear is that America will turn out to have been a phenomenon, not a civilization.

"It's a summons." "What's a summons?" "It means summon's in trouble."

No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that it is scraping the top of the barrel.

Solipsists of the World... you are already united.

Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever depths they were once able to plumb.

If there were a school for, say, sheet metal workers, that after three years left its graduates as unprepared for their careers as does law school, it would be closed down in a minute, and no doubt by lawyers.

Never appeal to a man's "better nature." He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.

Let's say your wedding ring falls into your toaster, and when you stick your hand in to retrieve it, you suffer Pain and Suffering as well as Mental Anguish. You would sue: * The toaster manufacturer, for failure to include, in the instructions

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money?

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."

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

Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra and sank.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

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

If a man stay away from his wife for seven years, the law presumes the separation to have killed him; yet according to our daily experience, it might well prolong his life.

Political speeches are like steer horns. A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull inbetween.

You can bring men from other parts of the world who are sane. And you know what happens? At the very moment they cross those mountains... they go mad. Instantaneously and automatically, at the very moment they cross the mountains into California,

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

Man proposes, God disposes.

All the waters of the earth are in the armpit of the Great Frog.

I have had my television aerials removed. It's the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.

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

Fast ship? You mean you've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?

Talkers are no good doers.

A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

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

"All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right hands."

I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family p

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

The longest part of the journey is said to be the passing of the gate.

A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

In Hollywood, all marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterwards that causes the problems.

Drop the vase and it will become a Ming of the past.

Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you're not just a number. Youre two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash and another number.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.

Delay not, Caesar. Read it instantly.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

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

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.

[He] took me into his library and showed me his books, of which he had a complete set.

Men freely believe that what they wish to desire.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

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

It's very glamorous to raise millions of dollars, until it's time for the venture capitalist to suck your eyeballs out.

"I don't mind going nowhere as long as it's an interesting path."

[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.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".

What we do not understand we do not possess.

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.

If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary qualifications, that field's employment market is glutted.

... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

The man who has never been flogged has never been taught.

It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving un

She ran the gamut of emotions from 'A' to 'B'.

The road to Hades is easy to travel.

Everything is possible. Pass the word.

He that bringeth a present, findeth the door open.

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

Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to

Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

I DON'T THINK I'M ALONE when I say I'd like to see more and more planets fall under the ruthless domination of our solar system.

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

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

... indifference is a militant thing ... when it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery.

BS: You remind me of a man. B: What man? BS: The man with the power. B: What power? BS: The power of voodoo. B: Voodoo? BS: You do. B: Do what? BS: Remind me of a man. B: What man? BS: The man with the power...

What we wish, that we readily believe.

God helps them that help themselves.

Men are superior to women.

Fear is the greatest salesman.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

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

"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."

When I saw a sign on the freeway that said, "Los Angeles 445 miles," I said to myself, "I've got to get out of this lane."

per year.

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die.

There is perhaps in every thing of any consequence, secret history, which it would be amusing to know, could we have it authentically communicated.

Always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.

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."

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

"Spare no expense to save money on this one."

It's from Casablanca. I've been waiting all my life to use that line.