The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian's readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians' predisposition for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventi

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

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

I'd just as soon kiss a Wookie.

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

There's such a thing as too much point on a pencil.

Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

If you wish to be happy for one hour, get drunk. If you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for a month, kill your pig and eat it. If you wish to be happy forever, learn to fish.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunc

Nothing recedes like success.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

All phone calls are obscene.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repainting.

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

It was a female that drove me to drink and I didn't even have the kindness to thank her.

Two heads are better than one.

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

"You would do well not to imagine profundity," he said. "Anything that seems of momentous occasion should be dwelt upon as though it were of slight note. Conversely, trivialities must be attended to with the greatest of care. Because death is moment

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

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men

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.

Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives

A definition of teaching: casting fake pearls before real swine.

It is not enough that I should succeed. Others must fail.

When the sun shineth, make hay.

Save the Whales

There are no manifestos like cannon and musketry.

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.

Plots are like girdles. Hidden, they hold your interest; revealed, they're of no interest except to fetishists. Like girdles, they attempt to contain an uncontainable experience.

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

Diary of a Young Girl LITE(tm)

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to meas

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.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

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.

Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.