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

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

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

When neither their poverty nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?

With her body, woman is more sincere than man; but with her mind she lies. And when she lies, she does not believe herself.

If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.

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

Go to the Scriptures... the joyful promises it contains will be a balsam to all your troubles.

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

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

"A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police."

The first requisite for immortality is death.

I never deny, I never contradict. I sometimes forget.

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!

Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

Remembering is for those who have forgotten.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

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

Porsche: there simply is no substitute.

"Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work"

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

When in doubt, tell the truth.

We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

Like ya know? Rock 'N Roll is an esoteric language that unlocks the creativity chambers in people's brains, and like totally activates their essential hipness, which of course is like totally necessary for saving the earth, like because the first th

Adde parvum parvo manus acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile.]

What a bonanza! An unknown beginner to be directed by Lubitsch, in a script by Wilder and Brackett, and to play with Paramount's two superstars, Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert, and to be beaten up by both of them!

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

Small is beautiful.

It doesn't matter whether you win or lose

To be or not to be.

All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

Alea iacta est. [The die is cast]

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

... but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witch

If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. A more sententious, holding- forth old bore who expected every

Fear and loathing, my man, fear and loathing.

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

Art is a jealous mistress.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

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

Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

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

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.

Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Fill what's empty, empty what's full, scratch where it itches.

It's no surprise that things are so screwed up: everyone that knows how to run a government is either driving taxicabs or cutting hair.

Two wrongs are only the beginning.

I stick my neck out for nobody.

If Jesus Christ came to this town, people would say, great guy; terrible carpenter.

There is always one thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace

Water, taken in moderation cannot hurt anybody.

God help those who do not help themselves.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

That government is best which governs least.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential death in which its

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

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.

Any road followed to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

The early bird who catches the worm works for someone who comes in late and owns the worm farm.

Inglish Spocken Hier: some mangled translations Sign on a cabin door of a Soviet Black Sea cruise liner: Helpsavering apparata in emergings behold many whistles! Associate the stringing apparata about the bosums and meet behind, flee then t

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented hell.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

That's no moon...

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

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.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

"Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest."

If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

If a guru falls in the forest with no one to hear him, was he really a guru at all?

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

Sho' they got to have it against the law. Shoot, ever'body git high, they wouldn't be nobody git up and feed the chickens. Hee-hee.

We ... make the modern error of dignifying the Individual. We do everything we can to butter him up. We give him a name, assure him that he has certain inalienable rights, educate him, let him pass on his name to his brats and when he dies we give

Diplomacy is to do and say, the nastiest thing in the nicest way.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs around your home are too difficult to tackle. So, when your furnace explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it. The "professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on t

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

Sorry 'bout that sweat, honey. That's just holy water.

Your chances of getting hit by lightning go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say, "Storms suck!"

Hotels are tired of getting ripped off. I checked into a hotel and they had towels from my house.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time.

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life.

So so is good, very good, very excellent good: and yet it is not; it is but so so.

Many enraged psychiatrists are inciting a weary butcher. The butcher is weary and tired because he has cut meat and steak and lamb for hours and weeks. He does not desire to chant about anything with raving psychiatrists, but he sings about his gin

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.

A is for Apple.

No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he had only had good intentions. He had money as well.

"Rights" is a fictional abstraction. No one has "Rights", neither machines nor flesh-and-blood. Persons... have opportunities, not rights, which they use or do not use.

When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

English literature's performing flea.

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

It is enough to make one sympathize with a tyrant for the determination of his courtiers to deceive him for their own personal ends...

There is a limit to the admiration we may hold for a man who spends his waking hours poking the contents of chickens with a stick.

I am just a nice, clean-cut Mongolian boy.

I'll burn my books.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so fo

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

There is no sin but ignorance.

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

He that teaches himself has a fool for a master.

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.

No group of professionals meets except to conspire against the public at large.

The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.

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

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

Dear Ann Landers: My husband watches the TV preachers every Sunday. He claims one minister said there are 350 different sins. My husband wants to know if you can get the list. He thinks he is missing something.

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

Flame on!

To have died once is enough.

The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo! now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

"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."

To generalize is to be an idiot.

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

"MacDonald has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts."

It is better to have loved and lost

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

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

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.

The state of innocence contains the germs of all future sin.

American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room with

To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.

"I wonder", he said to himself, "what's in a book while it's closed. Oh, I know it's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must be happening, because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet

Why be a man when you can be a success?

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

We Americans, we're a simple people... but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

"God gives burdens; also shoulders" Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech at the end of the 1980 election. At least he said it was a Jewish saying; I can't find it anywhere. I'm sure he's telling the truth though; why wo