You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you're not planning on coming back down.

Never trust an automatic pistol or a D.A.'s deal.

The best laid plans of mice and men are usually about equal.

"I'm dying," he croaked. "My experiment was a success," the chemist retorted . "You can't really train a beagle," he dogmatized. "That's no beagle, it's a mongrel," she muttered. "The fire is going out," he bellowed. "Bad marksmanship," the h

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

He knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official; and why? because the official is so impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a personality.

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

The Least Successful Defrosting Device The all-time record here is held by Mr. Peter Rowlands of Lancaster whose lips became frozen to his lock in 1979 while blowing warm air on it. "I got down on my knees to breathe into the lock. Somehow my lips

One good turn asketh another.

When I first arrived in this country I had only fifteen cents in my pocket and a willingness to compromise.

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

Luck can't last a lifetime, unless you die young.

Men will fuck mud.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

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,

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.

Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule."

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind.

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest r

Watch your mouth, kid, or you'll find yourself floating home.

To generalize is to be an idiot.

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.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away."

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.

Not all who own a harp are harpers.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

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

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.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Who dat who say "who dat" when I say "who dat"?

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

The scum also rises.

"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God." "I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid Go

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

Poverty must have its satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people.

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us

Gone With The Wind LITE(tm)

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.

For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into a hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.

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

Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the crunch he was all courag

Home is where the hurt is.

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

... we must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.

Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions: We think that we may take judicial notice of the fact that the term "bitch" may imply some feeling of endearment when applied to a female of the canine species but that it is seldom, if ever, so used whe

A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom, but he has no means to realize it other than through violence.

To say you got a vote of confidence would be to say you needed a vote of confidence.

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

Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things, a

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if only words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.

It pays in England to be a revolutionary and a bible-smacker most of one's life and then come round.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

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

There seems no plan because it is all plan.

"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

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 road to Hades is easy to travel.

"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

A woman takes off her claim to respect along with her garments.

"Elves and Dragons!" I says to him. "Cabbages and potatoes are better for you and me."

You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

Put a rogue in the limelight and he will act like an honest man.

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

It's always darkest just before the lights go out.

You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

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 used to be a rebel in my youth. This cause... that cause... (chuckle) I backed 'em ALL! But I learned. Rebellion is simply a device used by the immature to hide from his own problems. So I lost interest in politics. Now when I feel aroused by

"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."

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 divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

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.

You may have heard that a dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog.

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

The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away.

It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.

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

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.

"Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none."

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.

An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Thin

To know Edina is to reject it.

Too much of everything is just enough.

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

Fraud is the homage that force pays to reason.

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.

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

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Nothing succeeds like excess.

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

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.

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

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Money doesn't talk, it swears.

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

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

I am America's child, a spastic slogging on demented limbs drooling I'll trade my PhD for a telephone voice.

Man proposes, God disposes.

XXVI: If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance. XXVII: Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank. XXVIII: It is better to be the r

The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.

Or you or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but we take stock next week, and it would not be fair on the company.

We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean.

It's our fault. We should have given him better parts.

It was the next morning that the armies of Twodor marched east laden with long lances, sharp swords, and death-dealing hangovers. The thousands were led by Arrowroot, who sat limply in his sidesaddle, nursing a whopper. Goodgulf, Gimlet, and the r

Our sires' age was worse that our grandsires'. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.

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