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,

Life is the living you do, Death is the living you don't do.

Two wrongs are only the beginning.

Events are not affected, they develop.

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.

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

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't seem to work.

Out of sight is out of mind.

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

Too much of everything is just enough.

'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!

Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.

Facts are the enemy of truth.

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.

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

If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average.

A little inaccuracy saves a world of explanation.

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

The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.

Living in LA is like not having a date on Saturday night.

A violent man will die a violent death.

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

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

When alerted to an intrusion by tinkling glass or otherwise, 1) Calm yourself 2) Identify the intruder 3) If hostile, kill him. Step number 3 is of particular importance. If you leave the guy alive out of misguided softheartedness, he will repay y

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

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.

Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.

My father was a creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.

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

"World conquerors sometimes become fools, but fools never become world conquerors."

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

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

No evil can happen to a good man.

God gave man two ears and one tongue so that we listen twice as much as we speak.

The time spent on any item of the agenda [of a finance committee] will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

All phone calls are obscene.

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

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.

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

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

God is Dead.

Moneyliness is next to Godliness.

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.

... before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes s

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Only those who leisurely approach that which the masses are busy about can be busy about that which the masses take leisurely.

Scratch the average female and you'll find a purring bundle... at the ready to love and honor, bake a torte and still produce quintuplets.

"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

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Housework can kill you if done right.

Nothing endures but change.

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

What I tell you three times is true.

It is up to us to produce better-quality movies.

It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters.

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

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

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

It's easier to take it apart than to put it back together.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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

Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even worse.

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.

There is a natural hootchy-kootchy to a goldfish.

Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.

If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.

Catharsis is something I associate with pornography and crossword puzzles.

The ideal voice for radio may be defined as showing no substance, no sex, no owner, and a message of importance for every housewife.

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *___and* fresher

Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that balances are correct.

The [Ford Foundation] is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some.

For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say "Canada". Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something.

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

I didn't do it! Nobody saw me do it! Can't prove anything!

If you would know the value of money, go try to borrow some.

A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex.

Exceptions prove the rule, and wreck the budget.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

Thou hast seen nothing yet.

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

Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

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

Grig (the navigator): ... so you see, it's just the two of us against the entire space armada. Alex (the gunner): What?!? Grig: I've always wanted to fight a desperate battle against overwhelming odds. Alex: It'll be a slaughter! Grig: That'

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

The only "ism" Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.

Divorce is a game played by lawyers.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate. Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and great effort pushing boulders into a single

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

When I have one foot in the grave I will tell the truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, "Do what you like now."

Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions.

I understand why you're confused. You're thinking too much.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Everyone is in the best seat.

It seems to me that nearly every woman I know wants a man who knows how to love with authority. Women are simple souls who like simple things, and one of the simplest is one of the simplest to give. ... Our family airedale will come clear across t

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

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

"There was an interesting development in the CBS-Westmoreland trial: both sides agreed that after the trial, Andy Rooney would be allowed to talk to the jury for three minutes about little things that annoyed him during the trial."

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

"Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used it."

Necessity has no law.

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

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

Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is "Hey, taxi." Two is, "What train do I take to get to Bloomingdale's?" And three is, "Don't worry. It's just a flesh wound."

A furore Normanorum libera nos, O Domine! [From the fury of the norsemen deliver us, O Lord!]

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.

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

Charity begins at home.

All art is but imitation of nature.

If reporters don't know that truth is plural, they ought to be lawyers.

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

Art is a jealous mistress.

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

Nice guys finish last.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.

May you live in uninteresting times.

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

If you know the answer to a question, don't ask.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.

... [concerning quotation marks] even if we *___did* quote anybody in this business, it probably would be gibberish.

Ask not for whom the Bell tolls, and you will pay only the station-to-station rate.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

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

Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.

When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done.

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

The executioner is, I hear, very expert, and my neck is very slender.

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

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

Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of his followers. One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.

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

I am a deeply superficial person.

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

It looks like it's up to me to save our skins. Get into that garbage chute, flyboy!

The superfluous is very necessary.

Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing.

Sweet April showers do spring May flowers.

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

Look before you leap.

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

In case of fire, stand in the hall and shout "Fire!"

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

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

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soo

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein.

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

He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.