The Curmudgeon Quotelist

curmudgeon n. A cantankerous person.

The majority of these quotes are from the book THE PORTABLE CURMUDGEON.

The ideas and beliefs expressed in these quotations do not necessarily reflect my own views. I selected different quotes for different reasons. Some were chosen for the manner in which they present their ideas as opposed to the ideas themselves. Others were chosen because I considered them thought provoking though I may not agree with their content. Still others were chosen for their whimsical nature and entertainment value. And of course some were chosen because I feel they are enlightening.

"Some lies are so well disguised to resemble truth, that we should be poor judges of the truth not to believe them."

anonymous

" The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases, one of those diseases is man."

Fredrich Nietzsche

" The pleasure is momentary, the position rediculous, and the expense damnable."

Lord Chesterfield

"Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and - crowning injury - inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself."

Paul Valery

The eagle soaring majestically

Beholds the lion prowling

From now until eternity

The philosopher shall be howling

And the hoi polloi shall be scowling

anonymous

" It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Krishnamurti

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

Dean Acheson

" It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."

Alfred Adler

"It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich."

Alan Alda

"Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right."

Woody Allen

" I can't take a well-tanned person seriously."

Cleveland Amory

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher."

Bierce

"Politeness; n. The most acceptable hypocrisy."

Bierce

" Miss, n. A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Missis ( Mrs. ), and Mister ( Mr. ) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. In the general abolition of social titles in this our country they miraculously escaped to plague us. If we must have them let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to Mh."

Bierce

" Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane. For illustration, this present lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers. He may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators."

Ambrose Bierce

"The Trojans lost the war because they fell for a really dumb trick. " Hey, there's a gigantic wooden horse outside and all the Greeks have left. Let's bring it inside! " Not a formula for long-term survival. Now if they had formed a task force to study the Trojan Horse and report back to a committee, everyone wouldn't have been massacred..Who says middle management is useless?"

Adam C. Engst

"Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else."

Haywood Broun

"Moral indignation is jealosy with a halo."

H.G. Wells

"What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen."

Evelyn Waugh

"To succed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."

Voltaire

"The public is a ferocious beast: One must either chain it up or flee from it."

Voltaire

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

Bill Vaughn

"Virtue has never been as respectable as money."

Mark Twain

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

James Thurber

"What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm."

Henry David Thoreau

" Sanity is a cozy lie."

Susan Sontag

"All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for."

Logan Pearsall Smith

" Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention."

Cornelis Otis Skinner

" Society attacks early when the individual is helpless."

B. F. Skinner

" Victory is a political fiction."

anonymous

"To be free it is not enough to beat the system, one must beat the system every day."

anonymous

"A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going on."

William Burroughs

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."

Albert Camus

"They (cats) smell and they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery. They're sneaky, selfish, and not particularly smart; they are disloyal, condescending, and totally useless in any rodent free environment."

Jean-Micheal Chapereau

" I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles."

G. K. Chesterton

"There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation."

John Ciardi

"A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned."

George Bernard Shaw

"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

Shaw

"Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."

Shaw

"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."

Shaw

"The fact is, we are growing out of Shakespeare. Byron declined to put up with his reputation at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and now, at the beginning of the twentieth, he is nothing but a household pet. His characters still live; his word pictures of woodland and wayside still give us a Bank-holiday breath of country air; his verse still charms us; his sublimities still stir us; the commonplaces and trumperies of the wisdom which age and experience bring to all the rest of us are still expressed by him better than by anybody else; but we have nothing to hope from him, and nothing to learn from him - not even how to write plays, though he does that so much better than most modern dramatists."

George Bernard Shaw

"Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

" One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

Bertrand Russell

" Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

Francious de la Rochefoucauld

"Satire is often the reflection of a kind of maral nausea."

Crand Briton

"The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding."

Bacon

"Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. "

Bierce

"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated."

H. L. Mencken

" Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel."

Mencken

" Hamlet is a course and barbarous play. One might think the work is a product of a drunken savage's imagination."

Voltaire

"The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral."

Mencken

" A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."

Mencken

" Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans."

Mencken

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money."

Mencken

"The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul."

Norman Mailer

" Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."

A. J. Liebling

" Frenchman: Germans with good food."

Fran Lebowitz

"Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat."

Fran Lebowitz

" Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

Franz Kafka

" Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality."

C. J. Jung

" Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles."

Beverly Jones

"The only completely consistent people are the dead."

Aldous Huxley

" People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it."

Aldous Huxley

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."

Goethe

"There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, cariacatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausably at oppurtunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it."

John Kenneth Galbraith

" The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value."

Paul Fussell

"The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others."

Paul Fussell

" There is a certain impertinance in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion."

Anatole France

"Slums may be the breeding ground of crime but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delerium."

Cyril Connolly

"Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick."

Sameul Taylor Coleridge

" Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

Georges Clemenceau

" Television: Chewing gum for the eyes."

Frank Lloyd Wright

" A cult is a religion with no political power."

Tom Wolfe

" The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots."

Rebecca West

"Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness."

E. M. Cioran

"Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off."

E. M. Cioran

"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."

George Orwell

"People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights."

Nietzsche

" Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek Myths to their private parts."

Nabokov

" I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."

Wilson Mizner

"The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate."

Will Durant

"When an artist is more concerned with what is said than how it is said there is no art."

anonymous

" Civilization is a transient sickness."

Robinson Jeffers

"It is much easier for good to deal with evil than it is for good to deal with stupidity"

anonymous

"Stupidity is the friend of evil"

anonymous

Jack be nimble

Jack be quick

Jack jumped, passed gas,

And was burned to a crisp.

anonymous

"Some compare the internet to a labyrinth. I consider it more like Franz Kafka's 'The Castle.' "

Richard (the creator of this website)

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people have accessed this site since 1 September 1997

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