Favorite Sayings

Favorite Sayings


When I first started using the Internet, I began to collect funny sayings and quotations that I saw in other people’s email and newsgroup postings, and magazines and newspapers. Later, I began using them in my own email signatures. Here are some of my favorites:
--
“[Jeff] Bagwell was also hit by a pitch, but the umpires inspected the ball for damage and allowed the game to continue.” -- Mickey Herskowitz, Houston Chronicle, Sept 26, 1997 “Not that I care too much about geography: It’s one of those bossy ideas according to which, if you locate a place, there’s nothing more to be said about it.”
-- Saul Bellow, “Henderson the Rain King”
“Give up those intimate little dinners for four, unless there are three other people eating with you.”
-- attributed to Orson Welles
I allow my cats to express themselves, never interfere with their romances, and raise them with dogs to broaden their outlook. -- Murray Robinson
“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
-- Mark Twain, in _Huckleberry Finn_
“There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among them is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.”
-- P. J. O’Rourke
“Drink is an evil thing. It makes you fight with your neighbor, it makes you shoot at your landlord, and it makes you miss him.” -- spotted on alt.folklore.urban “Fear those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
-- Umberto Eco
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” -- Isaac Newton
There is nothing so terrifying as ignorance in action.
-- Goethe
“There’s no deoderant like success.”
-- Elizabeth Taylor
“Think of us as the Information Superhighway ... without any information!” -- David Letterman “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.” -- Harlan Ellison
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. -- Richard Feynman “The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.”
-- Mark Russell
Heard on the Don Imus radio program, during a discussion of the Virginia man who lost part of his penis while attempting to make love to a vacuum cleaner:
“I wonder what kind of vacuum cleaner it was ...”
“What do you mean, what kind it was? What difference does that make?”
“Well, of course it makes a difference. Shows what kind of taste he has. Was it one of those cute little Orecks?
Or was it a bag type, one of those big ugly Hoovers?”
“Too bad you didn’t shoot him. We get into so much trouble when we shoot anybody.” -- unidentified Houston police officer, to James Howard Gibbons (Houston Chronicle, Sunday, Jan. 15, 1995)
Two sodium atoms walk into a bar. All of a sudden one of them screams out, “Damn! I think I lost an electron!” The other looks around for a bit and says, “Are you sure?” The first continues: “Yes!, I’m ... positive!”
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken “I have the heart of a little boy, and I keep it in a jar in my desk.” -- speech by Stephen King
“Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” -- Axel Oxenstierna, 17th century chancellor of Sweden Chaos. I can relate to that. My life is chaos most of the time. I am in tune with the universe. It feels like home.
-- Robert Fulghum
“[Clinton] is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who ever could be elected in our childrens’ lifetime--Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone playing, McDonalds and junk-food loving boy from Arkansas.” -- Toni Morrison
“... the voters knew he brought a lot of debris with him, joints he didn’t inhale and truths he didn’t tell and women he hadn’t slept with (“They were awake at the time,” his aides privately explained).
-- ‘Time’ Feb. 2, 1998
“Vegetarian” is Sanskrit for “lousy hunter”. Topic for dyslexic philosophers: “Is there a dog?”
“The one clear proof of the absence of alligators is that not a single union official has ever advanced alligator infestation as a reason for a pay increase for sewer workers.” -- John T. Flaherty, New York City Bureau of Sewers (NY Times, May 19, 1982) 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. -- John Adams
“It ain’t what folks don’t know that gets ‘em in trouble; it’s knowing so many things that ain’t so.”
-- Kin Hubbard, American humorist, 19th cent.
I used to say that politics was the second oldest profession. I have come to know that it bears a gross similarity to the first. -- Ronald Reagan
“... like having Willie Sutton and Jesse James investigate one another for bank robbery.” -- Ross Perot, on the congressional investigations into campaign financing, October 1997
“Enough realities, we want promises!”
-- graffiti seen in Lima, Peru
“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
-- Woody Allen, “Husbands and Wives”
“If a man speaks in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”
“Nothing in life is ‘fun for the whole family.’ There are no massage parlors with ice cream and free jewelry.”
-- Jerry Seinfeld
The superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations in which he has to demonstrate his superior skill. -- Anonymous
“And when did we become so hungry for data that we’re all supposed to be surfing the Internet? If there is so deep a craving for significant information, why do millions watch _Roseanne_ or _Beavis and Butthead_?” -- Mike Royko “Whatever the recent cease-fires by Catholic and Protestant terrorists may mean for the war-weary residents of Northern Ireland, they can only bode ill for the adventurous traveller.” -- Louise Kiernan, Chicago Tribune
“If you take your wife on a sea voyage, buy her a round-trip ticket no matter what your plans may be.”
-- Alfred Hitchcock
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”
-- E. W. Dijkstra
“You try this case in California and six months, bam, the Unabomber’s playing golf with O. J.”
-- David Letterman
“Someone who writes what has been officially labeled a ‘humor column’ about the American scene lives in constant danger of being blindsided by the truth.”
-- Calvin Trillin
At some point in the O.J. trial, with both sides promising to call witnesses to challenge the credibility of any witness called to challenge the credibility of a a witness, it occurred to me that if this lasted long enough, we might all be called to testify. -- Calvin Trillin, _Time_, August 31, 1998
Engineering: “How will this work?”
Science: “Why will this work?”
Management: “When will this work?”
Liberal Arts: “Do you want fries with that?”
“Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?” -- John F. Kennedy, at Rice Stadium, September 1962.
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo its use.” -- Galileo “I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.” -- (spotted on IRC)
“Suppose I was a criminal. And suppose I was a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
-- Mark Twain
“It’s very hard to explain bad taste
to someone who has it.” -- Gene Wilder
“Children don’t understand how the world works, so everything is mysterious. Some of this perspective may still be lurking in the minds of adults, making them susceptible to believe in the irrational or pseudo-scientific.” -- Tom Kohlenberg Re: “War of the Worlds”: When asked by a reporter about news bulletins that stated Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese, an elderly New Jersey man said, “Ha! You got me on that Martian stunt; I had a hunch you’d try it again.”
“She fulfilled, you see, four of the five conditions necessary for what may be called the Australian Ideal - she was an immensely rich, stunningly beautiful, highly-skilled professional amorist with the sexual appetite of a pagan priestess; she did not own a public house.”
-- George MacDonald Fraser
If I was being executed by injection, I’d clean up my cell real neat. Then, when they came to get me, I’d say, “Injection? What injection? I thought you said ‘inspection.’” They’d probably feel real bad, and maybe I could get out of it.
-- Rice University _Thresher_

Comments and suggestions welcome, at: marzolian@yahoo.com.
Complaints: cheerfully ignored. Last revised: November 2, 1998