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Curmudgeon's Quotations

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick

Humanity and Other Curiosities

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon. -- Paul Fussell
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
-- Winston Churchill
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
-- Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
It's not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you.
-- Frank Zappa
The problem with the gene pool is, there's no lifeguard. -- Steven Wright
Why is "abbreviation" such a long word? -- Steven Wright
We only use a third of our brain to think with. The question is: what do we do with the other third?
-- Anonymous (submitted by Don Bannon)
We already have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart instead? -- Anonymous (submitted by Don Bannon)
The combination of foolishness in the heart and free will in the head is extremely volatile. -- John Rosemond
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. -- Aldous Huxley
A lie goes half way round the world before the truth can get its pants on. -- Winston Churchill
The enemies of the truth are always awfully nice. -- Christopher Morley
Of those who say nothing, few are silent. -- Thomas Neill
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them. -- Dame Rose Macaulay
He a cross between a godfather and a lawyer. He'll make you an offer you can't understand. -- Don Henley
Some open minds should be closed for repairs. -- Anonymous
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. -- Alfred Adler
The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself. -- Vance Havner
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
-- Joseph Heller
The self-made man is often a horrible example of unskilled labor. -- Anonymous
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Nick Diamos
The classes that wash most are those that work least. -- G. K. Chesterton
Some people are like blisters; they never show up till the work is almost done. -- Anonymous
We don't know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it. -- Will Rogers
There are lots of folks who want the front of the bus, the back of the church, and the center of attention.
-- Anonymous
The only people who brag about having been poor are the rich. -- Frank B. Medor
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. -- Eric Hoffer
Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity. -- Eric Hoffer
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-- Susan Ertz

Government and Politics

The supply of government exceeds the demand. -- Lewis Lapham
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even when there's no river. -- Nikita Khrushchev
A statesman is a successful politician who is dead. -- Thomas B. Reed
The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize. -- Saul Bellow
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other. -- Oscar Ameringer
Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television? -- Art Buchwald
A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment. -- Willis Player
A conservative is a person who does not think anything should be done for the first time. -- Frank Vanderlip
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. -- George Bernard Shaw
More is not always better. The fact that it takes one woman nine months to have a baby doesn't mean a nine-woman co-op can produce a baby in one month. -- Marilyn Ross
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein
A billion here, a billion there; the first thing you know, you're talking about real money. -- Everett Dirksen
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
-- Laurence J. Peter
I'm not indecisive. Am I indecisive? -- Jim Scheibel (mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota)

Academia

There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe. -- George Orwell
Science is the orderly arrangement of what, at the moment, seem to be the facts. -- Anonymous
Psychology: the science that tells you what you already know in words you don't understand. -- Anonymous
A philosopher is a person who gives other people advice about troubles he hasn't had. -- William R. Lewis
Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I think I think; therefore, I think I am. -- Ambrose Bierce
I have tried in my time to be a philosopher, but I don't know how. Cheerfulness was always breaking in.
-- Oliver Edwards
Psychiatry: enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings. -- Laurence J. Peter
Sociology: the study of people who do not need to be studied by people who do. -- E. S. Turner
Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus.
-- Peter S. Prescott
Teacher: "Johnny, do you know the meaning of 'apathy'?" Student: "I don't know and I don't care."
I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did. -- Yogi Berra

Books and Writers

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. -- Goethe
The multitude of books is making us ignorant. -- Voltaire
Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me. -- Anatole France
I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. -- Woody Allen
Poets have been mysteriously quiet on the subject of cheese. -- G. K. Chesterton
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. -- Dorothy Parker
The covers of this book are too far apart. -- Ambrose Bierce
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. -- Samuel Johnson
Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum. -- P. G. Wodehouse
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. -- Flannery O'Connor
I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific. -- David Mamet
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. -- Peter De Vries
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor. -- Joyce Carol Oates
I suppose some editors are failed writers -- but so are most writers. -- T. S. Eliot
An expert frequently avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. -- M. Lincoln Schuster (the Schuster in Simon & Schuster)
The world does not need more Christian writers. It needs more good writers who are Christians. -- C. S. Lewis

The Media

A newspaper editor is a person who knows precisely what he wants but isn't quite sure. -- Walter Davenport
In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. -- Oscar Wilde
Television is a medium of entertainment that permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time and yet remain lonesome. -- T. S. Elliott
Television: the bland leading the bland. -- Anonymous
Television -- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done. -- Ernie Kovacs
Why should people pay good money to go out and see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing? -- Samuel Goldwyn
The secret of acting is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made. -- George Burns
Television is for appearing on -- not for looking at. -- Noel Coward
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
-- Peter De Vries
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. -- David Frost
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry. -- Natalie Sarraute
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. -- George Orwell

Home and Family

There is nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won't aggravate. -- Anonymous (submitted by W. Frank Walton)
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped. -- Sam Levenson (submitted by W. Frank Walton)
Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder. -- Abraham Lincoln
Where there's a will, there's a relative. -- Groucho Marx
You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, "You're right! I never would've thought of that!" -- Dave Barry

Life As We Know It

What we need are some new cliches. -- Samuel Goldwyn
An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure. -- Steven E. Clark
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. -- Lisa Grossman
Surly to bed, surly to rise. -- Anonymous
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. -- Steven Wright
I don't make predictions. I never have and I never will. -- Tony Blair, British prime minister
Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. -- Anonymous (submitted by Warren Berkley).
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. -- Anonymous
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. -- Christopher Lasch
You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap. -- Dolly Parton
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious. -- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth. -- Alfred North Whitehead
In the battle of the sexes: woman fights from a dreadnaught and man from an open raft. -- H. L. Mencken
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. -- Bill Vaughn
Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year. -- Victor Borge
It's gotten to the point where most of us are spending way too much time with our seatbacks and tray tables in their upright and fully locked position. -- Anonymous
We're all in this together . . . by ourselves. -- Lily Tomlin
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. -- Alice Kahn
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. -- Havelock Ellis
The purpose of the doctor is to entertain the patient while the disease takes its course. -- Voltaire
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation. -- Jean Kerr
Life is a zoo in a jungle. -- Peter De Vries
I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous: everyone hasn't met me yet. -- Rodney Dangerfield
There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is "You never know." -- Joaquin Andujar
Noah was a brave man to sail in a wooden boat with two termites. -- Anonymous
Things are always darkest just before they go pitch black. -- From "I Spy"
Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps. -- Emo Philips
If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving is probably not for you. -- Anonymous
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
-- James Branch Cabel
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists. -- Jean Rostand
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future. -- Sydney Harris
Even paranoids have real enemies. -- Delmore Schwartz
I'm worried that the universe will soon need replacing. It's not holding a charge. -- Edward Chilton
A stale mind is the devil's breadbox. -- Mary Bly
It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.
-- Damon Runyon
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. -- Mark Twain
When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done. -- Anonymous
Remember, there is always hope. The ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by professionals. -- Anonymous