Curmudgeon’s Quotations

Listen to Google “Deep Dive” Discussion of Curmudgeon’s Quotations

Humanity and Other Curiosities

• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away. — Philip K. Dick
• An apple a day keeps the doctor away, and an onion a day will get rid of everyone else. — Anonymous
• If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question. — Lily Tomlin
• 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
• You can’t fool all of the people all of the time — but it isn’t necessary. — Booger Hollow
• The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are right. — Mark Twain
• 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’s 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 it is to live up to them. — Alfred Adler
• The devil will always 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. — Robert J. Hanlon
• 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
• No one party can fool all of the people all of the time. That’s why we have two parties. — Anonymous
• I am a member of the rabble in good standing. — Robert Nathan
• 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
• We certainly won’t have the horn of plenty if we keep blowing it. — Booger Hollow.
• 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
• Two cheers for democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. — Edward Morgan Forster
• 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 always kept 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.” — Anonymous
• 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
• We received your manuscript. Unfortunately, we cannot use the paper, as you have written on it already. — Rejection Notice from Publisher
• To a fellow writer: 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)
• Marriage is nature’s way of keeping us from fighting with strangers. — Alan King
• The man who says his wife can’t take a joke forgets that she took him. — Oscar Wilde
• 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

• People say life is strange, but . . . compared to what? — Steve Forbert
• 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
• The future is not what it used to be. — Yogi Berra
• Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. — Anonymous (submitted by Warren Berkley).
• When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before. — Mae West
• 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
• In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. — Yogi Berra
• I don’t like money actually, but it calms my nerves. — Joe Louis
• If a Christmas gift is advertised as “under $50,” you can bet it’s not $19.95. — McGowan’s Axiom
• 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
• History keeps repeating itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history. — Clarence Darrow
• 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
• Things will probably turn out all right, but sometimes it takes strong nerves just to watch. — Hedley Donovan
• 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
• Confidence: what you start off with before you completely understand the situation. — Robert Orben
• 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
• There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want. — Bill Waterson
• When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done. — Lou Holtz
• Remember, there is always hope. The ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by professionals. — Anonymous

Gary Henry