People Quotes
Home     Index

* - A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination. -- Arthur Wing Pinero
* - A good listener is usually thinking about something else. -- Kin Hubbard
* - A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist. -- Elbert Hubbard
* - Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if they are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis
* - Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic. -- Dan Rather
* - An appeal is when you ask one court to show it's contempt for another court. -- Finley Peter Dunne
* - An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible. -- Alfred A. Knopf
* - An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living. -- Nicholas Chamfort
* - Automatic simply means that you can't repair it yourself. -- Frank Capra
* - Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies. -- Thomas Jefferson
* - Both the cockroach and the bird could get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most. -- Joseph Wood Krutch
* - Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. -- Laurence J. Peter
* - Cab drivers are living proof that practice does not make perfect. -- Howard Ogden
* - Canada has never been a melting pot; more like a tossed salad. -- Arnold Edinborough
* - Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. -- Kin Hubbard
* - Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother's. -- Andrei Codrescu
* - Death will be a great relief. No more interviews. -- Katherine Hepburn
* - Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others. -- Ambrose Bierce
* - Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying. -- Ingmar Bergman
* - Guidelines for Bureaucrats: 1. When in charge, ponder. 2. When in trouble, delegate. 3. When in doubt, mumble. -- James H. Borden
* - I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of a hill. -- Erma Bombeck
* - If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from the 'Beverly Hillbillies'. -- Dave Barry
* - I've noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse. -- Dave Barry
* - Life is a long lesson in humility. -- James M. Barrie
* - Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victems he intends to eat until he eats them. -- Samuel Butler
* - One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is. -- Erma Bombeck
* - People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. -- Russell Baker
* - Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen; soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts; football is a beastly game played by beasts. -- Henry Blaha
* - The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer. -- Victor Borge
* - The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. -- Ambrose Bierce
* - The old system of having a baby was much better than the new system, the old system being characterized by the fact that the man didn't have to watch. -- Dave Barry
* - The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were. -- David Brinkley
* - The word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning "ability to," and bics, meaning "withstand tremendous boredom." -- Dave Barry
* - You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is satire. All you're doing is recording it. -- Art Buchwald
* - Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious. -- William Feather
* - Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent. -- Laurence J. Peter
* - Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. -- W. R. Inge
* - Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome. -- Oscar Levant
* - Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology. -- Clive James
* - Everyone who ever walked barefoot into his child's room late at night hates Legos. -- Tony Kornheiser
* - For most men life is a search for the proper manilla envelope in which to get themselves filed. -- Clifton Fadiman
* - Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing. -- Redd Foxx
* - Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned. -- Milton Friedman
* - History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban
* - I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. -- Gandhi
* - I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you don't like? -- Jean Cocteau
* - I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones. -- John Cage
* - I don't believe in astrology. The only stars I can blame for my failures are those that walk about the stage. -- Noel Coward
* - I don't like food that's too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting. -- Andy Rooney
* - I don't understand the appeal of Spuds McKenzie. He's always surrounded by beautiful women. Now, I'm single, and I know the pickin's can be mighty slim, but you have to be really desperate to date out of your own species. -- Susan Norfleet
* - I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me. -- John Cleese
* - I like a friend better for having faults that one can talk about. -- William Hazlitt
* - I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig. -- Alfred Hitchcock
* - If I had a hammer, I'd use it on Peter, Paul, and Mary. -- Howard Rosenberg
* - In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk. -- Rita Rudner
* - Instant gratification takes too long. -- Carrie Fisher
* - It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks. -- Pierre August Renoir
* - It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has decended from man. -- H.L. Mencken
* - Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. -- Aldous Huxley
* - Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother's tasted better the day before. -- Rita Rudner
* - Most vegetarians look so much like the food they eat that they can be classified as cannibals. -- Finley Peter Dunne
* - Never judge a book by its movie. -- J.W. Eagan
* - Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected. -- Robert Orben
* - Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name. -- Henry Kissinger
* - No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating. -- Harold Rosenberg
* - No, Groucho is not my real name. I am breaking it in for a friend. -- Groucho Marx
* - Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. -- Brendan Gill
* - Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers. -- Edward Shepherd Mead
* - A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants. -- Alben W. Barkley
* - A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. -- John Updike
* - Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting. -- George Sanders
* - Actions lie louder than words. -- Carolyn Wells
* - All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. -- Alexander Wolcott
* - An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer. -- Evelle J. Younger
* - An ugly baby is a very nasty object, and the prettiest is frightful when undressed. -- Queen Victoria
* - Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment...They do everything but watch television. -- Lewis Thomas
* - Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer. -- John Ruskin
* - Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. -- Oscar Wilde
* - Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. -- Jonathan Swift
* - Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain. -- Pierre Trudeau
* - Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early. -- George Will
* - Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children. -- Mark Twain
* - Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've got a pretty neck. -- Eli Wallach
* - Honesty is the best policy -- when there is money in it. -- Mark Twain
* - I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance -- a sharp, vindictive glance. -- James Thurber
* - I did a picture in England one winter and it was so cold I almost got married. -- Shelley Winters
* - I love acting. It is so much more real than life. -- Oscar Wilde
* - I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life. -- Rita Rudner
* - I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain. -- Lily Tomlin
* - I squirm when I see athletes praying before a game. Don't they realize that if God took sports seriously he never would have created George Steinbrenner. -- Mark Russel
* - I want to have children and I know my time is running out: I want to have them while my parents are still young enough to take care of them. -- Rita Rudner
* - I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable. -- Mark Twain
* - If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. -- James Thurber
* - If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English. -- Wilfred Sheed
* - If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. -- Peter Ustinov
* - If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong. -- Mo Udall
* - In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice. -- George Bernard Shaw
* - It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. -- Caron de Beaumarchais
* - It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes. -- Oscar Wilde
* - It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. -- Oscar Wilde
* - It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes. -- Sir Thomas Beecham
* - Muscles come and go; flab lasts. -- Bill Vaughan
* - My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives. -- Rita Rudner
* - My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head. -- Rita Rudner
* - No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. -- Oscar Wilde
* - Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in memory as the wish to forget it. -- Montaigne
* - Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he's overcharging you. -- Kin Hubbard
* - Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. -- Norman Mailer
* - One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before. -- Kin Hubbard
* - Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. -- Lewis Mumford
* - People come to Washington believing it is the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not connected to an engine. -- Richard Goodwin
* - People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.' -- Sinclair Lewis
* - Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it merely had been detected. -- Oscar Wilde
* - Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
* - Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects. -- Lester Pearson
* - Progress was all right. Only it went on too long. -- James Thurber
* - Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast, the disk jockey is not allowed to talk. -- Fran Lebowitz
* - Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
* - Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. -- H.L. Mencken
* - Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some. -- Alfred Hitchcock
* - Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork and picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. -- Tom Stoppard
* - Some people approach every problem with an open mouth. -- Adlai Stevenson
* - Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be. -- Rita Rudner
* - The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. -- John Maynard Keynes
* - The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. -- Oscar Wilde
* - The best reason I can think of for not running for president of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day. -- Adlai Stevenson
* - The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity. -- George Bernard Shaw
* - The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you. -- Kin Hubbard
* - The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights. -- J. Paul Getty
* - The national sport of England is obstacle racing. People fill their rooms with useless and cumbersome furniture, and spend the rest of their lives trying to dodge it. -- Herbert Beerbohm Tree
* - The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault. -- Henry Kissinger
* - The trouble with a kitten is that it eventually becomes a cat. -- Ogden Nash
* - The trouble with America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. -- Louis Kronenberger
* - The trouble with children is that they are not returnable. -- Quentin Crisp
* - The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. -- Frank Zappa
* - There are more bad musicians than there is bad music. -- Isaac Stern
* - There are more fools in the world than there are people. -- Heinrich Heine
* - There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian class and the neurotic class. -- George Bernard Shaw
* - There are several differences between a football game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also there are more injuries at a football game. -- Alfred Hitchcock
* - There ought to be one day -- just one -- where there is open season on senators. -- Will Rogers
* - There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. -- Steven Wright
* - This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop. -- Alfred Hitchcock
* - To be stupid, selfish, an have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. -- Gustave Flaubert
* - Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -- Gore Vidal
* - Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. -- Mark Twain
* - We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends. -- P.D. James
* - We're having something a little different this year for Thanksgiving. Instead of a turkey, we're having a swan. You get more stuffing. -- George Carlin
* - When good Americans die they go to Paris. When bad Americans die they go to America. -- Oscar Wilde
* - When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. -- Eric Hoffer
* - When those waiters ask me if I want some fresh ground pepper, I ask if they have any aged pepper. -- Andy Rooney
* - Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. -- Cyril Connolly
* - Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes. -- Oscar Wilde
* - Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. -- Aldous Huxley
* - You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well. -- Carrie Fisher
* - You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. -- John Ciardi 

Home     Index