Quotes by Columnists - Page 6

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.
Dave Barry
I believe that love--not imitation--is the sincerest form of flattery. Your imitator thinks that you can be duplicated your lover knows you can't.
Marilyn Vos Savant
He couldn't get into Harvard even if he had the dean's wife at gunpoint.
Dave Barry
Middle age occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.
Franklin Pierce Adams
I'll understand if you don't want me. But I will be heartbroken. You are all I ever dreamed of and hoped for. You are much, much more. Please know that I didn't think I was mean-minded. But I realize I am. I don't want you to put your arms around me and say it's all right, that you forgive me. I want you to be sure that you do, and my love for you will last as long as I live. I can see no lightness, no humour, no joke to make. I just hope that we will be able to go back to when we had laughter, and the world was coloured, not black and white and grey. I am so sorry for hurting you. I could inflict all kinds of pain on myself, but it would not take back any I gave to you. - David Power
Maeve Binchy
Would a harsh word ever fall from lips which now breathed only love? Would the step whose lightest footfall now made her heart leap, ever sound in her ear like a death knell?
Fanny Fern
In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon
George F. Will
Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.
George F. Will
MakeNew FrNdS But Keep D oLd , One iS silVerThe Other is Gold.
Chetan Bhagat
Happiness is not something you get but something you do.
Marcelene Cox
Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either neoconservative welfare-warfare statists or global social democrats ...
Ilana Mercer
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation’s continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pepper spray on fourteen commercial flights without getting caught. Then ABC News reports that it smuggled fifteen pounds of uranium into New York City. Then Fox News reports that it flew Osama bin Laden to Washington, D.C., and videotaped him touring the White House.
Dave Barry
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
Dave Barry
People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.
George F. Will
Problems rarely exist at the level at which they are expressed. If you are arguing for more than ten minutes then you are probably not discussing the real conflict.
Kare Anderson
The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
Charles Murray
We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.
Javier Marías
I'm fairly certain that, at this very minute, the [Mars Polar Lander] is floating somewhere around the Neptune feeling tired and cranky and looking for a Holiday Inn.Of course, you'd have to have a heart of titanium not to feel a twinge of sadness while watching those dejected NASA scientiest waiting by the phone like the class wallflower on prom week.On the other hand, it was kind of fun to watch a bunch of men waiting by the phone and seeing how they feel when someone promises they'll call and then YOU NEVER HEAR FROM HIM AGAIN.
Celia Rivenbark
I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.
Paul Krugman
I m human, I m not perfect. Although, I make mistakes all the time.
Chetan Bhagat
Whoever said you can't buy Happiness forgot little puppies.
Gene Hill
There's nothing wrong with self-improvement, as long as you recognize that at some point you're going to have to accept yourself in all your imperfect glory. What's wrong with liking yourself the way you are?
Jessica Zafra
But if I hadn't shoved you off the boat back there,you'd be lost at sea now,wouldn't you? We'd all be lost! So thanks to me you're all standing on land."(Pirates, its a good thing they're idiots)
Dave Barry
I have a tendency to want to understand everything people say and everything I hear, both at work and outside, even at a distance, even if it’s one of the innumerable languages I don’t know, even if it’s in an indistinguishable murmur or imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn’t understand and what’s said is not intended for my ears or is said precisely so I won’t understand it.
Javier Marías
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.
Dave Barry
The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.
Dan Savage
The aloo gobi is perhaps to North India what apple pie is to America. It is cheap and easy to make. Like most Indian dishes, you can make aloo gobi in as complex or rudimentary a fashion as you wish. You can eat it with rice, rotis, parathas or even with sliced white bread. A little leftover aloo gobi between two slices of white bread, toasted in one of those clamp sandwich-makers, and served with ketchup and mint chutney, is one of the greatest breakfast achievements of our species.
Sidin Vadukut
if we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.
George F. Will
There may be arrogance – and the laziness of someone who is indefatigable when doing what he enjoys, but only when doing that.
George F. Will
Gossip is when you hear something you like about someone you don't.
Earl Wilson
We sat on the floor for dinner. Ananya's father passed me a banana leaf. I wondered if i had to eat it or wipe my hands with it.
Chetan Bhagat
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
Marcelene Cox
Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.
Earl Wilson
Other useful commands to teach your dog are 'stay,' 'heel,' 'remove your snout from that person's groin,' 'stop humping the Barcalounger,' 'do not bark violently for two hours at inanimate objects such as a flowerpot,' ' do not eat poop,' and 'if you must eat poop, then at least refrain from licking my face afterward'.
Dave Barry
If there is a place in heaven for Labrador Retrievers (and I trust there is or I won't go) it'll have to have a brook right smack in the middle - a brook with little thin shoals for wading and splashing; a brook with deep, still pools where they can throw themselves headlong from the bank; a brook with lots of small sticks floating that can be retrieved back to shore where they belong; a brook with muskrats and muskrat holes; a brook with green herons and wood ducks; a brook that is never twice the same with surprises that run and swim and fly; a brook that is cold enough to make the man with the dog run like the devil away from his shaking; a brook with a fine spot to get muddy and a sunny spot or two to get dry.
Gene Hill
Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data.
Charles Murray
I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness.
Jessica Zafra
It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.
Dave Barry
If your parents bring you no shame, be very grateful. If you're proud of them, celebrate.
Dennis Prager
Those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self-esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind. If you really want goodness to prevail, wisdom is a key to unlocking it. The heart is not.
Dennis Prager
A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere. It's the life you’re living in the dress.
Diana Vreeland
Brevity Is Best: Nicknamed "Silent Cal," President Calvin Coolidge was once challenged by a reporter, saying, "I bet someone that I could get more than two words out of you." Coolidge responded, "You lose." The notion of crafting six word memoirs really took off after Smith Magazine shared this poignant one written by Ernest Hemingway: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." Pithiness Pays Off For Other Reasons: When required to be brief, for example, we gain clarity about what we really mean -- or have to offer. As Mark Twain once wrote, in a slower-paced time, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Kare Anderson
What a comfort to know that God is a poet.
Rachel Held Evans
The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers.
Charles Murray
Oh, I'm not saying that alcohol is perfect. It has caused its share of problems. Russia is only one example.
Dave Barry
Reading... a vacation for the mind....
Dave Barry
The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.
Heywood Broun
The best things in life aren't things.
Art Buchwald
When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
Dave Barry
Never invite someone who is speaking a foreign language in your presence to "Go back to your country." The only time that phrase is every acceptable is if you are British and you are speaking to Madonna.
Celia Rivenbark
each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Aligned Movement worked. They have no idea about the numerous wars India has fought against Pakistan or China. They have no idea, for instance, of what many people call the greatest threat to India’s internal security: the Naxal movement. What created this Naxal movement? And why is the movement popular where it is? Our youth doesn’t know.
Sidin Vadukut
What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novelist’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.
Javier Marías
If you can pick the baby up without him squirting our of your hands like a bar of soap in the shower, he's not oiled up enough.
James Lileks
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and this be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost.
Javier Marías
The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in "calories," which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.
Dave Barry
The world's most sensible and the most idiotic person lies within us..the worst part is we can't say who is who
Chetan Bhagat
There is a morally flawed understanding of ‘peace.’ In much of the world (again, thanks to the left), peace has been so narrowly defined as to be morally irrelevant. It essentially means not having troops fighting in a foreign country. Thus, because the United States has troops fighting in Afghanistan and recently had troops fighting in Iraq, it is considered a ‘threat to peace.’ But Iran, with no troops on foreign soil, is not considered a threat to peace, even though it sustains terror movements, murders its own people, seeks to annihilate Israel, props up the mass murdering Syrian regime and is rapidly developing a nuclear weapon.
Dennis Prager
Why should each generation be brought up on the selective prejudices of the one before it? I believe that this is exactly the point of history. And not just reading or studying history but also approaching it with a sceptical bent of mind. When each generation approaches received wisdom with scepticism, perhaps it will reassess established notions of right and wrong, love and hate. Perhaps it will finally see mistaken priorities for what they really are. Perhaps it will do something that previous generations steadfastly refused to do.
Sidin Vadukut
I love the Olympics, because they enable people from all over the world to come together and--regardless of their political or cultural differences--accuse each other of cheating.
Dave Barry
Time was when much of lawyering consisted (according to turn-of-the-century lawyer and statesman Elihu Root) in "telling would-be clients that they are damned fool's, and should stop.
George F. Will