Quotes by Humorists - Page 14

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Mark Twain
I would later discover it was a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any length of time. The stage was not only a physical place but also a state of mind, and the word audience was defined as anyone forced to suffer your company. We young actors were a string of lightbulbs left burning 24 hours a day, exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance.
David Sedaris
Look at the tyranny of party-- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty-- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes-- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing thier doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults nad licking the shoes of his Southern master.
Mark Twain
And verily, a woman need know but one man well, in order to understand all men; whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them.
Helen Rowland
you can't say civilization dont advance, in every war they kill you in a new way
Will Rogers
One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.
Josh Billings
I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Mark Twain
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Mark Twain
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.
Erma Bombeck
One revolution is like one cocktail it just gets you organized for the next.
Will Rogers
We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.
David Sedaris
Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily.
Mark Twain
W turned on his heel and began walking toward the door at the far wall. And by walking I mean, of course, not moving at all, at least not to the naked eye, because his strides could only be measured in micrometers. His creaky legs made barely the tiniest of forward steps, so he’d taken four strides before I noticed any lateral movement at all.“I'll be right back.”“Geologically speaking, of course,” HARV said.
John Zakour
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
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.
Will Rogers
Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.
Mark Twain
Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.
Josh Billings
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
Mark Twain
He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different.
Stuart McLean
Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.
Mark Twain
You can never know where I am or what I am,But I am good company to you nonetheless,And really do regret I broke your ink
Henry N. Beard
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
Mark Twain
You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you all over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken. It would be a genuine pleasure. By an odd coincidence I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me!' So saying, and recognising a good exit line when he saw one, he strode out, and after an interval of tense meditation I followed him. (Spode to Wooster)
P.G. Wodehouse
If the food supply runs out, try trapping or hunting animals. For most people, this won't be easy. If you can't catch any animals, it's time to throw a Donner party.
Andrew Shaffer
A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.
Mark Twain
I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.
David Sedaris
Stupid Ape: I had to quantify this with the word “stupid” so as not to offend the ape community. Large of limb, impotent of intellect, he was the kind of guy who lettered in leg-breaking at thug school but flunked the written exam because he didn't know which end of the e-pencil to use.
John Zakour
Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
Mark Twain
Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.
Jerome K. Jerome
George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good - said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like.Harris said he would rather have the headache.
Jerome K. Jerome
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
David Sedaris
When two people decide to get a divorce it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another but a sign that they have at last begun to.
Helen Rowland
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Mark Twain
Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.
David Sedaris
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain
I had one of those ideas I do sometimes get, though admittedly a chump of the premier class.
P.G. Wodehouse
It is a wise child that knows its own father and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.
Mark Twain
Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.
Mark Twain
This thing of being a hero about the main thing to it is to know when to die.
Will Rogers
I see gr-reat changes takin' place ivry day but no change at all ivry fifty years.
Finley Peter Dunne
Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie-I found that out.
Mark Twain
Opportunity knocks at every man's door once. On some men's door it hammers till it breaks down the door and then it goes in and wakes him up if he's asleep and ever afterward it works for him as a night watchman.
Finley Peter Dunne
All to myself I think of you Think of the things we used to do Think of the things we used to say Think of each happy bygone day Sometimes I sigh and sometimes I smile But I keep each olden golden while All to myself.
Wilbur D. Nesbit
Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
Arnold H. Glasow
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
P.G. Wodehouse
Don't worry, boss,” HARV said. “I get the feeling that this is only the tip of the iceberg of complications.”“HARV, you’re a machine. You don’t get feelings.”“Would it make you feel better if I said I've done a numerical analysis on the probabilities and the results are skewed toward you having more problems with this case?
John Zakour
Always drink upstream from the herd.
Will Rogers
I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners."Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction.
Mark Twain
The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.
Mark Twain
Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.
Erma Bombeck
Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)
Mark Twain
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
P.G. Wodehouse
It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Mark Twain
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
Leo Rosten
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
Have a place for everything and keep the things somewheres else. That is not advice it is merely custom.
Mark Twain
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
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today -- all without seeing him. It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better to be alone that unwelcome. I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals.
Mark Twain
A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.
Mark Twain