Quotes by Humorists - Page 2

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
Mark Twain
Travel is ninety per cent anticipation and ten per cent recollection.
Edward Streeter
A husband is what is left of a lover after the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland
One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
Mark Twain
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
Mark Twain
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain
A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.
Will Rogers
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Mark Twain
The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin "Tubby" Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.
David Sedaris
If law school is so hard to get through how come there are so many lawyers?
Calvin Trillin
Insanity is hereditary - you can get it from your children.
Sam Levenson
Was I the only one who became unsettled and swoonish at the sight of a large, inverted carcass hanging from a tree, its vital organs strewn about like children's toys, the occasional pack of hunting dogs fighting over a lung, another one looking for a quiet place to enjoy the severed head? It happened all the time and nobody else seemed bothered. People just walked up to the bloody carcasses and carried on entirely normal conversations, as though a man wasn't standing there squeezing deer feces out of a large intestine and small children weren't playing football with a liver.
Harrison Scott Key
You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?
Will Ferguson
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow hard and cold
Thomas Hood
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.
Mark Twain
Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession.
Mark Twain
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.
Mark Twain
But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn't even find work as an elf. That's when you know you're a failure.
David Sedaris
Don't mistake pleasures for happiness. They are a different breed of dog.
Josh Billings
My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.
David Sedaris
This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!- Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901
Mark Twain
My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.
David Sedaris
He looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say "when."
P.G. Wodehouse
Love is a madness if thwarted it develops fast.
Mark Twain
I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
David Sedaris
If you ever find happiness by hunting for it you will find it as the old woman did her lost spectacles safe on her nose all the time.
Josh Billings
Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
Mark Twain
If it's dive-bombing you from the air, bury yourself in the sand. It might lose sight of you. Also, no one likes to eat food covered in sand. No one.
Andrew Shaffer
That kind of so-called housekeeping where they have six Bibles and no cork-screw.
Mark Twain
Every man has his follies - and often they are the most interesting things he has got.
Josh Billings
Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.
Mark Twain
In the rather informal survey I have taken over the years on intensity of interest in food by profession, lawyers rank only a few trades below concert pianists....
Calvin Trillin
I hate Risk. I have for many years now. I hate that you still like Risk. I hate that you guilt me into playing with you because no one else will. I hate that you do the accents of the countries you’re attacking from. And I hate that you wear a beret every time we play. God, do I hate the beret.
Colin Nissan
The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.
P.G. Wodehouse
In America there are two classes of travel - first class and with children.
Robert Benchley
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Mark Twain
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.
Mark Twain
Stories are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
Finley Peter Dunne
It's full of worth and goodness too with manly kindness blent It's worth a million dollars and it doesn't cost a cent.
Wilbur D. Nesbit
I've just learned about his illness let's hope it's nothing trivial.
Irvin S. Cobb
Happiness is the feeling we experience when we are too busy to be miserable.
Thomas L. Masson
There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater,you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.
Dave Barry
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.
Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
Mark Twain
Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
Mark Twain
If some people are “outed,” are other people “inned”? Can we say that someone has been “besided” or “overed”?
David Sedaris
The best fiction is true.
Kinky Friedman
Let’s put to rest one cliché. You can sell refrigerators to Eskimos. The people of Savoonga are Yupiks, the westernmost of the Eskimo tribes, closer to Siberians than American Eskimos in their appearance, and their customs, and their distinctive, liquidly sibilant native language. And, yes, they all have refrigerators. In the winter, food gets freezer burn if left out in the elements. Eskimos need refrigerators to keep their food warm.
Gene Weingarten
I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.'This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.
Dave Barry
Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.
Mark Twain
If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.
Mark Twain
There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.
Josh Billings
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.
Mark Twain
Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.
Mark Twain
For the first time since he showed up in my checkout lane, I let my eyes wander the full length of his body. The bulge in his running down the side of his pants leg is quite noticeable; either he has a banana in his pocket, or he’s happy to see me. Then I notice a similar bulge running down the side of his other pants leg. Either he has two bananas in his pockets, or he has two erections.
Andrew Shaffer
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food
Erma Bombeck
Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.
P.G. Wodehouse
Would it not be downright cruel to keep him in semi-captivity in a town or city, where the opportunities for wreaking havoc and destruction upon the landscape are necessarily so limited? In a word, is it right to attract Wombats?
Will Cuppy
I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
Leo Rosten