good ole' quentin crisp
The Admiral
"Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors."
"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."
"Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes
at which the hearer is permitted to laugh."
"Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are."
"Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual
good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may
seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?"
"Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level."
"Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed
with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps."
"Sex is the last refuge of the miserable."
"The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant
their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe
this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of
character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency."
"To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."
"Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab
hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses."
"Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a
triviality as if it were a disaster."
"The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style
after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then
the burden becomes intolerable at once."
"The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at
the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and
copying one another."
"Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is but for a
little while. It is alimony that is forever."
"Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated
than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate
congress."
"The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity."
"It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is
the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect.
Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom."
"Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the
filing system has been lost?"
"For flavor, instant sex will never supercede the stuff you have to
peel and cook."
"Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but
not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding."
"Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne."
"In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those
who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without
changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis."
"Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the
presence of a tragedy-in-the-making."
"Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than
reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which
it is possible to commit some social sin."
"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we
hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think
about us."