a few (dozen) quotes
John N! Swegan
-- Gregory Ratoff
"He moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire."
-- Truman Capote (about Mick Jagger)
"He sounds like he's got a brick dangling from his willy, and a food-
mixer making purée of his tonsils."
-- Paul Lester (about Jon Bon Jovi)
"Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband's penis. Which
explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee."
-- Conan O'Brien (about Tommy Lee)
"He could be a maneuvering swine, which no one ever realized."
-- Paul McCartney (about John Lennon)
"A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-
impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, mincing heap of mother
love."
-- William Connor (about Liberace)
"Sleeping with George Michael would be like having sex with a
groundhog."
-- Boy George
"When you talk to him, he looks at you and grins and grins and nods
and nods and appears to be the world's best listener, until you
realize he is not listening at all."
-- Larry L. King (about Willie Nelson)
"He sang like a hinge." -- Ethel Merman (about Cole Porter)
"Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it
altogether."
-- Greil Marcus (about Elvis Presley, 1976)
"Presley sounded like Jayne Mansfield looked -- blowsy and loud and
low."
-- Julie Burchill (about Elvis Presley)
"Bambi with testosterone." -- Owen Gleiberman (about Prince, 1990)
"Even the deaf would be traumatized by prolonged exposure to the most
hideous croak in Western culture. Richards's voice is simply
horrible."
-- Nick Coleman (about Keith Richards)
"He plays four-and-a-half-hour sets. That's torture. Does he hate his
audience?"
-- John Lydon (about Bruce Springsteen)
"He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom."
-- Britt Eklund (about Rod Stewart)
"'Slavic March' -- "One feels that the composer must have made a bet,
for all his professional reputation was worth, that he would write the
most hideous thing that had ever been put on paper, and he won it,
too."
-- Boston Evening Transcript (about Tchaikovsky, 1883)
"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by its
tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with
its claws."
-- Charles Baudelaire (about Richard Wagner)
"Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays and vegetarian
on Tuesdays. On Wednesday, he was in favor of annexing Newfoundland,
Thursday he wanted to sink Venice, and Friday he wanted to blow up the
pope."
-- Tony Palmer (about Richard Wagner)
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
-- Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye
"Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like
staring at a cow for forty-five minutes."
-- Aaron Copland
"WRITERS
"He is all ice and wooden faced acrobatics."
-- Percy Wyndham Lewis (about Wystan Hugh Auden)
"His verse... is the beads without the string."
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (about Robert Browning)
"He is mad, bad and dangerous to know."
-- Lady Caroline Lamb (about Lord Byron)
"The world is rid of him, but the deadly slime of his touch remains."
-- John Constable (about the death of Lord Byron)
"A great zircon in the diadem of American literature."
-- Gore Vidal (about Truman Capote)
"He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices."
-- Gore Vidal (about Truman Capote)
"A huge pendulum attached to a small clock."
-- Ivan Panin (about Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
"His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich."
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (about John Dryden)
"T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he
likes to play Eucharist."
-- Robert Frost (about T.S. Eliot)
"Even those who call Mr. Faulkner our greatest literary sadist, do not
fully appreciate him, for it is not merely his characters who have to
run the gauntlet, but also his readers."
-- Clifton Fadiman (about William Faulkner)
"He uses a lot of big words, and his sentences are from here to the
airport."
-- Carolyn Chute (about William Faulkner)
"He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend
of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet."
-- Truman Capote (about William Faulkner)
"Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence,
the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to
the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a
part, that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to
crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death."
-- John Aldridge (about F. Scott Fitzgerald)
"An animated adenoid."
-- Norman Douglas (about Ford Maddox Ford)
"A nice, acrid, savage, pathetic old chap."
-- I.A. Richards (about Robert Frost)
"Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow and poisons our
literary club for me. I class him among infidel wasps and venomous
insects."
-- James Boswell (about Edward Gibbon)
"He walked as if he had fouled his small clothes and looks as if he
smelt it."
-- Christopher Smart (about Thomas Gray)
"Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (about Ernest Hemingway)
"The stupid person's idea of the clever person."
-- Elizabeth Bowen (about Aldous Huxley)
"He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."
-- T.S. Eliot (about Henry James)
"A little emasculated mass of inanity."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (about Henry James)
"I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block
of smooth amber."
-- Virginia Woolf (about Henry James)
"Reading him is like wading through glue."
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (about Ben Johnson)
"There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he
knocks you down with the butt end of it."
-- Oliver Goldsmith (about Samuel Johnson)
"Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible,
and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic
dirty-mindedness."
-- D.H. Lawrence (about James Joyce, 1928)
"That's not writing, that's typing."
-- Truman Capote (about Jack Kerouac's style)
"Mr. Lawrence looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some
suburban garden... he looked as if he had just returned from spending
an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave."
-- Dame Edith Sitwell (about D. H. Lawrence)
"There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the
other is to read Pope."
-- Oscar Wilde (about Alexander Pope)
"Some call Pope little nightingale"
-- all sound and no sense."
-- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (about Alexander Pope)
"He was humane but not human."
-- e e Cummings (about Ezra Pound)
"To me Pound remains the exquisite showman without the show."
-- Ben Hecht (about Ezra Pound)
"The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by
Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."
-- Edmund Wilson
"A freakish homunculus germinated outside lawful procreation."
-- Henry Arthur Jones (about George Bernard Shaw)
"He writes his plays for the ages
--the ages between five and twelve."
-- George Nathan (about George Bernard Shaw)
"Sitting in a sewer and adding to it."
-- Thomas Carlyle (about Algernon Charles Swinburne)
"A dirty man with opium-glazed eyes and rat-taily hair."
-- Lady Frederick Cavendish (about Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
"A tall, thin, spectacled man with the face of a harassed rat."
-- Russell Maloney (about James Thurber)
"That insolent little ruffian, that crapulous lout. When he quitted a
sofa, he left behind him a smear."
-- Norman Cameron (about Dylan Thomas)
"A large shaggy dog unchained scouring the beaches of the world and
baying at the moon."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson (about Walt Whitman)
"Oscar Wilde's talent seems to me to be essentially rootless,
something growing in glass on a little water."
-- George Moore (about Oscar Wilde)
"Dank, limber verses, stuft with lakeside sedges And propt with rotten
stakes from rotten hedges."
-- Walter Savage Landor (about William Wordsworth)
"MISCELLANEOUS OTHER PEOPLE
"He couldn't Master Mind an electric bulb into a socket."
-- Fanny Brice (about her husband Nick Arnstein)
"A fat little flabby person, with the face of a baker, the clothes of
a cobbler, the size of a barrelmaker, the manners of a stocking
salesman, and the dress of an innkeeper."
-- Victor de Balabin (about Honoré de Balzac)
"A monstrous orchid."
-- Oscar Wilde (about Aubrey Beardsley)
"An enchanting toad of a man."
-- Helen Hayes (about Robert Benchley)
"When he has a party, you not only bring your own scotch, you bring
your own rocks."
-- George Burns (about Jack Benny)
"He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on."
-- Fred Allen (about Milton Berle)
"His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a
small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the
soup into somebody's lap."
-- Irving Stone (about William Jennings Bryan)
"He's an anesthetist"
-- Prince Valium."
-- Mort Sahl (about Johhny Carson)
"He is, like almost all the eminent men of this country, only half
educated. His morals, public and private, are loose."
-- John Quincy Adams (about Henry Clay)
"The biggest bug in the manure pile."
-- Elia Kazan (about Harry Cohn)
"The only time he opens his mouth is to change feet."
-- David Feherty (about Nick Faldo)
"Gone With the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood
history. I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling flat on his
face, and not Gary Cooper."
-- Gary Cooper (after he turned down the role of Rhett Butler)
"He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great."
-- Samuel Johnson (about Thomas Gray)
"He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty."
-- Sam Houston (about Thomas Jefferson Green)
"He's thin boys. He's thin as piss on a hot rock."
-- William F. Jenner (about Averell Harriman)
"... a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a
lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth."
-- Martin Luther (about Henry VIII)
"The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a
disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the
history of England."
-- Charles Dickens (about Henry VIII)
"A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest."
-- Alexander Pope (about Lord Hervey)
"If brains was lard, Jethro couldn't grease a pan."
-- Jed Clampett (from "The Beverly Hillbillies")
"The General is suffering from mental saddle sores."
-- Harold L. Ickes (about Hugh S. Johnson)
"His pictures seem to resemble not pictures, but a sample book of
patterns of linoleum."
-- Cyril Asquith (about Paul Klee)
"A character who, if he had not existed, could not be imagined."
-- S.N. Behrman (about Oscar Levant)
"He is suffering from halitosis of the intellect. That's presuming he
has intellect."
-- Harold Ickes (about Huey Long)
"I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review
before me. In a moment, it shall be behind me."
-- Max Reger (letter to critic Rudolph Louis, 1906)
"Never trust a man who combs his hair straight from his left armpit."
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Douglas MacArthur)
"He has a face like a warthog that has been stung by a wasp."
-- David Feherty (about Colin Montgomerie)
"In defeat, he was unbeatable; in victory, unbearable."
-- Edward Marsh (about B.L. Montgomery)
"An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the
mania of grandeur."
-- Leo Tolstoy (about Friedrich Nietzsche)
"He has committed every crime that does not require courage."
-- Benjamin Disraeli (about Daniel O'Connell)
"If he were any dumber, he'd be a tree."
-- Barry Goldwater (about William Scott)
"A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska"
-- sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within."
-- Joseph O'Connor (about C. P. Snow)
"His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away
for dear life on a sinking ship."
-- Edmund Wilson (about Evelyn Waugh)
"The only genius with an IQ of 60."
-- Gore Vidal (about Andy Warhol)
"Every drop of blood in that man's veins has eyes that look downward."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (about Daniel Webster)
"He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade."
-- Harpo Marx (about Alexander Woolcott)
"From Poland to Polo in one generation."
-- Arthur Caesar (about Darryl Zanuck)
"The triumph of sugar over diabetes."
-- George Nathan (about J. M. Barrie)
"If you can't live without me, why aren't you dead already?"
-- Cynthia Heimel
"The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other
words, the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To
be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a
deficiency disease, and males are emotional cripples."
-- Valerie Solanos
"You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and
hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses."
-- Pamela Hansford Johnson
"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling
invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the
sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up
England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their
spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed."
-- D.H. Lawrence, 1912
"NATIONALITY
"Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the
Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner
at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on
the invention of the motor car."
-- Bill Bryson
"In America, only the successful writer is important, in France all
writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in
Australia you have to explain what a writer is."
-- Geoffrey Cottrell
"There have been many definitions of hell, but for the English the
best definition is that it is the place where the Germans are the
police, the Swedish are the comedians, the Italians are the defense
force, Frenchmen dig the roads, the Belgians are the pop singers, the
Spanish run the railways, the Turks cook the food, the Irish are the
waiters, the Greeks run the government, and the common language is
Dutch."
-- David Frost and Anthony Jay
"AMERICA
"America is a melting pot: the people at the bottom get burned while
all the scum floats to the top."
-- Charlie King
"Americans always try to do the right thing"
-- after they've tried everything else."
-- Winston Churchill
"America is one long expectoration."
-- Oscar Wilde
"I don't see much future for the Americans. Everything about the
behavior of the American society reveals that it's half-judaized, and
the other half is negrified. How can one expect a state like that to
hold together?"
-- Adolf Hitler
"In California, they don't throw their garbage away"
-- they make it into TV shows."
-- Woody Allen
"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three
unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience,
and the prudence to never practice either of them."
-- Mark Twain (about America)
"Never criticize Americans. They have the best taste that money can
buy."
-- Miles Kington
"Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it
had always been hushed up."
-- Oscar Wilde
"The 100% American is 99% idiot."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"Their demeanor is invariably morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive.
I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so
entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity for enjoyment."
-- Charles Dickens (about Americans)
"CANADA
"Canada is a country so square, that even the female impersonators are
women."
-- Richard Brenner
"What I got by going to Canada was a cold."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"ENGLAND
"Britain is the only country in the world where the food is more
dangerous than the sex."
-- Jackie Mason
"England, the heart of a rabbit in the body of a lion. The jaws of a
serpent, in an abode of popinjays."
-- Eugene Deschamps
"I know why the sun never sets on the British Empire: God wouldn't
trust an Englishman in the dark."
-- Duncan Spaeth
"The English think soap is civilization."
-- Heinrich von Treitschke
"The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a
broken heart."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is one thing on earth more terrible than English music, and
that is English painting."
-- Heinrich Heine
"FRANCE
"The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese
that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own
children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons, even when you try to
speak to them in their own wimpy language."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"GERMANY
"German in the most extravagantly ugly language"
-- it sounds like someone using a sick bag on a 747."
-- Willy Rushton
"Germany, the diseased world's bathhouse."
-- Mark Twain
"The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes, but the very
greatest."
-- Clifton Fadiman
"You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a
barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell"
"GREECE
"Few things can be less tempting or dangerous than a Greek woman of
the age of thirty."
-- John Carne
"IRELAND
"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use
whatsoever."
-- Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)
"The problem with Ireland is that it's a country full of genius, but
with absolutely no talent."
-- Hugh Leonard
"RUSSIA
"In Russia, a man is called reactionary if he objects to having his
property stolen and his wife and children murdered."
-- Winston Churchill
"SCOTLAND
"Scotland: A land of meanness, sophistry and lust."
-- Lord Byron
"Scotland: That garret of the earth"
-- that knuckle-end of England"
-- that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur."
-- Sydney Smith
"YUGOSLAVIA
"The food in Yugoslavia is fine, if you like pork tartare."
-- Ed Begley, Jr.
"APPEARANCE
"A blank, helpless sort of face, rather like a rose, just before you
drench it with DDT."
-- John Carey
"A four-hundred-dollar suit on him would look like socks on a
rooster."
-- Earl Long
"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
-- Winston Churchill
"At first, I thought he was walking a dog. Then I realized it was his
date."
-- Edith Massey in "Polyester"
"Don't point that beard at me, it might go off."
-- Groucho Marx
"Had double chins all the way down to his stomach."
-- Mark Twain
"He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating."
-- Ayn Rand
"He had a winning smile, but everything else was a loser."
-- George C. Scott
"He makes a very handsome corpse and becomes his coffin prodigiously."
-- Oliver Goldsmith
"He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a
career of its own."
-- Margaret Halsey
"He strains his conversation through a cigar."
-- Hamilton Mabie
"He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young
for his years, or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged
by trouble."
-- P.G. Wodehouse
"He's a trellis for varicose veins."
-- Wilson Mizner
"He's so fat, he can be his own running mate."
-- Johnny Carson
"He's so small, he's a waste of skin."
-- Fred Allen
"He'd make a lovely corpse."
-- Charles Dickens
"Her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac
arrest in a yak."
-- Woody Allen
"Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style. It will look
ridiculous year after year."
-- Fred Allen
"Her only flair is in her nostrils."
-- Pauline Kael
"Her skin was white as leprosy."
-- S. T. Coleridge
"His face is livid, gaunt his whole body, his breath is green with
gall; his tongue drips poison."
-- John Quincy Adams
"His face was filled with broken commandments."
-- John Masefield
"His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin."
-- John Philpot Curran
"His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with."
-- Charles Lamb
"I don't recognize you"
-- I've changed a lot."
-- Oscar Wilde
"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception."
-- Groucho Marx
"I see her as one great stampede of lips directed at the nearest
derriere."
-- Noël Coward
"Is that a beard, or are you eating a muskrat?"
-- Dr. Gonzo
"It's like cuddling with a Butterball turkey."
-- Jeff Foxworthy
"Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache."
-- Alan Bennett
"She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon."
-- Groucho Marx
"She had much in common with Hitler, only no mustache."
-- Noel Coward
"She is a peacock in everything but beauty."
-- Oscar Wilde
"She looked as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth"
-- or anywhere else."
-- Elsa Lanchester
"She not only kept her lovely figure, she's added so much to it."
-- Bob Fosse
"She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and
has white spots on her yellow skin."
-- Heinrich Heine
"She spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled
pig."
-- Margot Asquith
"She was a large woman who seemed not so much dressed as upholstered."
-- James Matthew Barrie
"She was so ugly she could make a mule back away from an oat bin."
-- Will Rogers
"She was what we used to call a suicide blonde"
-- dyed by her own hand."
-- Saul Bellow
"She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork."
-- Jonathan Swift
"The tautness of his face sours ripe grapes."
-- William Shakespeare
"When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I
feel sorry"
-- for the clothes."
-- Josh Billings
"While you remain at home, your hair is at the hairdresser's; you take
out your teeth at night, and sleep tucked away in a hundred cosmetics
boxes"
-- even your face does not sleep with you."
-- Martial, 1st Century AD (to a female friend)
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on
it?"
-- Mark Twain
"Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum."
-- P.G. Wodehouse
"Yeah, she's beautiful, but you can't find her IQ with a flashlight."
-- from "The Greatest American Hero"
"You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation."
-- Irvin S. Cobb
"A woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
-- Rudyard Kipling
"A woman will lie about anything, just to stay in practice."
-- Phillip Marlowe
"A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinter legs. It is
not done well; but you are surprised to see it done at all."
-- James Boswell
"A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's. She changes it more often."
-- Oliver Herford
"Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the
rest of her body."
-- John Vanbrugh
"The chief excitement in a woman's life is spotting women who are
fatter than she is."
-- Helen Rowland
"Women are like elephants to me: nice to look at, but I wouldn't want
to own one."
-- W.C. Fields
"Women's intuition is the result of millions of years of not
thinking."
-- Rupert Hughes
"MEN
"Behind every great man, there is a surprised woman."
-- Maryon Pearson
"Outside every thin girl is a fat man, trying to get in."
-- Katharine Whitehorn
"Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses."
-- Elizabeth Taylor
"Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as
mediocre as possible."
-- Margaret Mead (May 15, 1958)
"INTELLIGENCE
"A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead."
-- Alexander Pope
"A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post."
-- Tom Waits
"A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits."
-- Alexander Pope
"Did you eat a brain tumor for breakfast?"
-- from "Heathers"
"Differently clued."
-- Dave Clark
"Doesn't know much, but leads the league in nostril hair."
-- Josh Billing
"End of season sale at the cerebral department."
-- Gareth Blackstock
"Has the mathematical abilities of a Clydesdale."
-- David Letterman
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I
know."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
-- Robert Redford
"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
-- Billy Wilder
"He is brilliant"
-- to the top of his boots."
-- David Lloyd George
"He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea."
-- John Steinbeck
"He is useless on top of the ground; he aught to be under it,
inspiring the cabbages."
-- Mark Twain
"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
-- Joseph Heller
"He knows nothing, and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly
to a political career."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"He knows so little and knows it so fluently."
-- Ellen Glasgow
"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
-- Forrest Tucker
"He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that
fool you. He really is an idiot."
-- Groucho Marx
"He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in
style."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"He never said a foolish thing nor never did a wise one."
-- Earl of Rochester
"He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop."
-- Sydney Smith
"He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold."
-- John Ruskin
"He used statistics the way a drunkard uses lampposts"
-- for support, not illumination."
-- Andrew Lang
"He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright."
-- Samuel Butler
"He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea and that
was wrong."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
"His golf bag does not contain a full set of irons."
-- Robin Williams
"His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a
hole in it anywhere."
-- Mark Twain
"His ignorance is encyclopedic."
-- Abba Eban
"His mind is so open"
-- so open, that ideas simply pass through it."
-- F.H. Bradley
"His mind is so open, that the wind whistles through it."
-- Heywood Braun
"I want to reach your mind"
-- where is it currently located?"
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"I wish I'd known you when you were alive."
-- Leonard Louis Levinson
"I would not want to put him in charge of snake control in Ireland."
-- Eugene McCarthy
"If he ever had a bright idea, it would be beginner's luck."
-- William Lashner "Veritas"
"Little things affect little minds."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
"Next-day delivery in a nanosecond world."
-- Van Jacobson
"No more sense of direction, than a bunch of firecrackers."
-- Rob Wagner
"Please try not to be such a wiener-head."
-- Dave Barry
"Sharp as a sack full of wet mice."
-- Foghorn Leghorn
"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable
substitute for wit."
-- W. Somerset Maugham
"She is a water bug on the surface of life."
-- Gloria Steinem
"She's descended from a long line her mother listened to."
-- Gypsy Rose Lee
"Stay with me; I want to be alone."
-- Joey Adams
"Teflon brain (nothing sticks.)"
-- Lily Tomlin
"That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic
life forms. It has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to
avoid meeting."
-- Douglas Adams
"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of
human knowledge."
-- Thomas Brackett Reed
"Useless as a pulled tooth."
-- Mary Roberts Rinehart
"What has a tiny brain, a big mouth, and an opinion nobody cares
about? You!"
-- from "Murphy Brown"
"What's on your mind? If you'll forgive the overstatement."
-- Fred Allen
"When you go to the mind reader, do you get half price?"
-- David Letterman
"While he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter either."
-- James Thurber
"You look into his eyes, and you get the feeling someone else is
driving."
-- David Letterman
"You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I bet he was glad to
get rid of it."
-- Groucho Marx
"OCCUPATION
"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings
unintentionally."
-- Oscar Wilde
"A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed
keeping rabbits."
-- Edith Sitwell
"A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his
own verbosity."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
"Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled
to the utterly bewildered."
-- Al Capp
"An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he'd have someone to
look up to."
-- Gene Fowler
"God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."
--- Mark Twain
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and
quoted."
-- Fred Allen
"I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions"
-- the curtain was up."
-- Groucho Marx
"I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes
all of the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's
sake."
-- John D. Rockefeller
"If all the girls who attended the Harvard-Yale game were laid end to
end, I wouldn't be surprised."
-- Dorothy Parker
"If there's anything disgusting about the movie business, it's the
whoredom of my peers."
-- Sean Penn
"In the United States, today, we have more than our share of the
nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club"
-- the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."
-- Spiro T. Agnew (about the press, 1970)
"Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles."
-- Henry Van Dyke
"Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls."
-- Jackie Gleason
"Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed
him with the ability to write."
-- A.E. Housman
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of
Congress; but I repeat myself."
-- Mark Twain
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book"
-- I'll waste no time reading it."
-- Moses Hadas
"The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw
of character."
-- Lyndon Johnson
"This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be
hurled with great force."
-- Dorothy Parker
"This is one of those big, fat paperbacks, intended to while away a
monsoon or two, which, if thrown with a good overarm action, will
bring a water buffalo to its knees."
-- Nancy Banks-Smith (review of M.M. Kaye's "The Far Pavillions")
"What is art? Prostitution."
-- Charles Baudelaire
"Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty."
-- Lillian Hellman
"You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible
voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner."
-- Aristophanes
"A dork is a dork is a dork."
-- Judy Markey
"Debating against him is no fun. Say something insulting and he looks
at you like a whipped dog."
-- Harold Wilson
"Failure has gone to his head."
-- Wilson Mizner
"God was bored by him."
-- Victor Hugo
"Greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his friends for his
life."
-- Jeremy Thorpe
"He could never see a belt without hitting below it."
-- Margot Asquith
"He had delusions of adequacy."
-- Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues I dislike, and none of the vices I admire."
-- Winston Churchill
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
-- Oscar Wilde
"He has sat on the fence so long, that the iron has entered his soul."
-- David Lloyd George
"He is a fine friend. He stabs you in the front."
-- Leonard Louis Levinson
"He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and
stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight."
-- John Randolph
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
-- John Bright
"He is an old bore. Even the grave yawns for him."
-- Herbert Beerbohm Tree
"He is as good as his word"
-- and his word is no good."
-- Seamus MacManus
"He is mad, bad and dangerous to know."
-- Lady Caroline Lamb
"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
-- Samuel Johnson
"He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."
-- H. H. Munro (Saki)
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
-- Paul Keating
"He is so mean, he won't let his little baby have more than one measle
at a time."
-- Eugene Field
"He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own
grease."
-- Henry James
"He made enemies as naturally as soap makes suds."
-- Percival Wilde
"He makes a July's day short as December."
-- William Shakespeare
"He must have killed a lot of men to have made so much money."
-- Moliere
"He never bore a grudge against anyone he wronged."
-- Simone Signoret
"He was a bit like a corkscrew. Twisted, cold and sharp."
-- Kate Cruise O'Brien
"He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like
he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity."
-- Mark Twain
"He was about as useful in a crisis as a sheep."
-- Dorothy Eden
"He was as great as a man can be without morality."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
"He was happily married"
-- but his wife wasn't."
-- Victor Borge
"He was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."
-- William Faulkner
"He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the
gift of the power to use them."
-- Charles Kingsley
"He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin."
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
"He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both
eyes."
-- Molly Ivins He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it
would blind him in both eyes."
-- Fred Allen
"FAMOUS INSULTS (cont'd)
"He was trying to save both his faces."
-- John Gunther
"He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on
his tombstone."
-- Oscar Wilde
"He's so snobbish, he has an unlisted zip-code."
-- Earl Wilson
"He's the kind of man who picks his friends"
-- to pieces."
-- Mae West
"He's the only man I ever knew who had rubber pockets, so he could
steal soup."
-- Wilson Mizner
"He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head."
-- Margot Asquith
"I will always love the false image I had of you."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be
beating a dead horse."
-- Woody Allen
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
-- Charles, Count Talleyrand
"No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have; and I think he's
a dirty little beast."
-- W.S. Gilbert
"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only
stupid."
-- Heinrich Heine
"She could carry off anything; and some people said that she did."
-- Ada Leverson
"She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the
same class of people."
-- Robertson Davies
" She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake."
-- Margot Asquith
"She never lets ideas interrupt the easy flow of her conversation."
-- Jean Webster
"She never was really charming till she died."
-- Terence
"She not only expects the worst, but makes the worst of it when it
happens."
-- Michael Arlen
"She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast
stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white
"cliffs of the obvious."
-- W. Somerset Maugham
"She proceeds to dip her little fountain-pen filler into pots of oily
venom and to squirt the mixture at all her friends."
-- Harold Nicholson
"She should get a divorce and settle down."
-- Jack Paar
"She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with
nothing but peanuts and filberts."
-- Raymond Chandler
"She was like a sinking ship firing on the rescuers."
-- Alexander Woollcott
"She's been on more laps than a napkin."
-- Walter Winchell
"She's got such a narrow mind, when she walks fast her earrings bang
together."
-- John Cantu
"She's so pure, Moses couldn't even part her knees."
-- Joan Rivers
"She's the kind of woman who climbed the ladder of success"
-- wrong by wrong."
-- Mae West
"She's the sort of woman who lives for others"
-- you can tell the others by their hunted expression."
-- C.S. Lewis
"So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name."
-- Alan Bennett
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Some folks are wise and some are otherwise."
-- Tobias George Smolett
"Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee later than
others."
-- Kin Hubbard
"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men
"have mediocrity thrust upon them."
-- Joseph Heller "Catch-22"
"That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them."
-- Dorothy Parker
"The finest woman that ever walked the streets."
-- Mae West
"The greatest thing since they reinvented unsliced bread."
-- William Keegan
"The perfection of rottenness."
-- William James
"The triumph of sugar over diabetes."
-- George Jean Nathan
"The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation, but
"not the power of speech."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"There, but for the grace of God, goes God."
-- Winston Churchill
"There goes the famous good time that was had by all."
-- Bette Davis
"Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles."
-- Jack London
"You are so pure in mind and heart,
"In aspect, too, so mild,
"I wonder that you ever could
"Implant your wife with child."
-- Martial
"You had to stand in line to hate him."
-- Hedda Hopper
"You have a good and kind soul. It just doesn't match the rest of
you."
-- Norm Papernick
"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your
hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."
-- Mark Twain
"You're a mouse studying to be a rat."
-- Wilson Mizner
"You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in
a Y-shaped coffin."
-- Joe Orton
"Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the
same time."
-- Frederic Raphael
"MISCELLANEOUS CURMUDGEONLY COMMENTS
"A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults."
-- Louis Nizer
"Don't look now, but there's one too many in this room, and I think
it's you."
-- Groucho Marx
"Every time I look at you, I get a fierce desire to be lonesome."
-- Oscar Levant
"Everyone has his day, and some days last longer than others."
-- Winston Churchill
"Fine words! I wonder where you stole them."
-- Jonathan Swift
"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was
convulsed with laughter. Some day, I intend reading it."
-- Groucho Marx
"Gee, what a terrific party. Later on, we'll get some fluid and embalm
each other."
-- Neil Simon
"He hasn't an enemy in the world"
-- but all his friends hate him."
-- Eddie Cantor
"He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
-- Raymond Chandler
"He's completely unspoiled by failure."
-- Noel Coward
"He's liked, but he's not well liked."
-- Arthur Miller
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
-- Mae West
"I can't believe that, out of 100,000 sperm, you were the quickest."
-- Steven Pearl
"I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no
other provisions in sight."
-- Mark Twain
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I
approved of it."
-- Mark Twain
"I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here."
-- Stephen Bishop
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure."
-- Clarence Darrow
"I never liked him, and I always will."
-- Dave Clark
"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy
me."
-- Fred Allen
"I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
"I'll bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks
at the stork."
-- Irving Brecher (Marx Bros. "At the Circus")
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
-- Groucho Marx
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing
trivial."
-- Irvin S. Cobb
"If you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies?"
-- Charles Pierce
"In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a
majority."
-- Ellen Glascow
"I've had them both, and I don't think much of either."
-- Beatrix Lehmann (watching a Hollywood wedding.)
"Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life."
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett
"She's good, being gone."
-- William Shakespeare
"Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week."
-- William Dean Howells
"Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"The best part of you ran down your mother's legs."
-- Jackie Gleason
"The gods too are fond of a joke."
-- Aristotle
"The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind."
-- Joseph Stilwell
"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
-- Jack E. Leonard
"They don't hardly make 'em like him any more"
-- but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
"We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"Well, I think we ought to let him hang there. Let him twist slowly,
slowly in the wind."
-- John Ehrlichman
"What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank."
-- Liberace
"Why are we honoring this man? Have we run out of human beings?"
-- Milton Berle
"Why don't you bore a hole in yourself, and let the sap run out?"
-- Groucho Marx
"You have delighted us long enough."
-- Jane Austen
"You're a good example of why some animals eat their young."
-- Jim Samuels
SWIGGY - Listmaster - Webmaster - baturMaster
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A MARATHON OF LAFFS @ JOKE-A-THON
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GEE, I wonder how many spammers have subscribed this week?
just kiddin
(John N! Swegan) wrote:
>"You're a parasite for sore eyes."
>-- Gregory Ratoff
>
and so on.
Here is another one I just had to share as it is really brilliant:
"Take your humour seriously, and work hard at being spontaneous."
-- John Goodwin
Elisabeth
just quoting