84 hits
On an American Airlines package of nuts: Instructions: Open package, eat nuts.
Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
"That's the trouble with women these days. They act like men and want to be treated like women" (An American in Paris)
Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
"You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her."
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.-- H. L. Mencken
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.-- Adlai Stevenson
On the sexes:
Brains times Beauty times Availability = Constant.
The American public knows what it wants, and deserves to get it good and hard.-- H. L. Mencken
America was founded by drug smugglers -- rum was the drug, but smugglers nonetheless.
"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead."-- Sinclair Lewis
98% of us Americans are hard-working people. It's the other 2% that give us a bad reputation. Then again, we did elect them.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.
Bagdikian's Observation:
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukelele.
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."-- Mark Twain
Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters.
"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.-- Spiro T. Agnew
"In America--as elsewhere--free speech is confined to the dead."-- Mark Twain
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
"America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please."-- P.J. O'Rourke
"America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up."-- Oscar Wilde
Dustin Pons, an American high-school student who attended a Soviet school for three weeks, as quoted in the New York Times: "American teenagers are more socially advanced. For instance, in their free time Soviets would rather read a book or walk in the park or play the piano. American teenagers would probably go out and watch TV, go to a movie, or something more actively inclined." ("The Progressive")
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.-- Carl Sagan
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?-- Lily Tomlin
A winning formula can be obliterated simply by the change to an ingorant new manager.
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.-- Oscar Wilde
"In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact."-- Marlene Dietrich
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.-- Erica Jong
"Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift' ... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'...."-- Alexi Sayle
"Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States."-- J. Bartlett Brebner
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: No one to blame.-- Erica Jong
The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows that the average man can see much better than he can think. (Ladies' Home Journal)
In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.-- Groucho Marx
"Pretty is something you're born with. But beautiful, that's an equal opportunity adjective."
Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved; the pig was committed.
"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U. S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate."
-- George McGovern
You can be a professional without being constipated about it.-- David Keyser
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."-- Theodore Roosevelt
No, you may not speak freely. This is America. We have a high moral hypocrisy to uphold.-- Shannon Thomas Pricket
Great Lover, n: A man who can breathe through his ears.
"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"-- Jean Kerr
"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window."-- Stephen King
The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.-- Sloan Wilson
"Any girl can be glamourous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."-- Hedy Lamarr
"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."-- Peter Alexander Ustinov
"I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have is that I didn't study my Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."-- Dan Quayle
"Our country was founded on a distrust of government. Our founding fathers gave power to the people to keep an eye on government. So when politicians say "Trust me" they're actually being very unamerican."-- David Duchovny (X Files)
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.-- Gamel Abdel Nasser
"The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy."-- Louis Kronenberger
"You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it."-- Wendell Berry
The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God.-- Jerry Falwell (Reader's Digest, 1985)
"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."-- Hermann Weyl
"I don't think you can be a true man until you've humiliated yourself before a woman."-- David Duchovny
The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct amongst us... I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so.-- Adlai Stevenson
"The I.S.O. standard unit of female pulchritude is the milli-Helen. This is the amount of beauty capable of causing the launching of a single ship."-- Terry Pratchett
There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.-- Richard Rodriguez
Grammar is not a vice (though excessive picking at it can be). And nonstandard words/grammar can be used to good effect--but no one can do that without knowing how they're deviating.-- Randy Clark
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.-- Georges Clemenceau (1 December 1945)
I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks.
To the lions.-- Brian Kantor (the SDM)
It seems more people are bitten by new yorkers per year than by sharks.
More to the point, new yorkers can be anywhere, not being limited by water. Fear them.
"The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."-- Aldous Huxley
"When your world looks kind of mean, and you wish that you weren't there.... Just close your eyes and look beneath, and you can be anywhere...." (Muppet Babies Theme Song)
On-line, adj: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.
PATRIOTISM, n:
1) The inability to distinguish between the government and one's 'country';
2) A highly praiseworthy virtue characterized by the desire to dominate and kill;
3) A feeling of exultation experienced when contemplating heaps of charred 'enemy' corpses;
4) The first, last, and perennial refuge of scoundrels.-- Chaz Bufe (The Devil's Dictionaries ("American Heretic's Dictionary" section))
"I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild."-- Keats
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an "inconvenience." We have opted instead for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there.-- Frank Zappa