109 hits
On an American Airlines package of nuts: Instructions: Open package, eat nuts.
Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
"You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her."
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
"That's the trouble with women these days. They act like men and want to be treated like women" (An American in Paris)
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.-- Adlai Stevenson
Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
On the sexes:
Brains times Beauty times Availability = Constant.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.-- H. L. Mencken
The American public knows what it wants, and deserves to get it good and hard.-- H. L. Mencken
"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead."-- Sinclair Lewis
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
America was founded by drug smugglers -- rum was the drug, but smugglers nonetheless.
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.
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."-- Mark Twain
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.
America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.
"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.-- Spiro T. Agnew
Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters.
"In America--as elsewhere--free speech is confined to the dead."-- Mark Twain
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)
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.-- Erica Jong
"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
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")
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?-- Lily Tomlin
"America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up."-- Oscar Wilde
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)
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: No one to blame.-- Erica Jong
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
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 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."
"In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact."-- Marlene Dietrich
"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
The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.-- Sloan Wilson
Great Lover, n: A man who can breathe through his ears.
You can be a professional without being constipated about it.-- David Keyser
Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved; the pig was committed.
"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
"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
"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
"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
The liberal does not hope for a better world, because liberal ideology already that this is the best world it can be.
No, you may not speak freely. This is America. We have a high moral hypocrisy to uphold.-- Shannon Thomas Pricket
"Any girl can be glamourous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."-- Hedy Lamarr
"You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it."-- Wendell Berry
"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."-- Peter Alexander Ustinov
"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
"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
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)
"The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."-- Aldous Huxley
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
"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)
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
I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks.
To the lions.-- Brian Kantor (the SDM)
"I don't think you can be a true man until you've humiliated yourself before a woman."-- David Duchovny
"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
"I have to find a way of saying the truth without saying it; that is exactly what is literature, after all: clever lies which only secretly say the truth."-- Simone de Beauvoir
There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.-- Richard Rodriguez
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
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.
On-line, adj: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.
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 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
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.-- Dorothy Parker
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.-- William James
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
"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)
"I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants."-- A. Whitney Brown
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.-- Wernher von Braun
Natural selection won't matter soon, not anywhere as much as conscious selection. We will civilize and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed ourselves unrecognizably.-- Greg Bear
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.-- Eric Hoffer
It was irritating to have one's physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.-- Tom Holt
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))
"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day."
-- Winston Churchill
I have an IQ of 150, if that's worth anything.
-- Zak May
We use base 10 numerical representations in this country, not base 6.-- Melinda Shore
UNIX is a scrawny kid from New Jersey who became something of a local hero, but is now middle-aged with a beer gut. Mach tries to turn modern UNIX into RoboCop; POSIX is an attempt to make UNIX more attractive to corporate America with silicone implants and Tammy Fay Bakker's double-parked Maybelline truck.-- Eric P. Scott
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.-- Elizabeth Taylor
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.-- Robert Bly
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
-- Mark Twain
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
Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.-- Alan Cohen
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who's standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest."
Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.-- President Andrew Shepard (The American President)
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.-- Henry Miller
...problems continue in the South African black townships. Four people were killed in violent clashes yesterday. A black spokesman said - this situation is a tragedy for our people; we get no help from the government; blacks are dying and all the whites can do is talk about cricket. [very brief pause] last night at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the South African cricket team defeated Australia in the day-night match... (A(ustralian)BC-FM news)
"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."-- Mark Twain
Aardvark: Like an anteater, but harder to spell, the aardvark hangs around South American locations getting to know the local ant population, and attempting genocide on them. Well recognised for its long snout, with which it sucks up said unfortunate ants, the aardvark is best known for that bit in Tintin where it cleans up Captain Haddock's face. The Aardvark was originally named by Spanish Explorer Aaron Varkinos in 1533. [See also: Ant]-- Daniel Bowen (Toxic Custarpedia)
"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."-- Eric Hoffer
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”-- Noam Chomsky
I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.-- Lin Yutang