Quotes by Columnists - Page 3

Whatever one does for a living, three questions need to be confronted before it is too late: What really matters to me? What price do my spouse and kids pay for my career success? What price does my soul pay?
Dennis Prager
Mathematicians call it “the arithmetic of congruences.” You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o’clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o’clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ≡ 5 (mod 12), pronounced “eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.
John Derbyshire
Oh, I'm not saying that alcohol is perfect. It has caused its share of problems. Russia is only one example.
Dave Barry
We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.
Javier Marías
Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen
Maeve Binchy
The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
Doug Larson
The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever.
Herb Caen
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.
Doug Larson
Nothing in life was ever clearly drawn, obviously just, or totally emotionally satisfying, but the moment-to-moment stuff of reality featured infinitely more complication, sleaze, struggle, true beauty, unfairness, profundity, passion, and depth of consciousness than she, in her frantic struggle to be somebody other than her unspectacular self, had been previously aware of. page 302
Cintra Wilson
Brevity Is Best: Nicknamed "Silent Cal," President Calvin Coolidge was once challenged by a reporter, saying, "I bet someone that I could get more than two words out of you." Coolidge responded, "You lose." The notion of crafting six word memoirs really took off after Smith Magazine shared this poignant one written by Ernest Hemingway: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." Pithiness Pays Off For Other Reasons: When required to be brief, for example, we gain clarity about what we really mean -- or have to offer. As Mark Twain once wrote, in a slower-paced time, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Kare Anderson
Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again.
Cintra Wilson
For me that's the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can't be quite that straight forward because it doesn't exist in many languages, only in Italian and Spanish, as far as I know, but then again, I don't know that many languages. Perhaps in German too, although I can't be sure: el enamoramiento--the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, although not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ... We find a lot of people funny, people who amuse and charm us and inspire affection and even tenderness, or who please us, captivate us, and can even make us momentarily mad, we enjoy their body and their company or both those things, as is the case for me with you and as I've experienced before with other women, on other occasions, although only a few. Some become essential to us, the force of habit is very strong and ends up replacing or even supplanting almost everything else. It can supplant love, for example, but not that state of being in love, it's important to distinguish between the two things, they're easily confused, but they're not the same ... It's very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness.
Javier Marías
Go Slow to Go Fast in Growing a Stronger Bond With Others: When you see someone's interest rise in the conversation, you have a glimpse of the hook that can best connect you together. Ask follow-up questions, directly related to what that person just said. If you do just this much, recent research shows you are among the five percent of Americans in conversation. In so doing, you accomplish two things. You've increased their openness and warmth toward you, because you've demonstrated you care. And you've had a closer look at the hook that most matters to them in the conversation. Now you can speak to their hottest interest, in a way that can serve you both.
Kare Anderson
Love of sports will always break your heart, but in doing so, it reminds us we have one.
Stuart Stevens
Guys care about sports teams. I'm not talking about simply rooting; I'm talking about a relationship that guys develop, a commitment to a sport team that guys take way more seriously than, for example, wedding vows.
Dave Barry
There's a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes... but it's still the only giant peach in town. Even if it's wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.
Cintra Wilson
Unlike my father and millions of Chinese, everyone in America—every man, woman and child, whether rich or poor— has the freedom to choose, freedom to shape his or her own destiny. Don’t you agree that you can better manage your own life than other people can?
Helen Raleigh
Mediocrity comforts the masses. Mediocrity is a likeable attribute.
Shobhaa Dé
The soldier doesn’t usually act on his own initiative, he doesn’t harbour feelings of hatred or resentment or jealousy, he isn’t motivated by long-held desires or personal ambition; the only motivating force is a vague, rhetorical, empty patriotism, for those soldiers, that is, who are moved by such feelings or allow themselves to be convinced.
Javier Marías
Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money...
Peggy Noonan
The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.
John Derbyshire
We know we are all tarnished, so we doubt everyone else too. It is sad situation, where we need a leader but cannot really trust anyone.
Chetan Bhagat
The word corruption does not arouse the moral revulsion that it should. We think of it as more a nuisance than a great evil. But corruption kills societies every bit as much as murder kills an individual. Moreover there is no hope for any society in which corruption is endemic. One final thought: Here in Cameroon, as elsewhere in Africa, the knowledgeable guides who lead tours of the slave centers note that Africans were deeply involved in the slave trade, and that without them, the slave trade could not have existed. If only this fact were taught as readily in American universities as it is here in Africa — not in order to minimize white complicity, but because universities should teach truth. Flawed human nature has no color.
Dennis Prager
Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused, why is Communist so much less a term of revulsion than Nazi? When people describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, why do they use the terms Nazi or fascist but almost never Communist? And, unlike Hitler, Communist mass murderers are rarely used as examples of evil incarnate. Sometimes, in fact, they are used in a heroic or even entertaining way. There are “Mao” restaurants in various cities in the Western world. It is unlikely that there are any “Hitler” restaurants in the West. So, too, while Che Guevara T-shirts and posters are ubiquitous, there is nothing similar celebrating a Nazi, or fascist, or perhaps any non-Communist killer.
Dennis Prager
The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face.
Kevin D. Williamson
It doesn't matter what has happened to you, it matters what you do with what has happened to you. Life is like a poker game. You don't get to choose the cards you are dealt, but it's entirely up to you how to play the hand.
Regina Brett
National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.
George F. Will
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
Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.
George F. Will
We are not looking for endless variety--we are looking for fashion." February 10, 1967, Memo re HAIR ON SITTINGS
Diana Vreeland
A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere. It's the life you’re living in the dress.
Diana Vreeland
Okay, let's see if I got this straight. The butt is the new breast, and the lower back is the new ankle. Now if only we could figure out where the brain has moved.
Celia Rivenbark
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation’s continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pepper spray on fourteen commercial flights without getting caught. Then ABC News reports that it smuggled fifteen pounds of uranium into New York City. Then Fox News reports that it flew Osama bin Laden to Washington, D.C., and videotaped him touring the White House.
Dave Barry
Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.
George F. Will
Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.
George F. Will
It is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s Left that hates America. However, because the Left dominates the world’s news media and because nearly everyone, understandably, relies on the news media for their understanding of what happens in the world, many people, including Americans, believe that ‘the world’ hates America. And, of course, the Left-dominated media help to create much of the hatred for America that does exist. If I relied exclusively on the New York Times or Le Monde or the Guardian or CNN International or virtually any of the world’s major television and radio news stations and newspapers for all I knew about America, I would probably hold it in contempt as well.
Dennis Prager
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
Dave Barry
[Reverend James] Dobson says that the [Spongebob Squarepants] video would be watched by millions of elementary school students and includes a reference to being 'tolerant of differences.' The nerve! Who does Spongebob think he is? Jesus Christ? Tolerance will not be, uh, tolerated. Oh, and tolerance is quite possibly closesly connected to gay-ance.
Celia Rivenbark
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
Dave Barry
And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess.
Art Buchwald
We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.
Art Buchwald
We never have as great an opportunity to show self-comfort as when others around us aren’t. Hint: Don’t be a jerk because someone else is. Praise the behaviors in others that you most want to flourish.
Kare Anderson
Strangers can be consequential when you want to practice an atrophied or unexplored facet of you, as they don’t know how you usually act.
Kare Anderson
As the dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic teapot had gone mad.
Heywood Broun
With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mustered up enough courage to speak."What will you do if I surrender?" he asked."Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon."And if I don't surrender?""I'll eat you just the same.
Heywood Broun
Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?"Gawaine could do no more than nod."Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican.
Heywood Broun
Here you have learned the theories of life," continued the Headmaster, resuming the thread of his discourse, "but after all, life is not a matter of theories. Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for example, is to slay dragons.
Heywood Broun
If there is a place in heaven for Labrador Retrievers (and I trust there is or I won't go) it'll have to have a brook right smack in the middle - a brook with little thin shoals for wading and splashing; a brook with deep, still pools where they can throw themselves headlong from the bank; a brook with lots of small sticks floating that can be retrieved back to shore where they belong; a brook with muskrats and muskrat holes; a brook with green herons and wood ducks; a brook that is never twice the same with surprises that run and swim and fly; a brook that is cold enough to make the man with the dog run like the devil away from his shaking; a brook with a fine spot to get muddy and a sunny spot or two to get dry.
Gene Hill
You could be Charles Manson, or Hitler, or even a lawyer who advertises on television, and your dog will still think you're the greatest thing ever. This tells you something very important about dogs: They are not very bright.
Dave Barry
Other useful commands to teach your dog are 'stay,' 'heel,' 'remove your snout from that person's groin,' 'stop humping the Barcalounger,' 'do not bark violently for two hours at inanimate objects such as a flowerpot,' ' do not eat poop,' and 'if you must eat poop, then at least refrain from licking my face afterward'.
Dave Barry
Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.
Dave Barry
You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!
Dave Barry
Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception.
Dennis Prager
Be realistic with your expectations. I'd really like to cuddle a unicorn, but it aint going to happen.
India Knight
You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.
Adair Lara
Most people wait until tragedy strikes before thinking about how to incorporate tragedy into their life.
Dennis Prager
Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.
George F. Will
To Jesus, "by faith alone" did not mean "by belief alone." To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience.
Rachel Held Evans
Since neither black animosity nor the Left’s falsehood of “racial tensions” is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America can do will affect the perceptions of many black Americans or of the leftist libel.
Dennis Prager
You can beat me in the rat race, but remember u still remain a rat.
Reetwika Banerjee