Quotes by Humorists - Page 15

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
Mark Twain
You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel
Mark Twain
Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world
Mark Twain
I am only human, although I regret it.
Mark Twain
The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.
Mark Twain
he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign.
Mark Twain
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain
Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
Mark Twain
No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.
Mark Twain
All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. A quietly conducted political meeting is one of England's most delightful indoor games. When the meeting is rowdy, the audience has more fun, but the speaker a good deal less.
P.G. Wodehouse
Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.
Mark Twain
Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.
Will Rogers
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.
Mark Twain
The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
Mark Twain
It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells.
Mark Twain
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
Mark Twain
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
Mark Twain
You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.
Mark Twain
I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.
Mark Twain
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.
David Sedaris
Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.
Mark Twain
Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)
Mark Twain
In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.
Mark Twain
Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.
Mark Twain
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
SilenceTHERE is a silence where hath been no sound,t There is a silence where no sound may be,t In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,t Or in wide desert where no life is found,t Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;t No voice is hush'd—no life treads silently,t But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,t That never spoke, over the idle ground:t But in green ruins, in the desolate wallst Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,t Though the dun fox or wild hyæna calls,t And owls, that flit continually between,t Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan—t There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.
Thomas Hood
Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.
Art Buchwald
The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in "calories," which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.
Dave Barry
In the rather informal survey I have taken over the years on intensity of interest in food by profession, lawyers rank only a few trades below concert pianists....
Calvin Trillin
It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one—a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive—as follows:Radishes. Baked apples, with creamFried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.American coffee, with real cream.American butter.Fried chicken, Southern style.Porter-house steak.Saratoga potatoes.Broiled chicken, American style.Hot biscuits, Southern style.Hot wheat-bread, Southern style.Hot buckwheat cakes.American toast. Clear maple syrup.Virginia bacon, broiled.Blue points, on the half shell.Cherry-stone clams.San Francisco mussels, steamed.Oyster soup. Clam Soup.Philadelphia Terapin soup.Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style.Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad.Baltimore perch.Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.Lake trout, from Tahoe.Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans.Black bass from the Mississippi.American roast beef.Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.Cranberry sauce. Celery.Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore.Prairie liens, from Illinois.Missouri partridges, broiled.'Possum. Coon.Boston bacon and beans.Bacon and greens, Southern style.Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips.Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus.Butter beans. Sweet potatoes.Lettuce. Succotash. String beans.Mashed potatoes. Catsup.Boiled potatoes, in their skins.New potatoes, minus the skins.Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot.Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes.Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.Green corn, on the ear.Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style.Hot hoe-cake, Southern style.Hot egg-bread, Southern style.Hot light-bread, Southern style.Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk.Apple dumplings, with real cream.Apple pie. Apple fritters.Apple puffs, Southern style.Peach cobbler, Southern stylePeach pie. American mince pie.Pumpkin pie. Squash pie.All sorts of American pastry.Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.
Mark Twain
Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.
Mark Twain
Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.
Calvin Trillin
If it's dive-bombing you from the air, bury yourself in the sand. It might lose sight of you. Also, no one likes to eat food covered in sand. No one.
Andrew Shaffer
Eaters of Wonder BreadMust be underbred.So little to eat.Where's the wheat?
Roy Blount Jr.
Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?
Calvin Trillin
Some breakfast food manufacturer hit upon the simple notion of emptying out the leavings of carthorse nose bags, adding a few other things like unconsumed portions of chicken layer's mash, and the sweepings of racing stables, packing the mixture in little bags and selling them in health food shops.
Frank Muir
A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.
Mark Twain
Health food makes me sick.
Calvin Trillin
New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.
Mark Twain
I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
There was something sort of bleak about her tone, rather as if she had swallowed an east wind. This I took to be due to the fact that she probably hadn't breakfasted. It's only after a bit of breakfast that I'm able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite. I'm never much of a lad till I've engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee."I suppose you haven't breakfasted?""I have not yet breakfasted.""Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?""No, thank you."She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage league or a league for the suppression of eggs. There was a bit of silence.
P.G. Wodehouse
I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.
Mark Twain
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
Erma Bombeck
The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.
Erma Bombeck
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.
Erma Bombeck
Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
Mark Twain
I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination
Jerome K. Jerome
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.
Mark Twain
A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
Mark Twain
School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.
Calvin Trillin
One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.
Mark Twain
Parents can tell but never teach, unless they practice what they preach.
Arnold H. Glasow
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows
Erma Bombeck
It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Mark Twain
Everybody is ignorant, Just on different subjects.
Will Rogers
An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
Will Rogers
Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?
Mark Twain
For a little while, hope made a show of reviving-not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure.
Mark Twain
I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
David Sedaris