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Thu 8 Mar, 2007 04:04 am
A friend sent me this list. It contains the kinds of things I wish I'd have thought of or that I think of three hour or three days too late.
Got any others?
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
* Winston Churchill
"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
* Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure."
* Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary."
* William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
* Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time
reading it."
* Moses ?
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I
know."
* Abraham Lincoln
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
* Groucho Marx
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I
approved of it."
* Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
* Oscar Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend, if you have one."
* George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second if there is
one."
* Winston Churchill, in response
"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."
* Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
* John Bright
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
* Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
* Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
* Paul Keating
"He had delusions of adequacy."
* Walter Kerr
"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
* Jack E. Leonard
"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
* Robert Redford
"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of
human knowledge."
* Thomas Brackett Reed
"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by
diligent hard work, he overcame them."
* James Reston (about Richard Nixon)
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
* Charles, Count Talleyrand
"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
* Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on
it?"
* Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
* Mae West
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
* Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts, for support
rather than illumination."
* Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
* Billy Wilder
[ Up ] [ Famous Insults ] [ Famous Retorts ] [ Just Plain Mean ] [ Yo Mamma ]
"We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault."
Ashleigh Brilliant
"Why don't you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out?"
Groucho Marx
"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
"You're a parasite for sore eyes."
Gregory Ratoff
"Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week."
William Dean Howells
"Either he's dead or my watch has stopped."
Groucho Marx
"Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence."
Ashleigh Brilliant
"The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind."
Joseph Stilwell
"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."
Groucho Marx
"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
"I'll bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork."
Irving Brecher
"You're a good example of why some animals eat their young."
Jim Samuels
"If you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies?"
Charles Pierce
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Groucho Marx (so it's not an insult, I still liked it)
"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 wedding.)
"Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life."
Ivy Compton-Burnett
"I married your mother because I wanted children, imagine my disappointment when you came along."
Groucho Marx
"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 thought men like that shot themselves."
King George V
"Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honor; which is probably more than she ever did."
Groucho Marx
"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
"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
"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
"Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!"
Groucho Marx
"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
"The perfection of rottenness."
William James
"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
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.""
Tobias George Smolett
"Be careful when reading health books; you may die of a misprint."
Mark Twain
"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
"Time wounds all heels."
Groucho Marx
"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
"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know."
Groucho Marx
"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
"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
"You know I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters?"
Groucho Marx
"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
"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
"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
Groucho Marx
"She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people."
Robertson Davies
"She is such a good friend that she would throw all her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again."
Charles Talleyrand
"She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake."
Margot Asquith
"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
"Do you think I could buy back my introduction to you?"
Groucho Marx
"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
"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
"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
"A dork is a dork is a dork."
Judy Markey
"Being attacked by him is like being savaged by a dead sheep."
Dennis Healy
"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 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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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 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 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
"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 VanDyke
"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
"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 over arm action, will bring a water buffalo to its knees."
Nancy Banks-Smith (review of M. M. Kaye's "The Far Pavilions")
"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
"I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury."
Groucho Marx
Holy moley, bunny. I found the site that I think was the source of the original list--the same site you found. I picked out two more quotes.
I'll look for another site.
Holey moley.
I have only one quote to contribute--but applying it to the first Mr. Noddy has brought me great comfort:
Benjamin Disraeli said:
"He is a self-made man who worships his creator."