The World of Computer Software/World_Of_Computer_Software-02-387-Vol-3of3.iso/c/curmudge.zip/CURMUDGE.DAT

Text File | 1993-03-07 | 27KB | 661 lines

Day, n.  A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
Ambrose Bierce
Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or
absent, living or dead.
Louise Brooks
I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles
better than anything else in the world.
Oscar Wilde
Women who insist upon having the same options as men would do well to consider
the option of being the strong, silent type.
Fran Lebowitz
Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
Alexander Pope
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people
to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
T.S. Eliot
Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless
generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.
P.G. Wodehouse
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Nietzsche
Journalism consists largely in saying "Lord Jones died" to people who never
knew Lord Jones was alive.
G.K. Chesterton
Author:  A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with
him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.
Montesquieu
What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue
of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.
Thoreau
The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their
children.
The Duke of Windsor
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is
the mental institution of the universe.
Goethe
The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so
completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oscar Wilde
Cat, n.  A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked
when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
Ambrose Bierce
Women represent the triumph of matter of mind, just as men represent the
triumph of mind over morals.
Oscar Wilde
Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife. She has thought
much worse things about you.
Jean Rostand
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the
black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H.L. Mencken
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Oscar Wilde
We will have equality when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a
male schmeiel.
Estelle Ramey
If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy.  God will
forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
Hyman Rickover
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor
doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
Alvin Toffler
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food,
and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates
Morality consists in suspecting other people of not being legally married.
George Bernard Shaw
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic
motive.
Ayn Rand
Progress is the mother of all problems.
G.K. Chesterton
The thought of suicide is a great consolation; with the help of it one has
got through many a bad night.
Nietzsche
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a
philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce
I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.
Alexandre Dumas
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire,
and drop into your grave.
Quentin Crisp
Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males,
and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development.
Russell Baker
Capital, n.  The seat of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce
There are two kinds of music - good music and bad music.  Good music is that
I want to hear. Bad music is music that I don't want to here.
Fran Lebowitz
Husbands are awkward things to deal with; even keeping them in hot water
will not make them tender.
Mary Buckley
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell
to find it ridiculous.
Santayana
Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
C.G. Jung
When you're away, I'm restless, lonely,
Wretched, bored, dejected; only
Here's the rub, my darling dear
I feel the same when you are here.
Samuel Hoffenstein
The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy -
give one and take ten.
Mark Twain
In the case of many poets, the most important thing for them to do ...
is to write as little as possible.
T.S. Eliot
Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when
one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
Oscar Wilde
A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead
ape and work downward through a million graves.
Ambrose Bierce
Death will be a great relief.  No more interviews.
Katharine Hepburn
Peace, n.  In international affairs, a period of cheating between two
periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce
Money, to be worth striving for, must have blood and perspiration on it -
preferably that of someone else.
Wilson Mizner
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Gore Vidal
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.
This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain
I know nothing about sex, because I was always married.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Ah, love - the walks over soft grass, the smiles over candlelight,
the arguments over just about everything else.
"Max Headroom"
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers
is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Ben Hecht
A grouch escapes so many little annoyances that it almost pays to be one.
Kin Hubbard
Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share
of the artist's fame.
George Jean Nathan
Lawyers are ... operators of the toll bridge which anyone in search of
justice must pass.
Jane Bryant Quinn
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware
that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and
delay its putrefaction.
John Cage
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always got on one's nerves -
which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde
The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants,
sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.
Clarence Darrow
New York:  The only city where people make radio requests like
"This is for Tina - I'm sorry I stabbed you."
Carol Leifer
Radio news is bearable.  This is due to the fact that while the news is being
broadcast the disc jockey is not allowed to talk.
Fran Lebowitz
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get
themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would
promise them missionaries for dinner.
H.L. Mencken
Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.
George Jean Nathan
The trouble with a kitten is THAT
Eventually it becomes a CAT
Ogden Nash
Hollywood: A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth.
S.J. Perelman
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether
you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw
Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major catagories -
Those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker
Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to
make a speech to.
Shane Leslie
Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with
nonconformity.
Eric Hoffer
Ronald Reagan's library just burned down.  Both books were destroyed.
But the real horror: He hadn't finished coloring either one of them.
Gore Vidal
The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equalled by the infernal
constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
Why did Nature create man?  Was it to show that she is big enough to make
mistakes, or was it pure ignorance?
Holbrook Jackson
The First Law of Journalism:
To confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
Alexander Cockburn
Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers
Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance
than values.  That is to say, their own ideas and other peoples values.
Gerald Brenan
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other
people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
George Bernard Shaw
Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class or, on special occasions,
for the working class.  Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door
handles still intact.
Erma Bombeck
There will be no nuclear war.  There's too much real estate involved.
Frank Zappa
To all things clergic
I am allergic.
Alexander Woollcott
I'm tired of love, I'm still more tired of rhyme,
but money gives me pleasure all the time.
Hilaire Belloc
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that
a belch is more satisfying.
Ingmar Bergman
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
Balzac
A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in
the road.
Alexander Smith
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by
our children.
Clarence Darrow
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
Mark Twain
The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial.
G.K. Chesterton
You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can
think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.
Charles de Gaulle
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other
countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
It is almost nicer being a godfather than a father, like having white mice
but making your nanny feed them for you.
T.H. White
Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more
amusing than history.
Nicolas Chanfort
I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
Paul Fussell
The California climate makes the sick well and the well sick, the old young
and the young old.
H.L. Mencken
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Stephen Leacock
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to being
in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Russell Baker
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support
of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to
seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.
Henry Miller
A bachelor's virtue depends upon his alertness;
a married man's depends upon his wife's.
H.L. Mencken
One goes to see a tragedy to be moved; to the opera one goes for want of any
other interest or to facilitate digestion.
Voltaire
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the
window shut and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some
pretty good questions.
Woody Allen
Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the
hardships that made him rich.
Robert Frost
Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that's the way he
shows his passion for equality.
Charles de Gaulle
There are more fools in the world than there are people.
Heinrich Heine
The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one
graveyard to another.
Frank J. Dobie
I hate music, especially when it's played.
Jimmy Durante
A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire
to improve him.
 Nathaniel Branden
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but
in their readiness to doubt.
H.L. Mencken
The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.
W.C. Fields
Take it from me, marriage isn't a word - it's a sentence.
King Vidor
There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of
children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.
George Bernard Shaw
A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it
in taking them back.
Edgar Watson Howe.
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers.  My opinion
is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
John F. Kennedy
No man would dare say a bad word against Mother's Day in public, or a good
word for it in private.
Alistair Cooke
Love makes fools, marriage cluckolds, and patriotism malevolent imbeciles.
Paul Leautaud
The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to his level of
sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
James Thurber
After years of effort, women have won the right to be taken more seriously
than they deserve.
Stanley Bing
There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
Denis Diderot
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of
life, please press 3.
Alice Kahn
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of
handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.
Nathalie Sarraute
Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.
Huey P. Long
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the
morning feeling just plain terrible.
Jean Kerr
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
Oscar Wilde
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for
granted.
Aldous Huxley
Politics is not the art of the possible.  It consists in choosing between
the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Women do not like timid men.  Cats do not like prudent mice.
H.L. Mencken
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll
see why.
Mignon McLaughlin
Washington is the only place where sound travels faster than light.
C.V.R. Thompson
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile and transitory - they are so,
and they and we go very well together.
Santayana
I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's
brother.
Artemus Ward
As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its
fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Oscar Wilde
My advice to girls:  First, don't smoke - to excess;
second, don't drink - to excess; third, don't marry - to excess.
Mark Twain
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
George Jean Nathan
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to
worry about where the next meal would come from.
Peter F. Drucker
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is
a deep delight of the blood.
Santayana
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.  I'm frightened
of the old ones.
John Cage
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
Tolstoy
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
Edith Sitwell
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
Norman Douglas
Progress was all right.  Only it went on too long.
James Thurber
Misogynist:  A man who hates women as much as women hate one other.
H.L. Mencken
Idiot, n.  A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
Ambrose Bierce
We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
William Hazlitt
When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he
expects to be paid for it.
H.L. Mencken
The aviodance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any
reward.
John Maynard Keynes
The relation between psychiatrists and other kinds of lunatics is more or
less the relation of a convex folly to a concave one.
Karl Kraus
Poetry is nobodys business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen
years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have
exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard.  That is the only proper basis for
family life.
Oscar Wilde
Politics, n.  Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
Ambrose Bierce
There's nothing about an elevator I like.  It's too small.  It's filled with
people I did not invite. And often these people are wearing conflicting
perfumes.
Fran Lebowitz
In America everything goes and nothing matters.  While in Europe nothing
goes and everything matters.
Philip Roth
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
Alfred A. Knopf
Hollywood brides keep the bouquets and throw away the grooms.
Groucho Marx
I can see stopping a car for a dog.  But a cat?  You squish a cat and go on.
James Gallagher
"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.
George Ade
Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals.
To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football.
Fran Lebowitz
Patience, n.  A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
Oscar Wilde
"My country right or wrong" is like saying "My mother drunk or sober."
G.K. Chesterton
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Oscar Wilde
We live in an environment whose principle product is garbage.
Russell Baker
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for;
as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
H.L. Mencken
For the butterfly, mating and propagation involve the sacrifice, for the
human being, the sacrifice of beauty.
Goethe
Birth, n.  The first and direst of all disasters.
Ambrose Bierce
I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise.
Chauncey Depew
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.
Sir Thomas Beecham
I have had my television aerials removed.  It's the moral equivalent of a
prostrate operation.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including
our own.
G.C. Lichtenberg
Lawyers and tarts are the two oldest professions in the world.
And we always aim to please.
Horace Rumpole  (John Mortimer)
When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.
Robert M. Hutchins
An ugly baby is a very nasty object, and the prettiest is frightful when
undressed.
Queen Victoria
Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
Robert Orben
Pray, n.  To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a
single petitioner confessed unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce
Sex hasn't been the same since women started enjoying it.
Lewis Grizzard
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
Jonathan Swift
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how
bad I am.
Samuel Johnson
Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
Saki
An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the
grand fallacy.
Benjamin Stolberg
The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.
Nancy Astor
Holidays are often overrated disturbances of routine, costly and
uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their
ravages.
E.V. Lucas
I love being married.  It's so great to find that one special person you
want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner
Government is too big and important to be left to the politicians.
Chester Bowles
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for
money usually costs a lot less.
Brendan Behan
If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity.
Yousuf Karsh
Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous.
It should be left to the congenitally sinful,
who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.
H.L. Mencken
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked
and really being good all the time.  That would be hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde
Criminal:  A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital
to form a corporation.
Howard Scott
Fidelity, n.  A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Ambrose Bierce
Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the
teachers.
P.J. O'Rourke
Can't anything be done about calling these guys "student athletes"?
That's like referring to Attila the Hun's cavalry as "weekend warriors."
Russell Baker
Parents were invented to make children happy by
giving them something to ignore.
Ogden Nash
The only way to reform some people is to chloroform them.
Thomas C. Haliburton
The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how
can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an advocation?
H.L. Mencken
Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg
History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles,
cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names.
Tolstoy
The advantage of a classical education is that is enables you to despise
the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.
Russell Green
Football combines the two worst features of American life:  violence and
committee meetings.
George Will
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is
thought necessary.
Robert Lewis Stevenson
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to
prayer.
Mark Twain
Sex is God's joke on human beings.
Bette Davis
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations
and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they
cannot actually masturbate.
Dave Barry
All television is children's television.
Richard P. Adler
Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality
that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have
told it to the same person?
La Rochefoucauld
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Theodore Sturgeon
Women should be obscene and not heard.
Groucho Marx
The best number for a dinner party is two - myself and a damn good
head waiter.
Nubar Gulbenkian
I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
Mark Twain
One of the signs of Napoleon's greatness is the fact that he once had a
publisher shot.
Siegfried Unseld
Moderation is a fatal thing:  Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde
Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't
talk for people who can't read.
Frank Zappa
The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
Voltaire
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might
remember.
Eugene McCarthy
I require three things in a man:  He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
Dorothy Parker
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants
to read.
Mark Twain
Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way.
Isaac Goldberg
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism.  By giving us the
opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the
community.
Oscar Wilde
If they really want to honor the soldiers, why don't they let them sit in the
stands and have the people march by.
Will Rogers
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to
prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed,
and both are right.
H.L. Mencken
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you
pure?
Harry Shearer
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires
them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Russell Baker
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to
distinguish what is worth reading.
G.M. Trevelyan
Whenever I date a guy, I think, is this the man I want my children to spend
their weekends with?
Rita Rudner
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in
Hamburger Technology.
Clive James
The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to
the half-converted.
W.R. Inge
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you
think it is you want to hear.
Alan Coren
You never see a man walking down the street with a woman who has a little
pot belly and a bald spot.
Elayne Boosler
We were happily married for eight months.  Unfortunately, we were married
for four and a half years.
Nick Faldo
Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays
and the other who never forgets them.
Ogden Nash
If there's anything unsettling to the stomach it's watching actors on
television talk about their personal lives.
Marlon Brando
The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars' worth of
clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to
stand around at a bar and get drunk.
P.J. O'Rourke
Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.
Bertrand Russell
A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.
Karl Kraus
A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded
as a thing of beauty.
Mark Twain
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
H.L. Mencken
If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong.
Mo Udall
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk.  This
drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the
person you're married to.
P.J. O'Rourke
Never trust the ales of a God-fearin' people.
Quark
I have often had the impression that, to penguins, man is just another
penguin - different, less predictable, occasionally violent, but tolerable
company when he sits still and minds his own business.
Bernard Stonehouse
Hello! Yes oh YES I'd like to take advantage of your once in a lifetime
special TV offer for the amazing Ronco Combination "Plum Pitter and Yogurt
Squirter" for only $39.98!!  It dices! It slices! It shplices! It pushes!
It mooshes! It sqooshes!  Truly a dream machine!  Don't forget the free bonus
"Pocket Diaper Steamer!"  I'll take six thousand!!
Thank You!
Goodbye!!
Opus
Sir, your sign said I can have it my way, and my way is a herring on a bun
with lots of mayonaise.
Opus