Anectodes & Quotes - Funny, witty, comebacks

What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. sure, by W.H. Davies

-- from Lei

John Major, in a diplomatic trip to Russia, asked Yeltsin about the Russian econ omy and to express his opinion in one word. Yeltsin answered good to Major's surpr ise, as the country s economy was in a deplorable and fragile state. When he asked him to voice his opinion in two words, Yeltsin answered not good. I saw almost nothing but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few E gyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to set it all down on paper. -Beethoven's friend, Ignaz von Seyfried, who turned the pages of the music for him at the pre miere of Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto. An American scientist once visited the offices of the great Nobel prize winning physicist, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. He was amazed to find that over Bohr s desk was a horseshoe, securely nailed to the wall, with the open end up in the approv ed manner (so it would catch the good luck and not let it spill out). The Americ an said with a nervous laugh, Surely you don t believe the horseshoe will bring you good luck, do you, Professor Bohr? After all, as a scientist Bohr chuckled. I beli eve no such thing, my good friend. Not at all. However, I am told that a horsesh oe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not. Harry Reid quoted from the Cat in the Hat in Congress: That is good, said the fish. He s gone away, yes. But your mother will come. She will find this big mess. Some wou ld say that is what we have in the Senate today -- a big mess, the majority leade r explained. But if you go back and read Dr. Seuss, the cat manages to clean up t he mess, and as big of a mess as we have with immigration in the United States, we have the opportunity to clean up a big mess. He was unsuccessful because, as o ne analyst put it, the Cat in the Hat did not have to contend with cloture. John F. Kennedy famously commented, addressing a group of Nobel laureates, that it was the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of wh en Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Denton Cooley reportedly answered in the affirmative when a lawyer during a tria l asked him if he considered himself to be the best heart surgeon in the world. D on t you think that s being rather immodest? the lawyer replied. Perhaps, Dr. Cooley re sponded. But remember I m under oath. In a Chicago airport security line recently, Madeleine Albright went unnoticed u ntil she was face to face with a Transportation Security Administration officer. Oh, my God, it s you! Albright recalls him saying. After telling the former Madame Secretary that he was Bosnian, the TSA agent went on: We all love you in Bosnia, and if it weren t for you, there wouldn t be a Bosnia. Only after he held up the crow d for a picture with Albright did things return to normal, prompting a woman in line to ask the former Clinton cabinet aide: So what exactly happened here? As Alb right tells it: I said, Well, I used to be secretary of state. And she says, Of Bosn ia? Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble So, what are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of sou l ? -- from a letter to Conrad Habicht by Albert Einstein in which he describes his four Annus Mirabilis papers published in 1905. I got a story about someone who d become very used to his hallucinations and very c ool about it. He lived on the 19th story, and he saw someone outside his window.

You don t have someone hundreds of feet off the ground, so he thought it was a ha llucination. And the hallucination apparently waved at him. He paid no attention . And then of course, the window cleaner talked to the person next door and said , What s wrong with him? I waved at him and he didn t respond. So there, reality was m istaken for a hallucination. -Oliver Sacks, British neurologist and writer During one incident between Keith Moon and hotel management, Moon was asked to t urn down his cassette player because The Who were making too much noise. In respon se, Moon asked the manager up to his room, lit a stick of dynamite in the toilet , and shut the bathroom door. Following the explosion, Moon informed the startle d manager, That, dear boy, was noise. Moon then turned the cassette player back on and proclaimed, This is The Who. That warm, moist air begins to condense on the hull of the submarine. And it begi ns to drip. Okay? Now, you know it s going to drip. The pilot knows it s going to dr ip. It s one of those other things you fail to mention to the novice. In fact, you place the novice directly beneath the hatch. Tell him to look out the window. A nd you wait. Now, in fact, you and the pilot sort of take a side bet on how many drips it s going to take to crack this macho individual. It takes about eight dri ps. Okay. But, it takes forty-five minutes for this physics to manifest itself i nside the submarine. So, by the time the first drip starts to fall on their head , you re down about five thousand feet. You re about a mile down. And that first dri p falls on their head. Followed by the second. The third. And sure enough, aroun d the eighth drip, they re squirming. And they re getting flashlights. And they sear ch, because you turn off all the lights. And you let them sit there with a drip on their head. And they start searching for the drip. Well, naturally it s right a bove them. Right around the hatch. And they put the two together. And then you h ear them clear their voice. You know. In a very Agh hum. You know, I don t want to be an alarmist, they commonly say. I don t know if you, if any of you guys noticed tha t there s water coming in? Around the hatch. And our, our response is always, Oh my God, we re going to die. -- from a transcript of a speech by Dr. Robert Ballard In an incendiary public speech in New York, George Francis Train declared that Sl avery is a divine institution, to which an old man in the crowd exclaimed, So is h ell! -- from the journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democra cy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. -Orson Welles It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbl ed or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat an d blood; who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devo tions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while darin g greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt As a reluctant and devout fan of American sports, I ve pretty much acclimatized to the rhythms of native viewing, which involves watching actual play for about 12 minutes, then spending the next three or four minutes watching porno blondes blo w the froth off light beers and animated lizards pimp multinational insurance fi rms. You get used to the abuse, after a while. Crucial neurological receptors bu rn out, or fade away. And the marketing people know this, and so they keep pushi ng the envelope. They get more and more sophisticated in their emotional manipul ations. The budgets explode. The CGI geeks run wild. At a certain point, you fin d yourself chewing on your Nikes and gargling with ice-cold Coke Zero and snorti ng McNuggets. -Steve Almond

Babbage once contacted the poet Alfred Tennyson in response to his poem The Visio n of Sin . Babbage wrote, In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads, Every m oment dies a man, / Every moment one is born. ...If this were true, the populatio n of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]: Every moment dies a man, / Every moment 1 1/16 is born. Strictly sp eaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Rot h! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me. -- from Oper ation Shylock: A Confession by Philip Roth; thought by the writer Roth while conf ronting an impersonator identical in appearance and name. [S]he has read only two books in her life, Times article on Snooki

Twilight and

Dear John.

-- from a New York

Well, I m not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. I m a very serious possibilist. It 's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work analytically wit h the world. -Hans Rosling Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon thei r lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do. -- from Les Misérable s by Victor Hugo. The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pip e? No, it s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture Thi s is a pipe, I d have been lying! -René Magritte, on the inscription of his painting, a trahison des images (The Treachery of Images)

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To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time . -Leonard Berstein Politicians varnish the stories to make the truth more palatable. -Salman Rushdie La Traviata last night a failure. My fault or the singers ? Time will tell. e Verdi

-Giusepp

I m dying! Should I call an ambulance? No, not now! No, not tonight! I mean, eventually! Boris, everybody dies. It's unacceptable! -Boris Yellnikoff and h is first wife in Whatever Works, by Woody Allen We can t command our love, but we can our actions. The Feynman (1) write (2) think (3) write

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Problem-Solving Algorithm: down the problem; very hard; down the answer.

Life, n.: A whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.