Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Riesman

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.

Alan Coren

I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Al Capone

I don't even know what street Canada is on.

Charles Kingsley

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands

Janis Joplin

Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.

C. S. Lewis

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Bob Costas

Any good broadcast, not just an Olympic broadcast, should have texture to it. It should have information, should have some history, should have something that's offbeat, quirky, humorous, and where called for it, should have journalism, and judiciously it should also have commentary. That's my ideal.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Well, sir, let us do what we can to curtail this visit, which can hardly be agreeable to you, and is inexpressibly irksome to me.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

Arthur Conan Doyle

An absence of antecedents and of relatives is sometimes an aid rather than an impediment to social advancement . . .

Arthur Conan Doyle

I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round for it.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.

Bahman Ghobadi

I use humour a lot. My foundation is tragic, but my appearance is humorous.

Since it's a very small car, I don't have much office space.

David Sedaris

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

Dave Barry

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Dave Barry

English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

Dave Barry

The basic Roman ruin design is a pile of rocks with a little plaque saying "Roman Ruins" and a group of tourists frowning at it and wishing they were back at the hotel bar..

Dave Barry

The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.

Dave Barry

One key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium.

Dave Barry

Nevada has a very dynamic economy, with gambling being the number-one industry, followed closely by blood donorship.

Dave Barry

Europeans, like some Americans, drive on the right side of the road, except in England, where they drive on both sides of the road; Italy, where they drive on the sidewalk; and France, where if necessary they will follow you right into the hotel lobby.

Dave Barry

This nation is so friendly that the leading cause of injury is getting passionately embraced by strangers.

Dave Barry

In modern America, food is abundant everywhere except aboard commercial airplanes.

Dave Barry

Granted, this system is insane, but we must not let sanity stand in the way of airport security.

Dave Barry

Elsewhere in Italy is the lovely city of Venice, which each year attracts millions of visitors despite the fact that it is basically an enormous open sewer..

Dave Barry

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret.

Dave Barry

Japan has a low crime rate, unless you count the fact that approximately every fifteen minutes the entire Cabinet gets indicted for taking bribes.

Dave Barry

The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

Dave Barry

The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap.

Dave Barry

Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.