Quote collection
139 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong."
"The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars."
"Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of."
"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."
"The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist."
"What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises."
"In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved."
"A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems."
"Americans like fat books and thin women."
"It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic."
"You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart."
"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it."
"Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it."
"Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture."
"A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday."
"Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it."
"The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings."
"It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom."
"Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply."