Age

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
John Barrymore (1882-1942)

Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-)

At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell (1903-1950)

Do not regret growing old; many are denied the privilege.

Few women admit their age. Few men act theirs.

I'm old enough to know better but I'm still too young to care.

Middle age is when a narrow waist and a broad mind begin to change places.

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870-1965)

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.

The older I get, the better I was.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
George Santayana (1863-1952)

We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.

You are only young once, but you can be immature your whole life.

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Apathy

Not enough is done for the apathetic.

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Art

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp (1909-1979)

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Buy old masters. They bring better prices than young mistresses.
Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964)

Dada wouldn't buy me a Bauhaus.

I am a deeply superficial person.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

If it sells, it's art.

My art belongs to Dada.
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-)

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)

The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.
Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968)

This is either a forgery or a very clever original.
Frank Sullivan

Van Gogh was a painter because he had no ear for music.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

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Astronomy

Black holes are where god is dividing by zero.

If the universe is expanding, why can't I find a parking space?

The rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
Mark Russell (1932-)

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Atheism

A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.
Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696)

An atheist is someone with no invisible means of support.
John Buchan (1875-1940)

I'm still an atheist, thank God.
Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

My atheism is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana (1863-1952)

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Audiences

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956)

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Avarice

Avarice is the sphincter of the heart.
Matthew Green

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Beauty

All babies look like Winston Churchill.

Beauty is only sin deep.

Beauty multiplied by brains equals a constant.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius (551BC-479BC)

The hidden flaw never remains hidden.

There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.
John Erskine (1879-1951)

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Biography

Autobiography is now nearly as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.
Lord Altrincham (1924-)

Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Some people leave a mark on this world, while others only leave a stain.

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956)

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Books

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read, and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

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 (1890-1977)

Never judge a book by its movie.
J.W. Eagan

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.
Moses Hadas

The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

The paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace the hardcover book: it makes a very poor doorstop.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

There are three rules for writing a novel; unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

This book fills a much-needed gap.
Moses Hadas

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The Bourgeois

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.
Jules Renard (1864-1910)

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Breath

Halitosis is better than no breath at all.

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Chaos

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
Henry Miller (1891-1980)

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

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Cheese

What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

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Chess

Chess is the mind's gymnasium.
Vladimir Illyich Lenin (1870-1924)

Life's too short for chess.
Henry James Byron (1834-1884)

One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players.
Anatol Rappaport (1911-)

Poets do not go mad; but chess players do.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

When the game is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box.

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Children

Adults are obsolete children.

All children are essentially criminals.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

An ugly baby is a very nasty object, and the prettiest is frightful when undressed.
Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

Having children is hereditary, if your parents didn't have any, then you probably won't either.

I never met a kid I liked.
W.C. Fields (1879-1946)

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)

There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.
P.J. O'Rourke (1947-)

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Alan Bennett (1934-)

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Cinema

King Kong died for our sins.

Mickey Mouse is a rat.

The cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

What we need are new clichés.
Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)

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Closets

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton restless.

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Committees

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Sir Barnett Cocks

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

A group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
Carl C. Byers

A group that takes minutes and wastes hours.

Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it.

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Computers

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Ratliffe

A country's constitution is only a local ordinance in cyberspace.

A paperless office has about as much chance as a paperless bathroom.

Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw.

Artificial Intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in movies.

As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.

As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.

At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.

Bugs are sons of glitches.

Bugs come in through open Windows.

Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)

Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Computers follow your orders, not your intentions.

Disinformation is not as good as datinformation.

Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.

Hardware is the part of a computer system that can be kicked and software is the part that can only be screamed at.

I really hate this damned machine
I wish they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.

If there's artificial intelligence, there's bound to be some artificial stupidity.

Information is any difference that makes a difference.
Gregory Bateson (1904-1980)

Is a 5.25" floppy better than a 3.5" hard?

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There's always one more bug.

Never allow a computer to know you're in a hurry.

Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift.

RAM disk is not an installation procedure.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-)

Real programs don't eat cache.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates (1955-)

Smith & Wesson had the original point and click interface.

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

The Internet is proof that a million monkeys with a million typewriters can't write Hamlet.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

There's no place like 127.0.0.1

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

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Confession

Confession is good for the soul in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
Peter de Vries (1910-1993)

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Confucius never said this...

A man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is lost.

For a string to have one end it must have another.

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

It's always room-temperature.

Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.

Only dead fish swim with the stream.

The tire is only flat on the bottom.

While chain swings, seat is warm.

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Contracts

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)

The big-type giveth, and the small-type taketh away.

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Compiled and edited by
Luis de Avendaño
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Updated on Sunday, 24 January 2010

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