QUOTES ON “C”

CAB DRIVERS

Cab drivers are living proof that practice does not make perfect.
HOWARD OGDEN

CALAMITIES

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
AMBROSE BIERCE

CALENDARS

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
OSCAR WILDE

CALIFORNIA

California reminds me of the popular American Protestant concept of Heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many—not all—of one’s friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating one another about the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realize that now, the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant, nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again.
GEORGE F. KENNAN

In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist.
TRUMAN CAPOTE

California, the department store state.
RAYMOND CHANDLER

California: The west coast of Iowa.
JOAN DIDION

The Screwy State.
ROBERT GRAVES

Most people in California came from somewhere else. They moved to California so they could name their kids Rainbow or Mailbox, and purchase tubular Swedish furniture without getting laughed at. It’s a tenet also in California that the fiber of your clothing is equivalent to your moral fiber. Your “lifestyle” (as they say) is your ethic. This means that in California you don’t really have to do anything, except look healthy, think good thoughts and pat yourself on the back about what a good person you are. And waiters in California want to be called by their first name. I don’t know why.
IAN SHOALES

It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
TRUMAN CAPOTE

Living in California adds ten years to a man’s life. And those extra ten years I’d like to spend in New York.
HARRY RUBY

It is the land of perpetual pubescence, where cultural lag is mistaken for renaissance.
ASHLEY MONTAGU

California is a tragic country—like Palestine, like every Promised Land.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

A wet dream in the mind of New York.
ERICA JONG

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
DON DELILLO

CALMNESS

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.
OSCAR WILDE

CANADA

Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.
PIERRE TRUDEAU

Canada is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.
RICHARD BENNER

Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
P. J. O’ROURKE

Canada has never been a melting pot; more like a tossed salad.
ARNOLD EDINBOROUGH

In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations—it’s cold, half French, and difficult to stir.
STUART KEATE

Canada is useful only to provide me with furs.
MADAME DE POMPADOUR

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity. MARSHALL MCLUHAN

For some reason, a glaze passes over people’s faces when you say Canada. SONDRA GOTLIEB

A few acres of snow.
VOLTAIRE

CANADIANS

When I was there I found their jokes like their roads—very long and not very good, leading to a little tin point of a spire which has been remorselessly obvious for miles without seeming to get any nearer.
SAMUEL BUTLER

CANCER

My father died of cancer when I was a teenager. He had it before it became popular.
GOODMAN ACE

CANDY CORN

CAPITAL

Capital, n. The seat of misgovernment.
AMBROSE BIERCE

CAPITALISM

Capitalism is a condition both of the world and of the soul.
FRANZ KAFKA

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The big thieves hang the little ones.
CZECH PROVERB

When I came back to Dublin I was court martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
BRENDAN BEHAN

CARS

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
RUSSELL BAKER

CAR ALARMS

They erupt like indignant metal jungle birds, and they whoop all night. They make American cities sound like lunatic rain forests, all the wildlife affrighted, violated, outraged, shrieking. . .. In a neighborhood of apartment buildings, one such beast rouses sleepers by the hundreds, even thousands. They wake, roll over, moan, jam pillows on their ears and try to suppress the adrenaline. Car thieves, however, pay no attention to the noise.
LANCE MORROW

CAREER

My career is a fascist state. I’m the dictator, the chief of police, the head of the army. Anybody who tries to interfere is put up against the wall and shot.
MICHAEL CAINE

CATS

They smell and they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery; they’re sneaky, selfish and not particularly smart; they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent-free environment.
JEAN-MICHEL CHAPEREAU

The cat is the only non-gregarious domestic animal.
FRANCIS GALTON

Cat, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
AMBROSE BIERCE

I can see stopping a car for a dog. But a cat? You squish a cat and go on.
JAMES GALLAGHER

The trouble with a kitten is THAT
Eventually it becomes a CAT
OGDEN NASH

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance—a sharp, vindictive glance.
JAMES THURBER

The only good cat is a stir-fried cat.
“ALF”

CELEBRITY

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
FRED ALLEN

You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination. If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you’ve read his autobiography.
P. J. O’ROURKE

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
HENRY KISSINGER

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
H. L. MENCKEN

When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.
W. S. GILBERT

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

CHARM

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
OSCAR WILDE

CHASTITY

Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.
ALEX COMFORT

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
KARL KRAUS

CHARITY

One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.
ANDREW CARNEGIE

CHEERFULNESS

Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.
WILLIAM FEATHER

CHESS

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

As elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
RAYMOND CHANDLER

Chess is seldom found above the upper-middle class: it’s too hard.
PAUL FUSSELL

CHICAGO

This vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, mace-smelling boneyard of a city: an elegant rockpile of a monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON

CHILDHOOD

Childhood n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
AMBROSE BIERCE

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
COLETTE

CHILDLESSNESS

Childlessness has many obvious advantages. One is that you need not spend two hundred thousand dollars to send anyone to college, or contribute a similar sum to the retirement fund of a stranger who has decided to become a pediatrician. But the principal advantage of the nonparental life-style is that on Christmas Eve, you need not be struck dumb by the three most terrifying words that the government allows to be printed on any product: “Some assembly required.”
JOHN LEO

CHILD-PROOF BOTTLE TOPS

Allen Ginsberg said he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. I have seen the best minds of my generation go at a bottle of Anacin with a ball-peen hammer.
P. J. O’ROURKE

CHILD REARING

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.
ERMA BOMBECK

CHILDREN

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
NANCY MITFORD

Of children as of procreation—the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
EVELYN WAUGH

If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.
DON MARQUIS

Children should neither be seen nor heard from—ever again.
W. C. FIELDS

At eight or nine, I suppose, intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
H. L. MENCKEN

There are three terrible ages of childhood—1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
MELL LAZARUS

Never have children, only grandchildren.
GORE VIDAL

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant—and let the air out of the tires.
DOROTHY PARKER

By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

I like children. If they’re properly cooked.
W. C. FIELDS

Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.
EDGAR ALLAN POE

Insanity is hereditary; you can get it from your children.
SAM LEVENSON

Once you have children, it forever changes the way you bore other people.
BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults; feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
EVELYN WAUGH

A son of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and the ignominiousness of life.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Go back to reform school, you little nose-picker.
W. C. FIELDS

Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.
ROY BLOUNT, JR.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
BRIAN ALDISS

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

What is more enchanting than the voices of young people when you can’t hear what they say?
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
FRAN LEBOWITZ

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
GEORGE F. WILL

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
SAKI

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

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
P. J. O’ROURKE

A philosopher told me that, having examined the civil and political order of societies, he now studied nothing except the savages in the books of explorers, and children in everyday life.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a healthy young child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for a father and son.
EVELYN WAUGH

America’s gross national product.
FLORENCE KING

Children are cruel, ruthless, cunning and almost incredibly self-centered. Far from cementing a marriage, children more frequently disrupt it. Child-rearing is on the whole an expensive and unrewarding bore, in which more has to be invested both materially and spiritually than ever comes out in dividends.
NIGEL BALCHIN

I want to have children and I know my time is running out: I want to have them while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.
RITA RUDNER

Children are satisfied with the stork story up to a certain age because the little fartlings are the world’s most crustaceous reactionaries; they don’t want to know, they don’t want their preconceived opinions toppled.
FLORENCE KING

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
ROBERT ORBEN

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
SOCRATES

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can’t decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
RITA RUDNER

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
KINGSLEY AMIS

The trouble with children is that they are not returnable.
QUENTIN CRISP

They grow up so slow.
BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN

CHRIST

Christ: an anarchist who succeeded. That’s all.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX

A parish demagogue.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
JULES FEIFFER

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.
MARK TWAIN

CHRISTIAN CHARITY

The Jews and Arabs should settle their dispute in the true spirit of Christian charity.
ALEXANDER WILEY

CHRISTIANITY

Christian, n. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
AMBROSE BIERCE

The last Christian died on the cross.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETSCHE

I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.
MARK TWAIN

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venemous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

What I got in Sunday School . . . was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.
H. L. MENCKEN

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
DAVID HUME

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
SAMUEL BUTLER

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
G. K. CHESTERTON

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.
LAURENCE J. PETER

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.
SAKI

CHRISTMAS

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I believed in Christmas until I was eight years old. I had saved up some money carrying ice in Philadelphia, and I was going to buy my mother a copper-bottomed clothes boiler for Christmas. I kept the money hidden in a brown crock in the coal bin. My father found the crock. He did exactly what I would have done in his place. He stole the money. And ever since then I’ve remembered nobody on Christmas, and I want nobody to remember me either.
W. C. FIELDS

Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed and the rejected.
JIMMY CANNON

Something in me resists the calendar expectation of happiness.
J. B. PRIESTLEY

Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out any quicker than the Christmas spirit.
KIN HUBBARD

The prospect of Christmas appalls me.
EVELYN WAUGH

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.
RICHARD BACH

Christmas is when you have to go to the bank and get crisp money to put in envelopes from the stationery store for tips. After you tip the door-man, he goes on sick leave or quits and the new one isn’t impressed.
ANDY WARHOL

There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made out of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.
P. J. O’ROURKE

Did you ever notice, the only one in A Christmas Carol with any character is Scrooge? Marley is a whiner who fucked over the world and then hadn’t the spine to pay his dues quietly; Belle, Scrooge’s ex-girlfriend, deserted him when he needed her most; Bob Cratchit is a gutless toady without enough get-up-and-go to assert himself; and the less said about that little treacle-mouth, Tiny Tim, the better.
HARLAN ELLISON

Early in life I developed a distaste for the Cratchits that time has not sweetened. I do not think I was an embittered child, but the Cratchits’ aggressive worthiness, their bravely borne poverty, their exultation over that wretched goose, disgusted me. I particularly disliked Tiny Tim (a part always played by a girl because girls had superior powers of looking moribund and worthy at the same time), and when he chirped, “God bless us every one!” my mental response was akin to Sam Goldwyn’s famous phrase, “Include me out.”
ROBERTSON DAVIES

Adults can take a simple holiday for children and screw it up. What began as a presentation of simple gifts to delight and surprise children around the Christmas tree has culminated in a woman opening up six shrimp forks from her dog, who drew her name.
ERMA BOMBECK

“Merry Christmas, Nearly Everybody!”
OGDEN NASH

Bah, Humbug!
EBENEZER SCROOGE

CIVILIZATION

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
MARK TWAIN

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
CYRIL CONNOLLY

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have never forgiven them.
CYRIL CONNOLLY

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
ERIC BERNE

You can’t say civilization isn’t advancing: in every war they kill you in a new way.
WILL ROGERS

I regard everything that has happened since the last war as a decline in civilization.
A. L. ROWSE

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
BRIAN ALDISS

CLASS

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.
OSCAR WILDE

The classes that wash most are those that work least.
G. K. CHESTERTON

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
LORD ACTON

CLASSICAL EDUCATION

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.
RUSSELL GREEN

CLASSICS

Have I uttered the fundamental blasphemy, that once said sets the spirit free? The literature of the past is a bore—when one has said that frankly to oneself, then one can proceed to qualify and make exceptions.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
MARK TWAIN

CLEANLINESS

Cleanliness is almost as bad as godliness.
SAMUEL BUTLER

CLERGY

Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
H. L. MENCKEN

Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.
H. L. MENCKEN

The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.
VOLTAIRE

I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
CARL SANDBURG

A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.
VOLTAIRE

CLUB

I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
GROUCHO MARX

COCKTAILS

Cocktails have all the disagreeability without the utility of a disinfectant.
SHANE LESLIE

A cocktail is to a glass of wine as rape is to love.
PAUL CLAUDEL

COCKTAIL PARTIES

The cocktail party has the form of friendship without the warmth and devotion. It is the device for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse, or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.
BROOKS ATKINSON

A hundred standing people smiling and talking to one another, nodding like gooney birds.
WILLIAM COLE

COEDS

If all these sweet young things were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised.
DOROTHY PARKER

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

College football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students—there would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks.
H. L. MENCKEN

COMMITTEES

Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers.
EDWARD SHEPHERD MEAD

COMMON PEOPLE

God must hate the common people, because he made them so common.
PHILIP WYLIE

COMMUNICATION

Let us make a special effort to learn to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
MISS MANNERS (JUDITH MARTIN)\

COMMUNISM

Communism is like one big phone company.
LENNY BRUCE

I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
H. L. MENCKEN

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.
CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophesies.
H. L. MENCKEN

COMPANIONSHIP

I hold that companionship is a matter of mutual weaknesses. We like that man or woman best who has the same faults we have.
GEORGE Jean Nathan

COMPUTERS

The computer is a moron.
PETER DRUCKER

CONFERENCE

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
FRED ALLEN

CONFESSION

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff—it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
PETER DE VRIES

Nothing spoils a confession like repentence.
ANATOLE FRANCE

CONGRESS

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress.
MARK TWAIN

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what’s going to happen to us with both a Senate and a House?
WILL ROGERS

CONGRESSMEN

A flea can be taught everything a congressman can.
MARK TWAIN

A palm-pounding pack of preening pols.
WILLIAM SAFIRE

Eighty percent were hypocrites, eighty percent liars, eighty percent serious sinners . . . except on Sundays. There is always boozing and floozying. . . . I don’t have enough time to tell you everybody’s name.
WILLIAM “FISHBATI” MILLER

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
MARK TWAIN

CONSCIENCE

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H. L. MENCKEN

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.
OSCAR WILDE

The inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
H. L. MENCKEN

CONSCIOUSNESS

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.
JAMES THURBER

CONSERVATIVES

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
AMBROSE BIERCE

They define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
GEORGE WILL

CONSISTENCY

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
OSCAR WILDE

The only completely consistent people are the dead.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Consistency is a paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
BERNARD BERENSON

CONSTITUTION

Our Constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. senators.
WILL ROGERS

CONTENTED PEOPLE

I have not a word to say against contented people, so long as they keep quiet. But do not, for goodness sake, let them go strutting about, as they are so fond of doing, crying out that they are the true models for the whole species.
JEROME K. JEROME

CONTENTMENT

Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence.
RICHARD HALIBURTON

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

CONVERSATION

Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.
JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER

A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, “In silence.”
PLUTARCH

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.
FRED ALLEN

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

CONVICTIONS

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

COOKBOOKS

Cookbooks . . . bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother’s.
ANDREI CODRESCU

COOKS

It is no wonder that diseases are innumerable: count the cooks.
SENECA

COPY EDITORS

It is wonderful that our society can find a place for the criminally literal-mined.
ALICE KAHN

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools—and use it on the teachers.
P. J. O’ROURKE

CORPORATION

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
AMBROSE BIERCE

COSMETIC SURGERY

What does it profit a seventy-eight-year-old woman to sit around the pool in a bikini if she cannot feed herself?
ERMA BOMBECK

Anyone who gives a surgeon six thousand dollars for “breast augmentation” should give some thought to investing a little more on brain augmentation.
MIKE ROYKO

I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
FLORENCE KING

THE COUNTRY

The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.
ÉDOUARD MANET

It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much to do and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.
OSCAR WILDE

They can have the good old smell of the earth. Nine times out of ten it isn’t the good old smell of the earth that they smell so much as the good old smell of chicken feathers, stagnant pools of water, outhouse perfumes, cooking odors from badly designed kitchens and damp wall plaster.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

O Lord! I don’t know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.
SYDNEY SMITH

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
OSCAR WILDE

COUPONS

How about all those manufacturers’ coupons featuring Exciting Offers wherein it turns out, when you read the fine print, that you have to send in the coupon plus proof of purchase plus your complete dental records by registered mail to Greenland and allow at least eighteen months for them to send you another coupon that will entitle you to 29 cents off your next purchase of a product you don’t really want?
DAVE BARRY

COURAGE

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
HORACE SMITH

CRICKET

What is both surprising and delightful is that [baseball] spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game. I do not see why this feature should not be introduced into cricket. There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife’s fidelity and his mother’s respectability.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

CRIME

My husband gave me a necklace. It’s fake. I requested fake. Maybe I’m paranoid, but in this day and age, I don’t want something around my neck that’s worth more than my head.
RITA RUDNER

CRIMINALS

Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
HOWARD SCOTT

It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, launder became a dirty word.
WILLIAM ZINSSER

CRITICS AND CRITICISM

Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.
BRENDAN BEHAN

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
CHANNING POLLOCK

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
P. G. WODEHOUSE

Drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips.
SIR THOMAS BEECHAM

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
JOHN UPDIKE

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher’s circus.
AUSTIN O’MALLEY

A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

For critics I care the five hundred thousandth part of the tythe of a half-farthing.
CHARLES LAMB

Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
JOHN OSBORNE

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

There be some men are born only to suck out the poison of books.
BEN JONSON

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
H. L. MENCKEN

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense.
SAMUEL JOHNSON

Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share of the artist’s fame.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out of yourself; in reviewing you take it out of other people.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck.
ELI WALLACH

CRUISE SHIPS

If you thought you didn’t like people on land . . . .
CAROL LEIFER

CULT

A cult is a religion with no political power.
TOM WOLFE

CULTURE

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.
SIMONE WEIL

CURE

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK

CYNICISM

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. MENCKEN

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple’s substitute for intelligence. It is the dishonest businessman’s substitute for conscience. It is the communicator’s substitute, whether he is advertising man or editor or writer, for self-respect.
RUSSELL LYNES

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
SIDNEY HARRIS

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
OSCAR WILDE

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
LILLIAN HELLMAN

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW