ECONOMISTS
An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel
and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and
tortures the living.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms
of the incomprehensible.
ALFRED A. KNOPE
In all recorded history there has not been one
economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come
from.
PETER F. DRUCKER
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why
the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
LAURENCE J. PETER
If all economists were laid end to end, they would
not reach a conclusion.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
EDITORS
Editor: A person employed on a newspaper whose
business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see
that the chaff is printed.
ELBERT HUBBARD
An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d
have someone to look up to.
GENE FOWLER
EDUCATION
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of
echoes.
NORMAN DOUGLAS
Education . . . has produced a vast population able
to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. TREVELYAN
It has been said that we have not had the three R’s
in America, we had the six R’s: remedial readin’, remedial ‘ritin’
and remedial ‘rithmetic.
ROBERT M. HUTCHINS
I went to school so long ago, Ethics was a
required course.
H. MYLES JACOB
Education: the inclucation of the incomprehensible
into the indifferent by the incompetent.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise
and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre
but they are more deadly in the long run.
MARK TWAIN
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made
stupid by education.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of
echoes.
NORMAN DOUGLAS
We are shut up in schools and college recitation
rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a
bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Society produces rogues, and education makes one
rogue cleverer than another.
OSCAR WILDE
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher
grade of prejudices.
LAURENCE J. PETER
I prefer the company of peasants because they have
not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
How is it that little children are so intelligent and
men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS fils
You can’t expect a boy to be depraved until he has
been to a good school.
SAKI
“Whom are you?” said he, for he had been to night
school.
GEORGE ADE
ENEMIES
Enemies to me are the sauce piquante to my
dish of life.
ELSA MAXWELL
The only thing that will be remembered about my
enemies after they’re dead is the nasty things I’ve said about
them.
CAMILLE PAGLIA
One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they
are hanged.
HEINRICH HEINE
ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH
England is the most class-ridden country under the
sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the
old and silly.
GEORGE ORWELL
There is such a thing as too much couth.
S. J. PERELMAN
England has forty-two religions and only two
sauces.
VOLTAIRE
The English never smash in a face. They merely
refrain from asking it to dinner.
MARGARET HALSEY
The English instinctively admire any man who has no
talent and is modest about it.
JAMES AGATE
The English think incompetence is the same thing as
sincerity.
QUENTIN CRISP
Curse the blasted jelly-boned swines, the slimy
belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the
flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied
pulseless lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg
in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they
can breed . . . Why, why, why, was I born an Englishman!
D. H. LAWRENCE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
To learn English, you must begin by thrusting the jaw
forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immobilizing
the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant
little mews of which their language consists.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
ENJOYMENT
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot
of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
RUSSELL BAKER
EPCOT CENTER
With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has
accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world.
They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular
life.
P. J. O’ROURKE
EQUALITY
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on
earth can ever turn it into a fact.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
That all men are created equal is a proposition to
which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his
assent.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair
chance at being incompetent.
LAURENCE J. PETER
ETHICS
Grub first, then ethics.
BERTOLT BRECHT
EVERYTHING
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the
difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
INGMAR BERGMAN
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
THEODORE STURGEON
EXERCISE
The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to
walk.
OSCAR WILDE
The need of exercise is a modern superstition,
invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
Athletics don’t make anybody either long-lived or useful.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and
resting.
MARK TWAIN
I get my exercise acting as a pallbearer to my
friends who exercise.
CHAUNCEY DEPEW
The only exercise I get is when I take the studs out
of one shirt and put them in another.
RING LARDNER
When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the
feeling goes away.
ROBERT M. HUTCHINS
The word aerobics comes from two Greek words:
aero, meaning “ability to,” and bics, meaning “withstand
tremendous boredom.”
DAVE BARRY
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need
it; if you are sick, you shouldn’t take it.
HENRY FORD
I believe every human has a finite number of
heart-beats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around
doing exercises.
NEIL ARMSTRONG
EXISTENCE
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the
glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that
other people think about us.
QUENTIN CRISP
EXISTENTIALISM
Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath
for you.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
EXPECTATIONS
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never
be disappointed.
JONATHAN SWIFT
EXPERIENCE
Experience is the name everyone gives to their
mistakes.
OSCAR WILDE
Experience, n. The wisdom that enables us to
recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have
already embraced.
AMBROSE BIERCE
We learn from experience that men never learn
anything from experience.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
EXPERTS
An expert is a person who avoids small error as he
sweeps on to the grand fallacy.
BENJAMIN STOLBERG
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if
you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe
the military, nothing is safe.
LORD SALISBURY
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible
voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.
PETER USTINOV