GAMBLING
The gambling known as business looks with austere
disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Gambling promises the poor what property performs for
the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it
fundamentally.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
GANDHI
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi,
a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type
well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the
viceregal palace . . . to parley on equal terms with the
representatives of the king-emperor.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
GAY
“Gay” used to be one of the most agreeable words in
the language. Its appropriation by a notably morose group is an act
of piracy.
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.
GENIUS
When a true genius appears in the world you may know
him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against
him.
JONATHAN SWIFT
GENTILITY
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors
after the money is gone.
JOHN CIARDI
GENTLEMAN
I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
GERMANY AND THE GERMANS
Germany, the diseased world’s bathhouse.
MARK TWAIN
Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously
clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed
in great variety among Germans.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
German: a good fellow maybe; but it is better to hang
him.
RUSSIAN PROVERB
GERMAN REUNIFICATION
I view this in much the same way I view a possible
Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis reconciliation: I never really enjoyed
their work, and I’m not sure I need to see any of their new
stuff.
DENNIS MILLER
GIRLS
There are girls who manage to sell themselves, whom
no one would take as gifts.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
GLAMOUR
Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is
stand still and look stupid.
HEDY LAMARR
GOD
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the
helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms,
but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos;
He will set them above their betters.
H. L. MENCKEN
If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to
invent Him.
VOLTAIRE
If God created us in his own image we have more than
reciprocated.
VOLTAIRE
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which
he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS fils
The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t
exist.
STENDHAL
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and
time is running out.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Which is it: is man one of God’s blunders, or is God
one of man’s blunders?
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
God, that dumping ground of our dreams.
JEAN ROSTAND
If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to
you, you have schizophrenia.
THOMAS SZASZ
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all
the time.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
For me, the single word “God” suggests everything
that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul and grotesque.
ANDRÉ BRETON
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person
to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help
him.
H. L. MENCKEN
God is the Celebrity-Author of the World’s
Best-Seller. We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to
contain our own emptiness.
DANIEL BOORSTIN
God is love, but get it in writing.
GYPSY ROSE LEE
Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to
laugh.
H. L. MENCKEN
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once
the world becomes explicable.
H. L. MENCKEN
I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The impotence of God is infinite.
ANATOLE FRANCE
Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself
mad.
R. D. LAING
God will forgive me; that’s his business.
HEINRICH HEINE
He seems to have an inordinate fondness for
beetles.
J. B. S. HALDANE
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably
created the universe is still running it? It is certainly
conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to
lesser gods to operate.
H. L. MENCKEN
I respect the idea of God too much to hold it
responsible for a world as absurd as this one is.
GEORGES DUHAMEL
You must believe in God in spite of what the clergy
say.
BENJAMIN JOWETT
I read the book of Job last night—I don’t think God
comes well out of it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
GODS
Whom the mad would destroy, first they make
Gods.
BERNARD LEVIN
All Gods were immortal.
STANISLAW J. LEC
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god
superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a
spoiled child.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The worshiper is the father of the gods.
H. L. MENCKEN
GOLDEN RULE
The golden rule is that there are no golden
rules.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
GOLF
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
MARK TWAIN
Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within
the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be
ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
H. L. MENCKEN
A game in which you claim the privileges of age, and
retain the playthings of childhood.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing
marbles.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Nobody knows exactly how golf got started. Probably
what happened was, thousands of years ago, a couple of primitive
guys were standing around, holding some odd-shaped sticks, and they
noticed a golf ball lying on the grass, and they said, “Hey! Let’s
see if we can hit this into a hole!” And then they said, “Nah,
let’s just tell long, boring anecdotes about it instead.”
DAVE BARRY
GOOD FELLOWSHIP
What men call good fellowship is commonly but the
virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each
other warm.
THOREAU
GOOD LISTENER
A good listener is usually thinking about some-thing
else.
KIN HUBBARD
GOODNESS
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of
goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain
amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and
a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
OSCAR WILDE
The good die young—because they see it’s no use
living if you’ve got to be good.
JOHN BARRYMORE
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not
too good and not quite all the time.
GEORGE ORWELL
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it
is better to be good than to be ugly.
OSCAR WILDE
GOOD BREEDING
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we
think of ourselves and how little we think of the other
person.
MARK TWAIN
GOOD DEEDS
No good deed goes unpunished.
CLARE BOOTHE LUCE
GOOD AND EVIL
It is almost impossible systematically to constitute
a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us
with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected.
Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and
evil.
ANATOLE FRANCE
GOOD EXAMPLE
Few things are harder to put up with than the
annoyance of a good example.
MARK TWAIN
GOOD LOOKS
She got her good looks from her father. He’s a
plastic surgeon.
GROUCHO MARX
GOSSIP
The only thing worse than being talked about is not
being talked about.
OSCAR WILDE
If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit
right here by me.
ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH
GOVERNMENT
A government is the only known vessel that leaks from
the top.
JAMES RESTON
Every government is run by liars and nothing they say
should be believed.
I. F. STONE
Society is produced by our wants and government by
our wickedness.
THOMAS PAINE
In general, the art of government consists in taking
as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to
the other.
VOLTAIRE
Government is an association of men who do violence
to the rest of us.
LEO TOLSTOY
Government is too big and important to be left to the
politicians.
CHESTER BOWLES
Government expands to absorb revenue—and then
some.
TOM WICKER
In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things
swim at the top.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Creative semantics is the key to contemporary
government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the
public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
GEORGE WILL
There never has been a good government.
EMMA GOLDMAN
GRAFFITI
Any academic or literary hustler caught writing that
graffiti is a fascinating expression of artistic and cultural
creativity [should] be sprayed magenta and left without grants for
a year, sentences to be served consecutively.
CALVIN TRILLIN
GRATITUDE
I feel a very unusual sensation—if it is not
indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further
favors.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
GRIEF
Grief is a species of idleness.
SAMUEL JOHNSON