LANGUAGE
I personally think we developed language because of
our deep need to complain.
LILY TOMLIN
LAUGHTER
Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the
mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and
dissolution in all the powers of the soul.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising
from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by
comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own
formerly.
THOMAS HOBBES
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs;
he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.
BERTOLT BRECHT
LAW
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich
as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets,
and to steal bread.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months
in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear
the evidence.
H. L. MENCKEN
Law is a bottomless pit; it is a cormorant, a harpy
that devours everything.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Every law is an infraction of liberty.
JEREMY BENTHAM
All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural
ferocity of the species.
JOHN W. GARDNER
I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the
college, won the case, and got my tuition back.
FRED ALLEN
LAWSUIT
Lawsuit, n. A machine which you go into as a
pig and come out of as a sausage.
AMBROSE BIERCE
I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a
lawsuit, and once when I won one.
VOLTAIRE
LAWYERS
Lawyer, n. One skilled in the circumvention of
the law.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking
away the temptation.
H. L. MENCKEN
Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the
law is not punished.
JEREMY BENTHAM
If law school is so hard to get through . . . how
come there are so many lawyers?
CALVIN TRILLIN
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
CHARLES LAMB
Lawyers are . . . operators of the toll bridge which
anyone in search of justice must pass.
JANE BRYANT QUINN
An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months
or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
EVELLE J. YOUNGER
Lawyers and tarts are the two oldest professions in
the world. And we always aim to please.
HORACE RUMPOLE (JOHN MORTIMER)
Lawyers as a group are no more dedicated to justice
or public service than a private public utility is dedicated to
giving light.
DAVID MELINKOFF
What’s black and white and brown and looks good on a
lawyer? A Doberman.
MORDECAI RICHLER
LAZINESS
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting
before you get tired.
JULES RENARD
LEGOS
Everyone who ever walked barefoot into his child’s
room late at night hates Legos. I think Mr. Lego should be strung
up from a scaffold made of his horrid little pockmarked
arch-puncturing plastic cubes.
TONY KORNHEISER
LEISURE
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure
to bother about whether you are happy or not.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of
correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked
it.
ALVIN TOFFLER
LIAR
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight,
to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
OSCAR WILDE
It is always the best policy to tell the truth,
unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
JEROME K. JEROME
LIBERALS
A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight
begins.
HEYWOOD BROUN
The liberals can understand everything but people who
don’t understand them.
LENNY BRUCE
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
GEORGE ORWELL
A liberal is a person whose interests aren’t at stake
at the moment.
WILLIS PLAYER
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own
side in a quarrel.
ROBERT FROST
Liberals are very broadminded: they are always
willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same
side.
ANONYMOUS
Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.
DICK GREGORY
LIBERTY
Liberty means responsibility; that is why most men
dread it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does
in speeches.
WILL ROGERS
Liberty is the right to do whatever the law
permits.
CHARLES LOUIS MONTESQUIEU
LIBRARIANS
On librarians I do speak with prejudice. The
profession in general has always seemed to me like the
legitimization and financing of an impulse to collect old
socks.
JOHN CHEEVER
LIFE
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across
open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
QUENTIN CRISP
When you don’t have any money, the problem is food.
When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both, it’s health. If
everything is simply jake, then you’re frightened of death.
J. P. DONLEAVY
For most men life is a search for the proper manila
envelope in which to get themselves filed.
CLIFTON FADIMAN
Life is a long lesson in humility.
JAMES M. BARRIE
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad
and Good but between Bad and Worse.
JOSEPH BRODSKY
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries
disappear and life stands explained.
MARK TWAIN
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea
that life is serious.
BRENDAN GILL
Life is a disease; and the only difference between
one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he
lives.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
KARL KRAUS
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any
more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Life is a hospital in which every patient is
possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to
suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if
he were by the window.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good
physique and not too much imagination.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
Life is one long process of getting tired.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a
predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and
transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very
well together.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
HENRY JAMES
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
PETER DE VRIES
Human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments
lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient
experience.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of
life.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp
horns of a dilemma.
H. L. MENCKEN
Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering
cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding
back in the direction he came.
PETER DE VRIES
Life is a dead-end street.
H. L. MENCKEN
Life is gamble at terrible odds; if it was a bet you
wouldn’t take it.
TOM STOPPARD
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer
and then you find there is nothing in it.
JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER
In the great game of human life one begins by being a
dupe and ends by being a rogue.
VOLTAIRE
Life is an unbroken succession of false
situations.
THORNTON WILDER
Life is divided into the horrible and the
miserable.
WOODY ALLEN
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents
and the second half by our children.
CLARENCE DARROW
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk
seriously about.
OSCAR WILDE
The meaning of life is that it stops.
FRANZ KAFKA
Life is judged with all the blindness of life
itself.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Life is something to do when you can’t get to
sleep.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal
rather than the victim.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and
nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are
bastards.
THEODORE DREISER
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer
reading.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
LIMOUSINES
Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class
or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines
are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.
ERMA BOMBECK
LITERARY PARTY
A traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry
across the Styx.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
LITERATURE
Literature: proclaiming in front of everyone what one
is careful to conceal from one’s immediate circle.
JEAN ROSTAND
Never judge a book by its movie.
J. W. EAGAN
LITIGATION
For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the
place of sex.
GORE VIDAL
LOATHINGS
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression,
crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
LOGIC
Logic is like the sword: those who appeal to it shall
perish by it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
LONDON
London, that great cesspool into which all the
loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A place you go to get bronchitis.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
London, like a bowl of viscid human fluid, boils
sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily and
uglily into the home counties.
H. G. WELLS
A foggy, dead-alive city like a dying ant-heap.
London was created for rich young men to shop in, dine in, ride in,
get married in, go to theatres in, and die in as respected
householders. It is a city for the unmarried upper class, not for
the poor.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Crowds without company, and dissipation without
pleasure.
EDWARD GIBBON
The monstrous tuberosity of civilized life, the
capital of England.
THOMAS CARLYLE
In London they don’t like you if you’re still
alive.
HARVEY FIERSTEIN
LOS ANGELES
It is a geometropolitan predicament rather than a
city. You can no more administer it than you could administer the
solar system.
JONATHAN MILLER
L.A. you pass through and get a hamburger.
JOHN LENNON
Double Dubuque.
H. ALLEN SMITH
The Queen of the Angles.
IAN SHOALES
Thought is barred in this city of Dreadful Joy, and
conversation is unknown.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I mean, who would want to live in a place where the
only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red
light.
WOODY ALLEN
Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to
San Francisco live there?
HERB CAEN
A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than
a paper cup.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
There is always something so delightfully real about
what is phony here. And something so phony about what is real. A
sort of disreputable senility.
NOEL COWARD
Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and
usually banal in concept . . . The plastic asshole of the
world.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The town is like an advertisement for itself; none of
its charms are left to the visitor’s magination.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
L.A.: where there’s never weather, and walking is a
crime. L.A.: where the streetlights and palm trees go on forever,
where darkness never comes, like a deal that never goes down, a
meeting that’s never taken. The city of angels: where every
cockroach has a screenplay and even the winos wear roller skates.
It’s that kind of town.
IAN SHOALES
LOTTERY
I figure you have the same chance of winning the
lottery whether you play or not.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
LOVE
Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it
the more likely one is to contract it.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
LYNDA BARRY
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme
conceptual delusions; the most common of these being that other
people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do
yourselves.
JULIAN BARNES
Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
DOROTHY PARKER
Love is the delightful interval between meeting a
beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
JOHN BARRYMORE
Love is the most subtle form of self-interest.
HOLBROOK JACKSON
Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom
door and smells of Lysol.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Love is the state in which man sees things most
decidedly as they are not.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
The delusion that one woman differs from
another.
H. L. MENCKEN
People who are not in love fail to understand how an
intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This
is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera
because of a creature so insignificant as the common
bacillus.
MARCEL PROUST
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man
from catching the complaint a second time.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
In the Forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a
jock. In the Fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the
Sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the Seventies, to
get a girl you’ve got to be a girl.
MORT SAHL
Love is so much better when you are not
married.
MARIA CALLAS
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light
so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
MAURICE CHEVALIER
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of
marrying the whole girl.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same
reason that novels are more amusing than history.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
One of you is lying.
DOROTHY PARKER
LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in
particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the
favorite objects of all our appetites.
HENRY FIELDING
Once love is purged of vanity, it resembles a feeble
convalescent, hardly able to drag itself about.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love,
since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
MARCEL PROUST
The duration of passion is proportionate with the
original resistance of the woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know
them too well.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the
temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
E. M. CIORAN
Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking
egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental
postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and
masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of
courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the
compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
GERMAINE GREER
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve
the continuation of the species.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
To be in love is merely to be in a state of
perceptual anesthesia.
H. L. MENCKEN
Love, in present day society, is just the exchange of
two momentary desires and the contact of two skins.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Love is two minutes fifty-two seconds of squishing
noises. It shows your mind isn’t clicking right.
JOHNNY ROTTEN
A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Love is the desire to prostitute oneself.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The credulity of love is the most fundamental source
of authority.
SIGMUND FREUD
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference
between one person and everybody else.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Love is the victim’s response to the rapist.
TI-GRACE ATKINSON
Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal.
HART CRANE
Love is what happens to a man and a woman who don’t
know each other.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
I can understand companionship. I can understand
bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love
affair.
GORE VIDAL
Love as a relation between men and women was ruined
by the desire to make sure of the legitimacy of children.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime
that requires an accomplice.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
When we want to read of the deeds that are done for
love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The only true love is love at first sight; second
sight dispels it.
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Love is the triumph of imagination over
intelligence.
H. L. MENCKEN
Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement
of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual
dependence of the old.
JOHN CIARDI
Boy Meets Girl, So What?
BERTOLT BRECHT
LOVE LETTERS
It is well to write love letters. There are certain
things for which it is not easy to ask your mistress face to face,
like money, for instance.
HENRI DE REGNIER
LOVERS
The reason that lovers never weary each other is
because they are always talking about themselves.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
LUCK
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the
success of those you dislike?
JEAN COCTEAU
LYING
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the
ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.
CLARE BOOTHE LUCE
Carlyle said, “A lie cannot live”; it shows he did
not know how to tell them.
MARK TWAIN