NARCISSIST
A narcissist is someone better-looking than you
are.
GORE VIDAL
NASA
Some agencies have a public affairs office. NASA is a
public affairs office that has an agency.
JOHN PIKE
NATION
A nation is a society united by delusions about its
ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.
W. R. INGE
NATIONALISM
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are
right.
SCHOPENHAUER
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and
requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it
calls imbecility.
SANTAYANA
NATURE
Nature is a hanging judge.
ANONYMOUS
Now, nature, as I am only too well aware, has her
enthusiasts, but on the whole, I am not to be counted among them.
To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to
the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Nature: that lovely lady to whom we owe polio,
leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer.
STANLEY N. COHEN
NECESSITY
“Necessity is the mother of invention” is a silly
proverb. “Necessity is the mother of futile dodges” is much nearer
the truth.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
NEIGHBORS
I was much distressed by next-door people who had
twin babies and played the violin; but one of the twins died, and
the other has eaten the fiddle—so all is peace.
EDWARD LEAR
NETWORK EXECUTIVES
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled
to death by ducks.
ERIC SEVAREID
NEWSPAPER
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by
reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the
second hand of a clock.
BEN HECHT
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be
absolutely relied upon.
OSCAR WILDE
A newspaper consists of just the same number of
words, whether there be any news in it or not.
HENRY FIELDING
The average newspaper, especially of the better sort,
has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a
rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information
of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid
valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
H.L. MENCKEN
NEW YEAR’S EVE
The paper behaviors all through the holiday season is
to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when
you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.
P. J. O’ROURKE
NEW YORK
New York: Where everyone mutinies but no one
deserts.
HARRY HERSHFIELD
Prison towers and modern posters for soap and
whiskey.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
New York is the only city in the world where you can
get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
RUSSELL BAKER
The city of right angles and tough, damaged
people.
PETE HAMILL
If a day goes by and I haven’t been slain, I’m
happy.
CAROL LEIFER
It is one of the prime provincialities of New York
that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies
they’ve never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they
could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging
pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.
LOUIS KRONENBERGER
New York Taxi Rules:
1. Driver speaks no English.
2. Driver just got here two days ago from someplace like
Senegal.
3. Driver hates you.
DAVE BARRY
A marriage, to be happy, needs an exterior threat.
New York provides that threat.
GARRISON KEILLOR
New York: the only city where people make radio
requests like “This is for Tina—I’m sorry I stabbed you.”
CAROL LEIFER
New York has more commissioners than Des Moines,
Iowa, has residents, including the Commissioner for Making Sure the
Sidewalks Are Always Blocked by Steaming Fetid Mounds of Garbage
the Size of Appalachian Foothills, and, of course, the Commissioner
for Bicycle Messengers Bearing Down on You at Warp Speed with
Mohawk Haircuts and Pupils Smaller Than Purely Theoretical
Particles.
DAVE BARRY
When we moved to New York we had to get rid of the
children. Landlords didn’t like them and, in any case, rents were
so high. Who could afford an apartment big enough to contain
children?
RUSSELL BAKER
This muck heaves and palpitates. It is
multidirectional and has a mayor.
DONALD BARTHELME
NOBEL PRIZE
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented
dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the
Nobel Prize.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Nobel Prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer
who has already reached the shore in safety.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
NOISE
The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed
stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
NONCONFORMITY
Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not
conform with nonconformity.
ERIC HOFFER
NOVEMBER
November, n. The eleventh twelfth of a
weariness.
AMBROSE BIERCE
NUCLEAR WAR
There will be no nuclear war. There’s too much real
estate involved.
FRANK ZAPPA