QUOTES ON “P”

PAINTING

Painting, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
AMBROSE BIERCE

PALEY, WILLIAM

He looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.
TRUMAN CAPOTE

PANAMA

It’s not like they make or grow anything. The whole country is based on international banking and a canal the United States can take back any time it wants with one troop of Boy Scouts.
P. J. O’ROURKE

PARANOIA

A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what’s going on.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Even paranoids have real enemies.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ

PARENTHOOD

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.
PETER DE VRIES

There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
G. K. CHESTERTON

Some people seem compelled by unkind fate to parental servitude for life. There is no form of penal servitude worse than this.
SAMUEL BUTLER

The Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die.
PHILIP ROTH

Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.
OGDEN NASH

They fuck you up, your mum and dad . . . .
PHILIP LARKIN

PÂTÉ

It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse, flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunks of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity.
KINGSLEY AMIS

PATIENCE

Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
AMBROSE BIERCE

You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience.
STANISLAW J. LEC

PATRIOTISM

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
SAMUEL JOHNSON

In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
H. L. MENCKEN

“My country right or wrong” is like saying, “My mother drunk or sober.”
G. K. CHESTERTON

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
OSCAR WILDE

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Love makes fools, marriage cuckolds, and patriotism malevolent imbeciles.
PAUL LEAUTAUD

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
EDWARD ABBEY

PEACE

Peace, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
AMBROSE BIERCE

PEOPLE

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
OSCAR WILDE

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.
H. ALLEN SMITH

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.
KARL KRAUS

People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
ANATOLE FRANCE

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price-list. It makes my blood boil.
D. H. LAWRENCE

People could make the world a nice place to live ... if there weren’t so goddamn many of them.
CLAYTON HEAFNER

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
SINCLAIR LEWIS

People (a group that in my opinion has always attracted an undue amount of attention) have often been likened to snowflakes. This analogy is meant to suggest that each is unique—no two alike. This is quite patently not the case. People . . . are quite simply a dime a dozen. And, I hasten to add, their only similarity to snowflakes resides in their invariable and lamentable tendency to turn, in a few warm days, to slush.
FRAN LEBOWITZ

There are more fools in the world than there are people.
HEINRICH HEINE

THE PEOPLE

The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.
GEORGE FRIEDRICH WILHELM HEGEL

Once the people begin to reason, all is lost.
VOLTAIRE

The people are to be taken in very small doses.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
JAMES THURBER

PERSONAL QUESTIONS

Once upon a time a chap in Virginia, I believe it was, pressed me publicly on the recurrence of adulterous triangles in my earlier novels. Had I myself been a vertex in such a triangle? “Only once,” I told him: “with your mother.”
JOHN BARTH

PESSIMISM

A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.
ELBERT HUBBARD

Pessimist: one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
OSCAR WILDE

A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
DON MARQUIS

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.
JEAN ROSTAND

PH.D

Where there are two Ph.Ds in a developing country, one is head of state and the other is in exile.
EDWIN HERBERT SAMUEL

PHILADELPHIA

Philadelphia: all the filth and corruption of a big city; all the pettiness and insularity of a small town.
HOWARD OGDEN

Philadelphia, a metropolis sometimes known as the City of Brotherly Love, but more accurately as the City of Bleak November Afternoons.
S. J. PERELMAN

They have Easter egg hunts in Philadelphia, and if the kids don’t find the eggs, they get booed.
BOB UECKER

PHILANTHROPY

Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.
OSCAR WILDE

Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactors.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Giving away a fortune is taking Christianity too far.
CHARLOTTE BINGHAM

PHILOSPHERS

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
AMBROSE BIERCE

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
WILLIAM JAMES

If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
ALBERT CAMUS

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
OSCAR WILDE

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

I think I think; therefore, I think I am.
AMBROSE BIERCE

PHONOGRAPH

Phonograph, n. an irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.
AMBROSE BIERCE

PHOTOGRAPHER

The photographer is like the cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

PLASTIC SURGERY

One popular new plastic surgery technique is called lipgrafting, or “fat recycling,’ wherein fat cells are removed from one part of your body that is too large, such as your buttocks, and injected into your lips; people will then be literally kissing your ass.
DAVE BARRY

PLATITUDE

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. MENCKEN

PLEASANTRIES

Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he’s overcharging you.
KIN HUBBARD

PLEASURE

Pleasure, n. The least hateful form of dejection.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
OSCAR WILDE

I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before.
KIN HUBBARD

POETS

In the case of many poets, the most important thing for them to do . . . is to write as little as possible.
T. S. ELIOT

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. MENCKEN

Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY

POETRY

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
JEAN COCTEAU

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
OSCAR WILDE

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.
RANDALL JARRELL

Poetry is a religion without hope.
JEAN COCTEAU

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE

Blank verse, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters— the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G. K. CHESTERTON

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
PHILIP LARKIN

POLITENESS

Politeness . . . is fictitious benevolence.
SAMUEL JOHNSON

Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.
AMBROSE BIERCE

That roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

POLITICIANS

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H. L. MENCKEN

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
HENRY MILLER

Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of clichés the first prize.
SAUL BELLOW

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
CHARLES DE GAULLE

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.
KARL KRAUS

Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
DAVID BRODER

A politician is a person with whose politics you don’t agree; if you agree with him he is a statesman.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE

I once said cynically of a politician, “He’ll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.”
OSCAR LEVANT

Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television?
ART BUCHWALD

The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.
RUSSELL BAKER

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
H. L. MENCKEN

If you want to find a politician free of any influence, you can find Adolf Hitler, who made up his own mind.
EUGENE MCCARTHY

A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of the language.
MARYA MANNES

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
H. L. MENCKEN

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.
HARRY S. TRUMAN

The volume of political comment substantially exceeds the available truth, so columnists run out of truth, and then must resort to imagination. Washington politicians, after talking things over with each other, relay misinformation to Washington journalists, who, after intramural discussion, print it where it is thoughtfully read by the same politicians, who generally believe it. It is the only successful closed system for the recycling of garbage that has ever been devised.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

Nine politicians out of ten are knaves who maintain themselves by preying on the idiotic vanities and pathetic hopes of half-wits.
H. L. MENCKEN

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept; for I had longed to see him hanged.
HILAIRE BELLOC

Unfortunately, politicians have the Paul Masson theory of government—“We will deal with no problem before its time.”
MERVIN FIELD

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
HENRY KISSINGER

Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
P. J. O’ROURKE

POLITICS

Politics, n. strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Being in politics is like being a football coach; you have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
EUGENE MCCARTHY

The standard of intellect in politics is so low that men of moderate mental capacity have to stoop in order to reach it.
HILLAIRE BELLOC

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
JAMES RESTON

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

It makes no difference who you vote for—the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
GORE VIDAL

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
EUGENE MCCARTHY

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
ERNEST BENN

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
LESTER B. PEARSON

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.
MARK B. COHEN

I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.
HAROLD MACMILLAN

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
WILL ROGERS

Politics makes estranged bedfellows.
GOODMAN ACE

THE POOR

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
LIONEL TRILLING

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
JEAN PAUL SARTRE

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.
ANATOLE FRANCE

PORNOGRAPY

I don’t think pornography is very harmful, but it is terribly, terribly boring.
NOEL COWARD

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
ERICA JONG

POSTERITY

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful—there are far too many children.
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
HEYWOOD BROUN

Posterity is just around the corner.
GEORGE S. KAUFMAN

POWER

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
HARRY SHEARER

PRAYER

Pray, n. To ask the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
AMBROSE BIERCE

I squirm when I see athletes praying before a game. Don’t they realize that if God took sports seriously He never would have created George Steinbrenner?
MARK RUSSELL

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me. . .. Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
ROBERT FROST

PREGNANCY

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
NORA EPHRON

PREJUDICE

I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
W. C. FIELDS

I don’t like principles. I prefer prejudices.
OSCAR WILDE

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES

PRESIDENCY

The best reason I can think of for not running for president of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.
ADLAI STEVENSON

If I were the president, I’d bring some life to the White House. The theme of my administration would be summarized by the catchy and inspirational phrase: “Hey, the Government Is Beyond Human Control, So Let’s at Least Have Some Fun with It.”
DAVE BARRY

We need a president who’s fluent in at least one language.
BUCK HENRY

If presidents don’t do it to their wives, they do it to the country.
MEL BROOKS

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, by disqualified from ever doing so.
GORE VIDAL

These presidential ninnies should stick to throwing out baseballs and leave the important matters to serious people.
GORE VIDAL

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.
CLARENCE DARROW

PRINCIPLES

You can’t learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
MARK TWAIN

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
ALFRED ADLER

I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
OSCAR WILDE

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it mean he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it into practice.
BISMARCK

PRIVACY

Privacy—you can’t find it anywhere, not even if you want to hang yourself.
MENANDER

PRIZES

The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Saul Bellow for fiction only after Bellow had won the Nobel Prize, which must have seemed like being given a cup of warmed-over instant coffee twenty minutes after having drunk the world’s most expensive cognac.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN

PROCRASTINATION

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
MARK TWAIN

PROCREATION

Any man who, having a child or children he can’t support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.
H. L. MENCKEN

PRODUCER

“Nervous producer” is a redundancy. So is “complaining producer.”
MORLEY SAFER

PROFANITY

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
MARK TWAIN

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.
MARK TWAIN

PROGRESS

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
HAVELOCK ELLIS

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
SAMUEL BUTLER

Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature and makes purses out of human skin.
KARL KRAUS

Progress is the mother of problems.
G. K. CHESTERTON

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
JAMES THURBER

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
RUSSELL BAKER

PROMISCUITY

A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are.
VICTOR LOWNES

PROSPERITY

Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.
GOETHE

PROTESTANTISM

Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. MENCKEN

PSYCHIATRY

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The relation between psychiatrists and other kinds of lunatic is more or less the relation of a convex folly to a concave one.
KARL KRAUS

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents’ shortcomings.
LAURENCE J. PETER

If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Psychotherapy: the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned ijjit.
H. L. MENCKEN

Psychoanalysis makes quite simple people feel they’re complex.
S. N. BEHRMAN

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
G. K. CHESTERTON

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
GERMAINE GREER

I just want to make one brief statement about psychoanalysis: “Fuck Dr. Freud.”
OSCAR LEVANT

PSYCHOBABBLE

To err is dysfunctional, to forgive co-dependent.
BERTON AVERRE

THE PUBLIC

The public is a ferocious beast: one must either chain it up or flee from it.
VOLTAIRE

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
OSCAR WILDE

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
EDITH SITWELL

The public is a fool.
ALEXANDER POPE

PUBLIC FIGURES

Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
GORE VIDAL

PUBLIC OPINION

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans.
H. L. MENCKEN

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

PUBLISHER

One of the signs of Napoleon’s greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot.
SIEGFRIED UNSELD

PUNCTUALITY

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
EVELYN WAUGH

PUNNING

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
FRED ALLEN

PURITANISM

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

Puritanism . . . helps us enjoy our misery while we are inflicting it on others.
MARCEL OPHULS

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
H. L. MENCKEN

PUBLISHERS

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with irrational fear of life become publishers.
CYRIL CONNOLLY

I could show you all society poisoned by this class of person—a class unknown to the ancients—who, not being able to find any honest occupation, be it manual labor or service, and unluckily knowing how to read and write, become the brokers of literature, live on our works, steal our manuscripts, falsify them, and sell them.
VOLTAIRE