RADIO
Radio: the triumph of illiteracy.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
Radio: death in the afternoon and into the
night.
ARTHUR MILLER
Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with
carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.
FRED ALLEN
I don’t hold with furniture that talks.
FRED ALLEN
RAT RACE
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you
win, you’re still a rat.
LILY TOMLIN
REACTIONARY
A reactionary is someone with a clear and
comprehensive vision of an ideal world we have lost.
KENNETH MINOGUE
READING
No place affords a more striking conviction of the
vanity of human hopes than a public library.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
REAGAN LIBRARY
Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan’s
library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the
real horror: he hadn’t finished coloring either one of them.
GORE VIDAL
REALITY
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
LILY TOMLIN
REFORM
The only way to reform some people is to chloroform
them.
THOMAS C. HALIBURTON
REFORMERS
All reformers, however strict their social
conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
RELATIONSHIPS
It is explained that all relationships require a
little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that
we give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves
exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
QUENTIN CRISP
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of
them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical
barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of
goods.
W. H. AUDEN
RELATIVES
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who
haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest
instinct about when to die.
OSCAR WILDE
RELIGION
Religion consists in a set of things which the
average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.
MARK TWAIN
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and
the cleverness of the few.
STENDHAL
You never see animals going through the absurd and
often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves
with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being
intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most religions do not make men better, only
warier.
ELIAS CANETTI
The idea of a good society is something you do not
need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a
religion if you are terrified of death.
GORE VIDAL
Since the whole affair had become one of religion,
the vanquished were of course exterminated.
VOLTAIRE
Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to
explain randomness.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Religion is the fashionable substitute for
belief.
OSCAR WILDE
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only
in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his
wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H. L. MENCKEN
Religion is the venereal disease of mankind.
HENRI DE MONTHERLANT
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal
training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty
sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
JOHN MORLEY
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion
that has survived.
OSCAR WILDE
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of
human egotism.
WILLIAM JAMES
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not
enough to make us love one another.
JONATHAN SWIFT
There is not enough religion in the world to destroy
the world’s religions.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000
revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning
to give him the ride.
H. L. MENCKEN
I’m a born again atheist.
GORE VIDAL
REPORTER
Reporter, n. A writer who guesses his way to
the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
AMBROSE BIERCE
REPUBLICANS
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always
something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a
Republican.
H. L. MENCKEN
Republicans are the party that says government
doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.
P. J. O’ROURKE
REPUTATION
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death,
and live down everything except a good reputation.
OSCAR WILDE
RESPECT
There was no respect for youth when I was young, and
now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming
and going.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
RESPECTABILITY
I have always thought respectable people scoundrels,
and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my
becoming a scoundrel.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more
respectable he is.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
REVOLUTION
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change
in the form of misgovernment.
AMBROSE BIERCE
With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so
revolting as revolution.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of
suffering.
TOM STOPPARD
A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like
the plague the plague it promised to heal.
DANIEL BERRIGAN
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of
tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only
the slime of a new bureaucracy.
FRANZ KAFKA
THE RICH
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is
the matter with the rich is uselessness.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to
live with rich people.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Prior to the Reagan era, the newly rich aped the old
rich. But that isn’t true any longer. Donald Trump is making no
effort to behave like Eleanor Roosevelt as far as I can see.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich
they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to
be.
RITA RUDNER
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and
powerful know he is.
JEAN ANOUILH
The rich aren’t like us, they pay less taxes.
PETER DE VRIES
THE RIDICULOUS
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you find
it.
JULES RENARD
RIGHT AND WRONG
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and
wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
OSCAR WILDE
RIVERA, GERALDO
If Geraldo Rivera is the first journalist in space,
NASA can test the effect of weightlessness on weightlessness.
ANONYMOUS
ROCK JOURNALISM
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write
interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.
FRANK ZAPPA
ROGERS, WILL
This bosom friend of senators and congressmen was
about as daring as an early Shirley Temple movie.
JAMES THURBER
ROMANCE
When one is in love one always begins by deceiving
oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. This is what the
world calls a romance.
OSCAR WILDE
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should
begin with science and end with a settlement.
OSCAR WILDE
Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the
elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and
amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe
circles.
BEVERLY JONES
RUSSIA
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming
in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up,
the curve grossly stepped.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV