Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mark Twain

Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.

Mark Twain

Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.

Mark Twain

The funniest things are the forbidden.

Mark Twain

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

George Mikes

The Americans are extremely gadget minded people and American gadgets have a peculiar characteristic: they work.

George Mikes

Japan is, you often feel, an improved version of the United States.

George Mikes

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

George Mikes

The Japanese are human beings like the rest of us, but they will strongly resent this insinuation.

George Mikes

The poor Americans are so busy defending the rights of Hindus in Pakistan, Moslems in India, Jews in Palestine, Koreans in Japan, Italians in Yugoslavia and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia that they simply cannot give a thought to Negroes in the United States.

George Mikes

The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.

George Mikes

Tel-Aviv airport is still the only airport in the world where each passenger is met by ten relatives.

George Mikes

If it is gay, ribald and lascivious night-life you are after, Israel is not the place for you. The night clubs you do find are nearer in spirit to a YMCA than to dens of iniquity.

George Mikes

Israel also deprived the world of its chance of shedding tears of genuine sympathy over her destruction. The world resents this; it likes to feel noble and sympathetic.

George Mikes

'I don't say a Zionist must be insane,' said President Weizmann, 'but it helps if he is.'

George Mikes

Bad English was the second language of Israel and bad Hebrew, of course, remained the national language.

George Mikes

When a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut of without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared : "We are not amused".

George Mikes

The British suffer from a most unfortunate superiority complex - unjustified even under Victoria and most certainly hopelessly out-of-date today.

John Ruskin

The best work never was and never will be done for money.

Miguel de Cervantes

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.

Thomas Jefferson

Good humor is one of the preservatives of our peace and tranquility.

Edward Albee

The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.

Eckhart Tolle

Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

Jonathan Kellerman

Government is like junior high. Your status depends upon whom you're able to persecute.

Jon Stewart

For me it was just exciting to see fake news catching on like that. We don't you know, it's interesting. I think we don't make things up. We just distill it to, hopefully, its most humorous nugget. And in that sense it seems faked and skewed just because we don't have to be subjective or pretend to be objective. We can just put it out there.

Jon Stewart

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.

L. Ron Hubbard

It is considered in England and the United States that the Government of South Africa is altogether too harsh with its native peoples. It is sadly humorous to notice that the native in South Africa, however, holds an exactly reverse opinion and the fault he finds with the South African Government is that it is far too lenient in its administration of laws throughout the native populace.

Terry Bradshaw

I want to help people, give hope to all. Humor is the foundation of our lives.

Simon Pegg

I mean, yeah, I'm sure that Python and the other things have paved the way for a greater understanding of the British sense of humor, but I don't think it's all that different than the American sense of humor.

Ross Perot

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before.

Ross Perot

Japan is our rival, not our enemy. Japan is a competitor... Bashing a Toyota won't make a better car.

Ray Romano

The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life, yeah, I guess so. I guess some do political humor, some do topical humor, but the ones that I like, the ones that are appealing to me, were guys who were just talking to you about their life.