Dave Barry Quotes

286 Sourced Quotes

The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.

Dave Barry
I say the American Medical Association ought to get the hell off the golf course and answer this question...

Dave Barry
It was you readers who really came through, proving once again that when the American people decide to "get involved" in a problem, it is best not to let them have any sharp implements.

Dave Barry
I become faint and nauseous during even very minor medical procedures, such as making an appointment by phone.

Dave Barry
Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter.

Dave Barry
The primary function of the government is - and here I am quoting directly from the U.S. Constitution - 'to spew out paper.'

Dave Barry
The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.

Dave Barry
Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with.

Dave Barry
You should definitely have a travel agent. Why go through all the hassle of dealing with airlines, hotels, and rental-car agencies yourself, only to see the arrangements get all screwed up, when with just a single phone call you can have a trained professional screw them up for you?

Dave Barry
The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.

Dave Barry
It takes a minimum of six people, working in close harmony, to successfully flush a nautical toilet. That's why those old ships carried such large crews.

Dave Barry
At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that:
•The universe is even bigger than they thought!
•There are even more subatomic particles than they thought!
•Whatever they announced last year about global warming is wrong.

Dave Barry
Albert Einstein, who discovered that a tiny amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy, which explains why, as Einstein himself so eloquently put it in a famous 1939 speech to the Physics Department at Princeton, 'You have to exercise for a week to work off the thigh fat from a single Snickers.'

Dave Barry
England is a very popular foreign country to visit because the people there speak some English.

Dave Barry
The beer sold here in the United States is sweet and watery and lacking in taste and overcarbonated and just generally the lamest, wimpiest beer in the entire known world. All the other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer, and we are drinking Barry Manilow.

Dave Barry
Congress shall also create a tax code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox.

Dave Barry
The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

Dave Barry
Remember how he handled the Iran-contra Never Ending Scandal from Hell? He went on national television, the President of the United States, and said it wasn't his fault, because he was not aware, at the time, of what his foreign policy was.

Dave Barry
Here in Miami, on weekends, amusement-seekers will come to the marina, set up folding chairs, and spend a highly entertaining day watching boat owners perform comical maneuvers such as forgetting to set their parking brakes and having their cars roll down the ramp and disappear, burbling gaily, below the surface.

Dave Barry
Japan has a low crime rate, unless you count the fact that approximately every fifteen minutes the entire Cabinet gets indicted for taking bribes.

Dave Barry
The issue we are reluctant to talk about is even more sensitive than condoms. The issue - and I will try to be tasteful here - is that sometimes it seems like maybe the president of the United States is kind of dumb. If you get what I mean. What I mean is, I am not totally confident that the president would get what I mean, unless several aides explained it to him. And even then, he might forget.

Dave Barry
They have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can't move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed.

Dave Barry
The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.

Dave Barry
This ball was so crowded that it took me - a trained professional journalist with vast experience in this area - forty five minutes to get a beer.

Dave Barry
Stuffwise we are not a lean operation. We're the kind of people who, if we were deciding what absolute minimum essential items we'd need to carry in our backpacks for the final, treacherous ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, would take along aquarium filters, just in case.

Dave Barry
Baby's room should be close enough to your room so that you can hear baby cry, unless you want to get some sleep, in which case baby's room should be in Peru.

Dave Barry
I am a world-class weenie when it comes to letting people stick needles into me. My subconscious mind firmly believes that if God had wanted us to have direct access to our bloodstreams, He would have equipped our skin with small, clearly marked doors.

Dave Barry
I'm afraid that, in this chapter we must talk about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys.

Dave Barry
Computers operate on simple principles that can be easily understood by anybody with some common sense, a little imagination, and an IQ of 750.

Dave Barry
Here's a man who was twice elected to the most powerful position on Earth despite needing a TelePrompTer to correctly identify what year it was.

Dave Barry