Dave Barry Quotes

286 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Barry
English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

Dave Barry
Derangement is the only possible explanation for owning a cat, an animal whose preferred mode of communication is to sink its claws three-quarters of an inch into your flesh.

Dave Barry
One key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium.

Dave Barry
I'm not saying that women don't think about sex also. I'm saying that women are capable, for at least brief periods of time, of not thinking about sex, and that most guys are not.

Dave Barry
You can't have a bad time at Disney World. It's not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson.

Dave Barry
You have to be careful on the deck, because of the "hatches," which are holes placed around a sailboat at random to increase the insurance rates.

Dave Barry
The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap.

Dave Barry
As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

Dave Barry
He's a boating enthusiast, although that phrase seems too weak to describe the level of his interest, kind of like describing someone as a heroin fancier.

Dave Barry
If the security personnel do their job properly, they just might cause you to miss your plane, thereby possibly saving your life.

Dave Barry
Common criticism of the Internet is that it is dominated by the crude, the uninformed, the immature, the smug, the untalented, the repetitious, the pathetic, the hostile, the deluded, the sefl-righteous, and the shrill. This criticism overlooks the fact that the Internet also offers - for the savvy individual who knows where to look - the tasteless and borderline insane.

Dave Barry
This book is dedicated to Wilbur and Orville Wright, without whom air sickness would still be just a dream.

Dave Barry
Of course God enjoys a good prank as much as the next infallible deity.

Dave Barry
The Russians will never be able to get their missiles thought the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.

Dave Barry
Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask whether your country has been inhaling paint-thinner fumes.

Dave Barry
Are we ever going to have a federal tax system that regular people can understand?

Dave Barry
The method preferred by most balding men for making themselves look silly is called the comb over.

Dave Barry
Everybody in New York, including police horses, dresses fashionably, and whenever I'm there, even in my sharpest funeral-quality suit with no visible ketchup stains, I feel as though I'm wearing a Hefty trash bag. And it's last year's Hefty trash bag.

Dave Barry
'I'm sorry,' guys are always telling women, 'but I'm just not ready to make a commitment.' Guys are in a permanent state of nonreadiness. If guys were turkey breasts, you could put them in a 350-degree oven on July Fourth, and they still wouldn't be done in time for Thanksgiving.

Dave Barry
Nature is located mainly in national parks, which are vast tracts of wilderness that have been set aside by the United States government so citizens will always have someplace to go where they can be attacked by bears. And we're not talking about ordinary civilian bears, either: We're talking about federal bears, which can behave however they want to because they are protected by the same union as postal clerks.

Dave Barry