Humorist Quotes

Mark Twain

Jaroslav Hašek

Jerome K. Jerome

Ben Stein

Sue Townsend

John Hodgman

Pierre Daninos

Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

Most social problems could be helped or prevented if people had more money and practical advice.

Surely as cometh the Winter, I know
There are Spring violets under the snow.

Robert Henry Newell

America has no north, no south, no east, no west. The sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains, the compass just points up and down, and we can laugh now at the absurd notion of there being a north and a south. We are one and undivided.

You want to know what I make? I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor and an A-minus feel like a slap in the face.

The world is full of corruption, and deceit, and deviltry chock full of it.

James Montgomery Bailey

My mother tries to explain that I need support and that I'm just going through a period of adjustment. "Like puberty," she says.

"Hi," I said. She came over, licked my hand discreetly, allowed herself to be scratched for a time, chased her tail in a dignified circle, lay down again. I remember thinking: "There are times God puts a choice in front of you." I often had such thoughts back then. We took the dog.

People who can least afford to pay rent, pay rent. People who can most afford to pay rent, build up equity.

As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. Another merit in the new flag is, that it bears no resemblance to the now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals.

William Tappan Thompson

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.

The pen is mightier than the sword. The case for prescriptions rather than surgery.

The self-assured porcupine, endearingly grotesque, waddles up the road in broad daylight. He looks as if he had slept in his rumpled spiky clothes, and he probably has.

One of the marked superiorities the English enjoy over other peoples is their ability to imbue the foreigner with a crippling inferiority complex the moment he sets foot on British soil.

We mingle in society not so much to meet others as to escape ourselves.

There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.

Christian Rudder

According to child-experts—and every child is an expert on something—the function of a parent is to provide information, entertainment, transportation, and spot cash on demand.

I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution, and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

The cold winds sweeping the mountain-height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And 'mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snows she press'd,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.

One of the most unfortunate things about being an unfit Englishman cycling long distances in France is the number of signs that yell 'PAIN' down every high street.

We seem to exist in a hazardous time, Driftin' along here through space; Nobody knows just when we begun, Or how fur we've gone in the race.

Benjamin Franklin King, Jr.

A new life begins for us with every second. Let us go forward joyously to meet it. We must press on, whether we will or not, and we shall walk better with our eyes before us than with them ever cast behind.

Jerome K. Jerome

And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.

Jaroslav Hašek

There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren't.

One of those looks which only a quarter-century of wedlock can adequately marinate.