“There’s just some people you don’t hit with a pie and that’s all there is to it.” — Buster Keaton
Quotations
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“He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don’t envy dogs the lives they have to live.” — Charles M. Schulz, on Snoopy
“It’s a Great Advantage to Be Able to Hurdle With Both Legs”
Memorable sportscasting quotes:
- “And here’s Moses Kiptanui, the 19-year-old Kenyan, who turned 20 a few weeks ago.” (David Coleman)
- “Juantorena opens his legs and shows his class.” (Ron Pickering)
- “With half of the race gone, there is half of the race still to go.” (Murray Walker)
- “What I said to them at halftime would be unprintable on the radio.” (Gerry Francis)
- “I was in Saint-Etienne two years ago. It’s much the same as it is now, although now it’s completely different.” (Kevin Keegan)
- “I imagine that the conditions in those cars are totally unimaginable.” (Murray Walker)
- “The Baggio brothers, of course, are not related.” (George Hamilton)
- “For those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are in the all-yellow strip.” (John Motson)
“Real Madrid are like a rabbit in the glare of the headlights in the face of Manchester United’s attacks,” Hamilton once said. “But this rabbit comes with a suit of armor in the shape of two precious away goals …”
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“The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.” — e.e. cummings, on the death of Warren G. Harding
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“I don’t see any God up here.” — Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
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“There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.” — Cicero
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“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” — Aldous Huxley
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“One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.” — James Thurber
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“A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.” — Samuel Johnson
Subtract Line 55 From Line 45
Judge Learned Hand on the U.S. income tax code, writing in the Yale Law Journal, December 1947:
In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax … merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception — couched in abstract terms that offer [me] no handle to seize hold of [and that] leave in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness.
Even Albert Einstein, who died trying to find a generalized theory of gravitation, wrote, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”