Quote Me A Quote: Entertain Me

Kelly Pickler (sic?):
"Is France a country?"
"The capital of Budapest is France."
"Hungry is a country? I've heard of Turkey."

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.
-Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
-Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic

Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
-Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
-Terry Pratchett, The Truth

My Boss in Baghdad wrote:

If you take care of me, and I take care of me, then we'll both be happy.

"Of all the things I've lose, I miss my mind the most."
- Mark Twain

"f*ck you"
- Cyrus Grissom

"A soldiers primary needs are not food and water. A soldiers primary needs are fulfilled by an extraordinary amount of push-ups and unbeliavably long marches. Remember this." -My lieutenant on my first day in the service.

"Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet" -Robin Williams

"Comedy is acting out optimism." -Robin Williams

"In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we'll be voting for plants." -Lewis Black

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
"” Mark Twain

"I'm not black, I'm O.J."

"I'm absolutely, l00 percent, not guilty. "

- OJ Simpson

"If you build a man a fire, he'll be warm for a day. If you set a man on fire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
"The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money costs less"
"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it."
"Anyone who uses the phrase 'easy as taking candy from a baby' has never tried taking candy from a baby."
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."

And some of the usual suspects.

His Lord, Douglas. N. Adams:
"I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by"
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

Miss D. Parker:
"If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised"
"This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly: it should be thrown with great force"

Emo Philips:
"Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."
"At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote."
"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."

Steven Wright:
"I was in a submarine the other day. It didn't have a periscope. It had a kaleidoscope. 'We're surrounded!' "
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish."
"I have an existential map. It has "You are here" written all over it."

A compilation of C.S. Lewis.

"You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body."

"We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with"

"Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours."

"He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart"

"Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."

"With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere."

"Hell is other people" ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

"...And fame? Nah. It's an empty purse. Count it, go broke. Eat it, go hungry. Seek it, go mad!" ~ Torquil, in the Movie "Krull"

"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." ~ Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" ~ Douglas Adams

Ok, so here's the thing. There is a quote I heard it on the radio. It goes something like: "If I came to your country and took your land and killed all the buffalo would you not fight?" and it was said by someone like Sitting Bull or Red Cloud. At the time I heard it (actually several years ago!) I was driving somewhere so I couldn't make a note of it and, of course, despite my efforts to memorise it, I promptly forgot the details. Anyone know the quote and who said it?

"That's OK, the box is empty." -Lionel Hutz

"It's not what you know, it's what you can prove." - Alonzo Harris, Training Day.

Terry Pratchet quotes can be found in The Pratchett Quote File. The PTF is also available as a text file or a PDF.

"I'm a grown-ass man, I do what I want!"

"All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are staring at the stars."
-Oscar Wilde.

I saw an illustration of that one on the back of a "zine" (as I think they are called...) from City Lights. It was so pretty =)

I think my favourite collection of quotes above was DudleySmith's...kudos man.

VDOWhoNeedsDD wrote:
"I'm a grown-ass man, I do what I want!"

Thanks to XKCD, I read that as "I'm a grown ass-man, I do what I want!".

"I'm watching Futarama. It's like Futurama, but everyone is dickgirls!"

Benjamin Franklin wrote:

Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble.

PDQ Bach on his deathbed wrote:

Time, Gentlemen.

"This is Richard. He's Canadian and Canadians don't have any teeth so they have to gum their fish." ~my friend introducing me to his parents in that special way only he can.

If your bowels unleashed the beast, would they cease to peace the grease and make a beastly feast for beasts?

Not sure why that's so riveting, but there you have it. They don't make books for children like that any more.

No quotes page is complete without the sage words of Jack Handy:

If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet you could shoot beer out of you nose.
Sometimes I think I'd be better off dead. No, wait, not me, you.
Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.
We used to laugh at Grandpa when he'd head off and go fishing. But we wouldn't be laughing that evening when he'd come back with some whore he picked up in town.
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did.".
I'd like to see a nude opera, because when they hit those high notes, I bet you can really see it in those genitals.
You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who make people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.
I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away.
I'd rather be rich than stupid.
I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace. Two become a lawfirm, and three or more become a congress.-- John Adams in 1776
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
--Mark Twain
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
--Mark Twain
Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.
--Groucho Marx
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
--Groucho Marx
Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid.
--John Wayne
Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them “children.”
--Hannah Arendt
Pain is scary.
-- Jayne Cobb

An aide brought Churchill the morning paper with the news that one of his Cabinet Ministers would have to resign because he had been caught having sex with a Grenadier Guardsman in Green Park the night before.

Churchill: "It was cold last night was it not?"
The aide: "Yes Sir, only 23 degrees." (That's -5 celsius)
Churchill: "Makes you proud to be British."

"Sometime when you least expect it, love will tap you on the shoulder... and ask you to move out of the way because it still isn't your turn." ~N.V. Plyter
"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." ~Adam Smith
"Nothing in this world is to be feared... only understood." ~Marie Curie

H. L. Mencken wrote:

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent: the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
There is always an easy solution to every human problem: neat, plausible and wrong.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

Mark Twain wrote:

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Be good and you will be lonesome.
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one! keep from telling their happinesses to the unhappy.
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.

Oscar Wilde wrote:

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

Voltaire wrote:

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.
We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.
A witty saying proves nothing.

That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.
I expected times like this - but I never thought they'd be so bad, so long, and so frequent.
You asked me whom I love the most, I said my life. You cried and turned away and tears fell because you left before I could say you're my life...
Death is the release from all pain and complete cessation, beyond which our suffering will not extend. It will return us to that condition of tranquility, which we had enjoyed before we were born. Should anyone mourn the deceased, then he must also mourn the unborn. Death is neither good nor evil, for good or evil can only be something that actually exists. However, whatever is of itself nothing and which transforms everything else into nothing will not all be able to put us at the mercy of Fate.

"What if God turns out to be a giant chicken? What then? Eternal consequences, that's what!"

"Suffice to say that what spilled across Ambrose's rugs was not delicious candy" - Wise Man's Fear

One of my favorite juxtaposition of quotes

Soren Kierkegaard wrote:

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality,
when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or
ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you
is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every
individual in these millions and millions about only one thing:
whether you have lived in despair or not.

Bobby McFerrin wrote:

Don't worry, be happy!

...and some GWJ navel gazing:

Certis wrote:

Believing that we can cause someone to be good or bad,
or that we can simply cut out offending materials and
make a problem go away is so fundamentally wrong that
no lasting good will ever come of it.
To think otherwise is to make ourselves out to be small gods,
bending reality to our will --
like butterflies, convinced of their role as hurricane engines.

Elysium wrote:

I feel like I should be wanting more, like there is some sentiment of judgment from too many generations told that they were special, when the reality is that being a unique snowflake is great until you realize that from a distance it all just looks like snow.

Rabbit wrote:

(C)hildren grow up violent primarily through neglect.
I genuinely believe that the 14 year old with a rifle
in a shopping mall is not influenced by anything.
He's uninfluenced. He's feral. He's been left to grow up
as an animal, rather than a person. It's not the games,
it's the absence of people.

Malor wrote:

We get all caught up on the window dressing, like facing Mecca and
praying X times per day, instead of the fundamental desires. We seize on the wrong symptoms as being the cause of the disease. It's not important that these guys were Christian, any more than it's important that Mideastern terrorists are Islamic. The important part is picking up a gun and killing people, and that's not limited to any creed, race, or ethos.

Muttonchop wrote:

We live on a giant ball of rock whizzing around a ball of fire too big and powerful to properly comprehend. I can't wrap my head around the sun, and it's an insignificant speck in a galaxy that is an insignificant speck in a universe that we can't even measure the full extent of. Plants and animals are amazing, rocks are amazing, the tiny critters swimming around in our intestines are amazing. We don't even know most of what the human brain does, and yet somehow it's responsible for making me me and you you. I'm thinking these thoughts and I don't know how. My parents had sex and somehow bits of their DNA combined to make me. We don't even know what anything is made of: if we examine matter at a small enough scale there's hardly anything there, just weird little waves and particles and probabilities that may or may not be made out of 10-dimensional wiggling strings.
What's going on in all those extra dimensions that we can't perceive?
What the heck is time? Or gravity?
We should be walking around completely amazed by everything, but somehow our minds have come up with a way to filter all this crap out so we can sit around and complain that there's nothing to watch on TV.

Some remarkably insightful people on this site.

The biologist E.O.Wilson had a conversation with an unnamed chemist after the Vatican declared that Mary's physically ascendion into heaven was biblical truth. The chemist said, "I can't comment on whether Mary physically ascended into heaven. I wasn't there. I can say that she would have passed out at 30,000 feet."

Mousetrap, do you have links to the threads from which you pulled those quotes? The only one I saw was Muttonchop's.