Thanks for the post, Borges. Here's my collection of favorite HLM quotes. Don't necessarily agree with all of them, but they're funny and "well put":
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Adultery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
I do not believe in education, and am glad I never went to a university. Beyond the rudiments, it is impossible to teach anything. All the rest the student acquires himself. His teacher merely makes it difficult for him.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -and both commonly succeed, and are right.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another
Evil - That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it
Experience - A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
...one is always most bitter, not toward the author of one's wrongs, but toward the victim of one's wrongs.
Fine - A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his crime.
Psychology - The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.
"The trouble with cynicism is that, once you start,... it's never enough."
-Lily Tomlin as Trudy, the Bag Lady
... ping for some fun over here ...
Thank you so much for posting this.
Sometimes I need something heart warming -- At my favorite coffe house this morning (Where I know people) I had lots of fun passing these qutoes around.
Thanks for posting!
Solzie got to them first, but I have posted quotes in #51 as well for your perusal.
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