Posted on 08/06/2006 4:28:00 AM PDT by SLB
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill
"A modest little person, with much to be modest about." - Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... If you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
"I cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... If there is one." - Winston Churchill, in reply.
Yes, the British from the old school were masters of dry wit, and none-too-subtle putdowns.
There was a long exchange in the U.S. Senate involving Stephen Douglas where another senator said that "no one with the upright form of man" would utter such "foul-smelling" words, "Will the Senator from Illinois please take notice?" to which Douglas said, "I will sir, and therefore will not imitate you."
She bellies up to the gourmet cracker-barrel and delivers laid-back wisdom with the serenity of a down-home Buddha who has discovered that stool softeners really work. - - - Florence King (about Molly Ivins)
She is a lady short on looks, absolutely deprived of any dress sense, has a figure like a Jurassic monster . . . very greedy when it comes to loot, no tact and wants to upstage everyone else. - - - Sir Nicholas Fairbairn (about Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York)
A cross between an aardvark and an albino rat. - - - John Simon (about Barbra Streisand)
"He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.* - Voltaire.
Thanks!
I swear it was also Lord Chesterfield who was famously quoted on sex, something along the lines of "The pleasure is transitory and the position is ridiculous..."
Dr. Johnson.
Ping self = L8R
ping
I have a book of famous insults. My parents gave it to me when I was a teenager and I've kept it.
Winston Churchill and Mark Twain had some of the best in there.
Ah! He had a way with words, too.
"Winston, you're drunk."
"Bess, you're ugly, and tomorrow, I shall be sober."
A "poop-head" ping.
"If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he surely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday."
- H. L. Mencken talking about Franklin D. Roosevelt
bttt
"No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute." - Paul Gallico, US writer
Lovely!
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
- - - Abraham Lincoln
Paging Howard Dean, Howard Dean to this thread.
Insult literacy contained within.
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