Humor e Ironia

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

The secret to humor is surprise.

I started out with nothing and I've still got most of it left.

Wit is educated insolence.

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin—the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

It is the peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to find himself out.

Thanksgiving Day . Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

[ Remark after he was defeated in the presidentialelection :] A funny thing happened to me on theway to the White House.

 

The Oklahoma Ligno and Lithograph Co Weeps at a nude by Michael Angelo.

 

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Charles Babbage’s calculating machine] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

 

The wit we wish we had spoils the wit we have.

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste- souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

That which probably hears more stupidities than anything else in the world is a painting in a museum.

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Fun is like life insurance: The older you get, the more it costs.

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom...Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.