Humor e Ironia

The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.

Cynic, n . A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the highest flights of their art.

I am never bored anywhere; being bored is an insult to oneself.

as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish.

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit.

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

As hand-to-hand combat has gradually disappeared . . . Americans have turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct aggression.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.

There is no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice in a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.

Wit is like caviar; it should be savored in small elegant proportions, and not spread about like marmalade.

Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop Than when we soar.

I prefer an accommodating vice to an obstinate virtue.

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little—or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

A satirist is a man profoundly revolted by the society in which he lives. His rage takes the form of wit, ridicule, mockery.