Humor e Ironia

So Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

 

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

 

Gorgonized me from head to foot, With a stony British stare.

 

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay. Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

 

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day?

 

The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.

 

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

[ Reply when asked to name the hundredbest books of all time :] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five.

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do . . . the day after.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence.

[ Of George Bernard Shaw :] An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

It is indeed a burning shame that thereshould be one law for men and another law for women. . . . I think that there should be no law for anybody.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

[ Flower Belle Lee, played by Mae West, replying to judge’s question, “Are you trying to show contempt for the court?” :] No, I’m doing my best to hide it.

[ After Randolph Churchill’s lung was removedand found not to have malignancies :] A typicaltriumph of modern science to find the onlypart of Randolph that was not malignant andremove it.

Any one who has been to an English publicschool will always feel comparatively at home in prison.

The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that’swho She thinks we all are.

A seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon . Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

I want my attorney, my tailor, my valets, andeven my wife to believe in God, and I fancy that then I’ll be robbed and cuckolded less.

Le sens commun est fort rare .

Toutes les histoires anciennes, comme le disait un de nos beaux esprits, ne sont que des fables convenues .