I Will Fear No Evil

Between being ‘right’ and being kind, I know which way I vote.

We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we’ll ever eliminate taxes.

“Going to dance at my wake?”

“I don’t dance,” the lawyer answered, “but you tempt me to learn.”

I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry.

Fighting continued on a token basis, and the dead did not complain.

What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.

It’s impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he’s eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he’ll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors.

Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me—death is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way.

Boats and ships are female because they are beautiful, lovable, expensive—and unpredictable.

I’m not trying to frighten you, but only a fool makes predictions based on ignorance; I am not that sort of fool.

I don’t think Father Hugo is any more mistaken than the most learned theologian and he might be closer to the truth. Jacob, I don’t think anyone knows Who’s in charge.

I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical.

A man who marries at my age isn’t taking a wife, he’s indenturing a nurse.

When you’re rich, you don’t have friends; you just have endless acquaintances.

From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn.