Quotes about humor

"The hell with the human race!" said Beatrice.

"You're a member of it, you know," said Rumfoord.

"Then I'd like to put in for a transfer to the chimpanzees!" said Beatrice. "No chimpanzee husband would stand by while his wife lost all her coconuts."

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

"I liked him very much," said Constant.

"The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms," said Beatrice.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

"If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people," said Finnerty, "always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth would be an engineer's paradise."

"Things don't stay the way they are," said Finnerty. "It's too entertaining to try to change them."

[I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.