Tag: Kurt Vonnegut

Funny Quotes About Parents

Posted on August 13, 2011 by

“Parents are not interested in justice, they’re interested in peace and quiet.” – Bill Cosby

“There are two things that a child will share willingly – communicable diseases and its mother’s age.” – Benjamin Spock

“I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.” – Woody Allen

“Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.” – Bill Cosby

“Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.” – Peter Ustinov

“Like all parents, my husband and I just do the best we can, and hold our breath, and hope we’ve set aside enough money to pay for our kids’ therapy.” – Michelle Pfeiffer

“Think of stretch marks as pregnancy service stripes.” – Joyce Armor

“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.” – Yogi Berra

“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.” – Jim Morrison

“I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.” – Rodney Dangerfield

“If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t, either.” – Dick Cavett

“That’s sort of a cliché about parents. We all believe that our children are the most beautiful children in the world. But the thing is, what no one really talks about is the fact that we all really believe it.” – Heather Armstrong

“My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.” – Peter De Vries

“Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people’s children and publicly admit they can do better is asking for it.” – Erma Bombeck

“My husband and I have decided to start a family while my parents are still young enough to look after them.” – Rita Rudner

“Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.” – Leo Buscaglia

“Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.” – John Locke

“My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.” – Mark Twain

“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.” – Ogden Nash

“My parents are my backbone. Still are. They’re the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.” – Kobe Bryant

“I believe that we parents must encourage our children to become educated, so they can get into a good college that we cannot afford.” – Dave Barry

“Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.” – Franz Kafka

“The best part about being friends with your parents is that no matter what you do, they have to keep loving you.” – Natalie Portman

Famous Humor Quotes

Posted on February 26, 2011 by

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” – Oscar Wilde

“There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?” – Dick Cavett

“Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.” – Dame Edna Everage

“That is the saving grace of humor. If you fail no one is laughing at you.” – A. Whitney Brown

“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.” – Christopher Morely

“Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.” – Salma Hayek

“The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” – E.B. White

“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.” – W. Somerset Maugham

“I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.” – Frank Howard Clark

Criticism Quotes

Posted on December 21, 2010 by

“Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.” – Fritz Perls

“You can disagree without being disagreeable.” – Zig Ziglar

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

“Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”- Andy Warhol

“You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” – John Wooden

“If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.” – Paul Newman

“Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.”- James Luther Adams

“Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.” – Frank A. Clark

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.” – Wole Soyinka

“Quit now, you’ll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you’ll be halfway there.” – David Zucker

“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.” – Anne Tyler

“Once you label me you negate me.” – Søren Kierkegaard

“We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.” – Walt Disney

“He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.” – George Jean Nathan

“He only profits from praise who values criticism.” – Heinrich Heine

“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.” – David Brinkley

“Harshness to me is giving somebody false hopes and not following through. That’s harsh. Telling some guy or some girl who’ve got zero talent that they have zero talent actually is a kindness.”- Simon Cowell

“Don’t abuse your friends and expect them to consider it criticism.” – Edgar Watson Howe

Aging Quotes #2

Posted on October 5, 2010October 4, 2010 by

# Give me a young man in whom there is something of the old,
and an old man in whom there is something of the young.
Guided so, a man may grow old in body, but never in mind. – Marcus Tillius Cicero

# The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. – Madeleine L’Engle (The New York Times, 1985)

# How confusing the beams from memory’s lamp are;
One day a bachelor, the next a grampa.
What is the secret of the trick?
How did I get so old so quick? – Ogden Nash (“Preface to the Past” You Can’t Get There from Here)

# I believe the second half of one’s life is meant to be better than the first half. The first half is finding out how you do it. And the second half is enjoying it. – Frances Lear

# I look forward to being older, when what you look like becomes less and less an issue and what you are is the point. – Susan Sarandon

# I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward. – Mary Sarton (May Sarton: Excerpts from a Life)

# I think that, for all of us, as we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping our minds active and open. – Clint Eastwood

# I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had. – Margaret Mead

# If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old. – James A. Garfield

# If you don’t learn to laugh at troubles, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you grow old. – Ed Howe

# If you wait, all that happens is that you get older. – Larry McMurty

# In old age there is a coming into flower. My body wanes; my mind waxes. – Victor Hugo

# Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. – Kurt Vonnegut

# My after forty face felt far more comfortable than anything I lived with previously. Self-confidence was a powerful beauty-potion; I looked better because I felt better. Failure and grief as well as success and love had served me well. Finally, I was tapping into that most hard-won of your dews: wisdom. – Nancy Collins

# Never retire. Michelangelo was carving the Rondanini just before he died at 89. Verdi finished his opera Falstaff at 80. And the 80-year -old Spanish artist Goya scrawled on a drawing, “I am still learning.” – Dr. W. Gifford-Jones

Laugh Quotes

Posted on January 29, 2010 by

– “I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.” – Woody Allen

– “At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities. ” – Jean Houston

– “Even if there is nothing to laugh about, laugh on credit.” – Unknown

– “Mirth is God’s medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.” – Henry Ward Beecher

– “Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.” – Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts”, Saturday Night Live

– “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” – Unknown

– “Laughter is an instant vacation.” – Milton Berle

– “What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!” – Agnes Repplier

– “So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.” – Gordon W. Allport

– “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” – Victor Borge

– “What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.” – Yiddish Proverb

– “When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing each other.” – Alan Alda

– “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” – Kurt Vonnegut

– “A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.” – Irish Proverb

– “Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.” – Bob Newhart

– “A hearty laugh gives one a dry cleaning, while a good cry is a wet wash.” – Puzant Kevork Thomajan

– “There can never be enough said of the virtues, dangers, the power of a shared laugh.” – Françoise Sagan

– “I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, «Ain’t that the truth.»” – Quincy Jones

– “Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.” – Henri Bergson

– “Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.” – Max Eastman

– “A man isn’t poor if he can still laugh.” – Raymond Hitchcock

– “Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.” – Kurt Vonnegut

– “Remember, men need laughter sometimes more than food.” – Anna Fellows Johnston

– “No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.” – Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, chapter 4

– “You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.” – Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

– “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.” – Abraham Lincoln

– “Whoever said “laughter is the best medicine” never had gonorrhea.” – Kat Likkel and John Hoberg, My Name Is Earl, “Robbed a Stoner Blind”, original airdate 16 November 2006

– “Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.” – Ken Kesey