This is a random grab bag of quips, quotes, factoids and funny stuff I’ve run across. Feel free to send me yours or post them as comments.
 

QUOTE
Alfred Hitchcock’s advice to young filmmakers: Stay out of jail.

 

 

FACTOID
George Washington died because a “doctor,” who was bleeding him to cure a fever, miscalculated how many quarts of blood a person’s body contains and drained him.

 

 

QUOTE
My computer beat me at checkers, but I sure beat it at kickboxing.
– Emo Philips

 

FACT
Researchers at MIT are making “viral batteries.” These are genetically engineered viruses that can coat themselves with certain metals and self-assemble into nanowires which function as anodes. As soon as they’ve made ones that can turn into cathodes, they will be able to “grow” organic batteries to run cell phones, computers, even cars.

QUOTE
“Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.”
– Denis Diderot

 

QUOTE
Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?”
Priest: “No, not if you did not know.”
Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?”
– Annie Dillard, ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’
QUOTE
“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
– Sigmund Freud

 

 

QUOTE
“Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.”
– Mark Twain

 

QUOTE
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
– W.H. Auden

 

 

QUOTE
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
– George Bernard Shaw

 

 

QUOTE
It’s impossible to gain what you already have.
– Mahmoud Shabistari

 

 

GRAFFITI
“You have the watches, but we have the time.”
– What Afghans are saying about the West

 

 

QUOTE
Give me six lines written by the most honest man and I would find something in them to have him hanged.
– Cardinal Richelieu

 

 

QUOTE
“If you’re looking for a faultless friend, you will be a friendless.”
– Mevlana Rumi

 

 

ACCORDING TO A RECENT POLL:
33% of Americans can’t name all three branches of the U.S. government. 75% of Americans can name at least one American Idol judge.

 

QUOTE
Preserve yourself from a first love and you need not fear a second.
– Jane Austen

 

 

FACT (one that should give anti-vaccine crusaders pause)
Nearly a million people a year still die of measles in areas where the vaccine is not widely available.

 

 

QUOTE
Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.”
David Ben-Gurion
QUOTE
“The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” William Faulkner.

 

 

SOME FINALISTS IN THE SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY’S WORST-FIRST-SENTENCE-FOR-A-NOVEL CONTEST:

“As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.”

“Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens.”

“Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved.”

“Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor.”

“He’d hacked and hewed his home from ten acres of the Alaska wilderness, had Biff Hanratty, and one thing was for damn sure: he’d never share it with a woman. “

INSULT
“I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.”
– Stephen Bishop ”

 

 

INSULT
“A modest little person, with much to be modest about.”
– Winston Churchill (about Clement Atlee)

 

 

INSULT
“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.”
– Samuel Johnson

 

 

INSULT
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”
– Groucho Marx
 

 

INSULT
He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
– Billy Wilder

 

QUOTE
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
– John Muir
 

QUOTE
The strong man is not the one who throws people in wrestling but the one who controls himself when he is angry.
– A Hadith
 

 

QUOTE
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
–Winston Churchill

 

QUOTE
What’s another word for “thesaurus”?
– Steven Wright

 

WEIRD BUT TRUE
Birds and dolphins have split brains: only one half sleeps at a time. If four ducks are lined up in a row, the inside two sleep with both eyes shut, the outside two each sleep with one eye shut and one eye open. Every half hour they turn around and switch which eye is open.

 

QUOTE
“With a few more brains he could be a halfwit.”
– Thomas Reed (Speaker of the Hous in, 1908) deriding a political opponent

 

GRAFFITI
There are three kinds of people: Those who can count, and those who can’t.

 

QUOTE
Things are more like they are right now than they’ve ever been.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

QUOTE
Men! Do not needlessly sacrifice your lives!
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

FACT
Starbucks spends more on health care than it does on coffee beans.

 

FACT
Six percent of prisoners in the United States are in private prisons that are operated for profit.

 

FACT
The body has a set number of fat cells at each age. Even if fat cells are removed by liposuction or surgery, new ones are born until the body reaches its pre-set number.

 

FACT
A cheetah can go from 0 to 70 mph in 4 seconds.

 

QUOTE
I bought some batteries but they weren’t included.
- Steven Wright

 

QUOTE
If I had married myself, I’d be divorced by now.
- Eli Humbo

 

QUOTE
“A place where nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone. ”
- Bruce Springsteen’s vision for America

 

FACT
If you use the emergency phone in an elevator in the United States to call for help, the person you speak to will most likely be in India.

 

QUOTE
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
– Anatole France

 

QUOTE
In America the rich and the poor get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer, the poor get it in the winter.
- Bat Masterson

 

QUOTE
It’s not hubris if I win.
- Julius Caeser

 

QUOTE
It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.
- Muhammed Ali

 

QUOTE
Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.
- Golda Meir

 

FACT
The word “gun” probably derives from Gunnhilde, a woman’s name that medieval German soldiers frequently gave to their cannons.

 

QUOTE
Where they make a desert, they call it peace.
- Tacitus

 

FACT
Half the airplanes in the U.S. are in Alaska. Also, Alaska has more coastline than all the rest of the United States combined.

 

FACT
Over sixty countries in the world have an annual gross national product smaller than the endowment of Harvard University.

 

FACT
The word “glamour” is a corruption of the word “grammar”  –in the middle ages, knowing grammar made a man extremely cool.

 

QUOTE
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
- James Madison

 

JOKE
A man overhears Mullah Nasruddin telling someone, “I’m one year older than my brother.” He just has to intervene: “Mullah Sahib, you told me you were one year younger than your brother!” The Mullah replied, ‘That was two years ago.”

 

QUOTE
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
- A. J. Liebling

 

QUOTE
I would have made a good Pope.
- Richard M. Nixon

 

QUOTE
It is noble to be good; it is still nobler to teach others to be good - and so much less trouble.
- Mark Twain

 

FACT
The national database of possible terrorist targets has expanded from an original list of about 300 items and locations to over 300,000. They include such “potential targets” as the Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.
FACT
Cost of planting one landmine: $3.
Cost of removing one landmine: $1000.

 

FACT?
Some scholars estimate that 10 to 20% of the Africans dragged to the Americas as slaves were Muslims.

 

QUOTES
“Alcohol is the fuel of the future”
– Henry Ford.
“And it always will be.”
– Ford’s critics

 

QUOTE
“If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow

 

FACT
Almost every day, from 2003 to 2007 last four years, about ten million dollars worth of oil has gone missing from Iraq.
– San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 2007

 

FACT
Elephants can hear through their feet.

 

FACT
The first city to reach a population of a million people was Baghdad.

 

QUOTE
“If you want peace, work for justice.”
– Pope John Paul II

 

FACT
Pope Benedict says the Catholic Church never imposed alien cultural ideas on the indigenous people of the Americas because those people were already “silently longing for Christ … without realizing it.”

 

QUOTE
What gets us in trouble is not the things we don’t know, but the things we do know that aren’t true.
- Mark Twain

 

QUIP
No writer ever suffered from writer’s block whose standards were low enough.
- William Stafford

 

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