BillLindau

LindyOne's Favorite Quotes

Reporter offers a handful of memory-sticking quotes
By Bill Lindau
Many times when we have questions, we turn to things famous people have said for answers, for guidance or for moral support.
My personal favorite comes from Henrik Ibsen: “The strongest person in the world is the person who stands alone.“
I’ve been reading his plays since I was 17, and every time I find the world ganging up on me, this is the quote I remember.
An instructor I had in college once advised his students to write down every clever remark they hear or read. It could come from Shakespeare, the Bible, your mother, your best friend or the town drunk or your favorite TV sitcom. Keep them in a notebook throughout your life and never stop adding to it.
Here are some of the ones that have really stuck in my head. They come, from my latest personal collection:
* “Don’t panic.”
-- Douglas Adams, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
* “The art of falling involves learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
-- Douglas Adams, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
* “I wouldn’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
-- Woody Allen
* “Just because I read ‘Winnie the Pooh‘ doesn‘t make me Tigger.”
-- Anonymous friend, on being accused of treason for reading certain works of literature
* “Can’t you imagine a hair wart on your lip?”
-- Anonymous friend
* “All you need is love.”
-- The Beatles, “All You Need is Love”
* “Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she changes from day to day/I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I gotta get a belly full of wine.”
-- The Beatles, “Her Majesty”
* “Life is much too short and there’s no time/for fussing and fighting, my friend.”
-- The Beatles, “We Can Work it Out”
* “He’s the wackiest two-legger I’ve ever met in my life, but he’s the dude with the food!”
-- Blacky the cat on his father, Bill Lindau
* “If heroin is a monkey on the back, what’s a morphine suppository?”
-- Lenny Bruce
* "I never saw a porno film where anybody got killed in the end. Or even punched in the mouth.”
-- Lenny Bruce
* "You can't get snot off a suede jacket."
-- Lenny Bruce
* “His squeegee doesn’t go all the way to the bottom of the pail.”
-- Expression quoted by George Carlin
* “A children’s museum sounds like a good idea, but I would imagine it’s not easy to breathe inside those little glass cases.”
-- George Carlin
* “I finally figured out what e-mail is for. It’s for communicating with people you’d rather not talk to.”
-- George Carlin
* “I wish the ecology people would save one species that would make a dramatic comeback and then wipe us all out.”
-- George Carlin
* “I wonder if a person who comes out of a coma feels refreshed and well rested.”
-- George Carlin
* "I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me."
-- John Cleese
* "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."
-- John Cleese
* "If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'"
-- John Cleese
* "Lights will guide you home/and ignite your bones/and I will try to fix you."
-- Coldplay, "Fix You"
* “Don’t try to get yourself elected/if you do you’ll have to cut your hair.”
-- David Crosby, “Long Time Gone”
* “Where’s your will to be weird?”
-- Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison in “The Doors” (1990)
* “I think most of us have many personas inside us at the outset, but over time we lean to the one that is dominant and the others atrophy for lack of use.“
-- Jane Fonda, “My Life So Far”
* “Friend…Good.”
-- Boris Karloff as Frankenstein monster to blind hermit in “Frankenstein”
* “If a man don’t go his own way, he ain’t nothing.”
-- Montgomery Clift as Robert E. Lee Prewitt in “From Here to Eternity” (1953)
* “I’d trade a troop of Campfire Girls for the bunch of you.”
-- Burt Lancaster as Sgt. Milt Warden in “From Here to Eternity”
* "I definitely pretend to be glamorous in my real everyday life. I wouldn't characterise it as very glamorous. I'm mostly in sweat pants with my daughter, wiping hummus off my shirt."
-- Gywneth Paltrow on motherhood, speaking on America's Access Hollywood TV show
* “Nothing I like better than a well-organized set-up.”
-- Gregory Peck as an Allied commando in “The Guns of Navarone” (1991)
* “I‘m not so easy to kill.”
-- Anthony Quinn as a Greek commando in “The Guns of Navarone”
* “White collar conservative walking down the street
Pointing their plastic finger at me
They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die
But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high.”
-- Jimi Hendrix, “If Six was Nine”
* “You should never put your best trousers on when you fight for freedom and truth.”
-- Henrik Ibsen
* “The strongest person in the world is the person who stands alone.”
-- Henrik Ibsen
* “Trying to learn about American culture from public radio is like trying to learn about basketball from your grandmother.”
-- Garrison Keillor
* “Revenge is a dish which is best served cold.”
-- Klingon proverb, from the “Star Trek” TV series
* “Imagine all the people/living life in peace.”
-- John Lennon, “Imagine”
* “Go tell him, ‘Nuts.’”
-- U.S. Army general’s response to the Germans’ request to surrender at the Battle of the Bulge
* "Conservative Republicans are living proof that white people mated with wharf rats."
-- Bill Lindau
* “Intelligence is one thing I tend to avoid.”
-- Larry Linville as Maj. Frank Burns, in the CBS-TV series “M.A.S.H.”
* “What sad times are these when traveling ruffians can say ‘Ni’ to old women.”
-- Eric Idle as Roger the Shrubber in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975)
* “You empty-headed animal food-trough wiper!….Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.”
-- John Cleese as abusive French knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
* “When people pop a nice little chocolate in their mouths, they don’t expect to get their cheeks pierced.”
-- Monty Python’s “Crunchy Frog” skit
* “Feel a little smaller and in stature you will rise/A hobo or a poet must kill dragons for a bride/and humble pie is always hard to swallow with your pride.”
-- Graham Nash, “Humble Pie”
* “I once fought for two days with an arrow through my testicle.”
-- Liam Neeson as Godfrey, a medieval knight in “Kingdom of Heaven“
* “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay, saith the Lord.”
-- Matthew
* “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
-- Proverbs 17
* “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.”
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
* “The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.”
-- Shakespeare, “Othello”
* “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
-- Southern saying (origin unknown)
* “Every day we learn more how to hate/shut the doors/and then we tell ourselves we can relate.”
-- Stephen Stills, “We are not Helpless”
* “God is a comedian everyone is afraid to laugh at.”
-- Voltaire
* “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.”
-- The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

posted by Bill Lindau @ 6:44 PM