essays & effluvia: Insults about occupation

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Insults about occupation

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
- - - Oscar Wilde

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
- - - Edith Sitwell

A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.
- - - Benjamin Disraeli

Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
- - - Al Capp

An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'd have someone to look up to.
- - - Gene Fowler

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
- - - Mark Twain

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
- - - Fred Allen

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.
- - - Groucho Marx

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all of the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's sake.
- - - John D. Rockefeller

If all the girls who attended the Harvard-Yale game were laid end to end, I wouldn't be surprised.
- - - Dorothy Parker

If there's anything disgusting about the movie business, it's the whoredom of my peers.
- - - Sean Penn

In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club - the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.
- - - Spiro T. Agnew (about the press, 1970)

Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.
- - - Henry VanDyke

Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls.
- - - Jackie Gleason

Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
- - - A. E. Housman

Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
- - - Mark Twain

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it.
- - - -Moses Hadas

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.
- - - Lyndon Johnson

This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be hurled with great force.
- - - Dorothy Parker

This is one of those big, fat paperbacks, intended to while away a monsoon or two, which, if thrown with a good overarm action, will bring a water buffalo to its knees.
- - - Nancy Banks-Smith (review of M.M. Kaye's "The Far Pavillions")

What is art? Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
- - - Lillian Hellman

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
- - - Aristophanes