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Cynical Quips! So much cynicism -- so little time! Do you have a favorite cynical quip from a famous cynic? Share it with us by emailing KilljoyComics@yahoo.com. If we use your quip, we'll credit you on the site.

He had been kicked in the head by a mule when young, and believed everything he read in the Sunday papers.

-- George Ade

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one in a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and I remember more than I've seen.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

One sees great things from the valley;only small things from the peak.

-- G. K. Chesterton

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

-- Mark Twain

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this -- that you are dreadfully like other people.

-- James Russell Lowell

Perseverance, n.: A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves a glorious success.

-- Ambrose Bierce

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

-- Katharine Hepburn

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Humility is no substitute for a good personality.

-- Fran Lebowitz

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Greater things are believed of those who are absent.

-- Tacitus

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

-- Winston Churchill

It is not necessary to understand things to quarrel about them.

-- Beaumarchais

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

-- Aldous Huxley

Many people lose their tempers merely by seeing you keep yours.

-- Frank Moore Colby

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware the fury of a patient man.

-- John Dryden

Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.

-- John Keats

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.

-- La Rochefoucauld

Good is not good, where better is expected.

-- Thomas Fuller

The placebo cures 30% of patients -- no matter what they have.

-- David Cline

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

-- Louis Kronenberger

You can't make anything idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious.

-- Ron Burns

A modest man is usually admired -- if people ever hear of him.

-- Edgar Watson Howe

The only thing to know is how to use your neuroses.

-- Arthur Adamov

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

-- Karl Marx

If the human race wants to go to Hell in a handbasket, technology can help it get there by jet.

-- Charles M. Allen

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

-- James Thurber

It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back.

-- Bill Vaughn

If you're yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning.

-- Griff Niblack

City life -- millions of people being lonesome together.

-- Henry David Thoreau

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

-- Nikita Khrushchev

It is characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top.

-- Robert Lindner

Travelers from afar can lie with impunity.

-- French proverb

Intelligence ... is the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education ... is the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.

-- A. E. Wiggan

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

-- Abba Eban

As far as the laws of Mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

-- Albert Einstein

Now when I bore people at a party, they think it is their fault.

-- Henry Kissinger

The Middle East is a region where oil is thicker than blood.

-- James Holland

One of the surest signs of the Phillistine is his reverence for the superior taste of those who put him down.

-- Pauline Kael

"Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals would believe them."

-- George Orwell

Not to know certain things is a great part of wisdom.

-- Hugo Grotius

The thoughtless are rarely wordless.

-- Howard W. Newton

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making, in all, two.

-- Ambrose Bierce

Memory is the thing you forget with.

-- Alexander Chase

A gentleman does things no gentleman should do in a way only a gentleman can.

-- Luigi Banzini

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.

-- Sean O'Faolain

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

-- Johnathan Swift

Only a few human beings should grow to the square mile: they are commonly planted too close.

-- William T. Davis

Unhurt people are not much good to the world.

-- Enid Starkie

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

-- Cicero

The cocktail party: a device for paying off obligations to people you don't want to invite to dinner.

-- Charles Merrill Smith

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

-- Henry Miller

He who loves the more is inferior and must suffer.

-- Thomas Mann

The school teacher is certainly underpaid as a child minder, but ludicrously overpaid as an educator.

-- John Osborne

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

-- Marshall McLuhan

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

-- Logan Pearsall Smith

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if it does not lose.

-- Henry Kissinger

Trust in God, but tie up your camel.

-- Arabic axiom

Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.

-- Russian axiom

As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted.

-- Lucy Maud Montgomery

How much a dunce that has been sent to roam Excels a dunce that has been kept at home!

-- William Cowper

To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.

-- Chinese Proverb

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

-- Mark Twain

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

-- Nicholas Johnson

There is only one way to find out if a man is honest -- ask him. If he says 'yes,' you know he is crooked.

-- Groucho Marx

Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.

-- Georg Buchner

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

-- Robert Frost

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

-- William Dean Howells

At the end of every diet, the path curves back toward the trough.

-- Mason Cooley

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

-- George Orwell

Sickness is felt, but health not at all.

-- Thomas Fuller

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

-- Aldous Huxley

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair the rest of his life.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gossip is a vice enjoyed vicariously -- the sweet, subtle satisfaction without the risk.

-- Kin Hubbard

Often a hen who had merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

-- Mark Twain

There's nothing I'm afraid of like scared people.

-- Robert Frost

Cheese -- milk's leap toward immortality.

-- Clifton Fadiman

There are two kinds of fools: one says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better'.

-- Dean William R. Inge

Friendship is love minus sex and plus reason. Love is friendship plus sex and minus reason.

-- Mason Cooley

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency -- and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency -- and a vice.

-- Mark Twain

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

-- Peter F. Drucker

The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions.

-- Alexander Chase

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

-- Jonathon Swift

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

-- Brendan Behan

Wherever there is a crowd, there is untruth.

-- Soren Kierkegaard

The space in a needle's eye is sufficient for two friends, but the whole world is scarcely big enough for two enemies.

-- Solomon ibn Gabirol

All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.

-- Alexander Woollcott

Many of the insights of the saint stem from the experience of the sinner.

-- Eric Hoffer

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

How to make God laugh: Tell him your future plans.

-- Woody Allen

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the other are here for, I don't know.

-- W. H. Auden

Genius does what it must; and talent does what it can.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

-- Sidney J. Harris

I drink to make other people interesting.

-- George Jean Nathan

You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty.

-- Sacha Guitry

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

A humorist is a man who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

-- Don Herald

Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

-- Plato

Anyone who goes to a psychotherapist ought to have his head examined.

-- Samuel Goldwyn

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

-- Mark Twain

New roads; new ruts.

-- G. K. Chesterton

A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

-- J. D. Salinger

In America, any boy may become president, and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.

-- Adlai Stevenson

The true test of independent judgement is being able to dislike someone who admires us.

-- Sydney J. Harris

The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional take a little longer.

-- Henry Kissinger

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people: it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

-- Walter Bagehot

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblence to the first.

-- Ronald Reagan

We are a rather big-headed little species in a vast cosmos that can do without us very well.

-- Rev. George Cary

If I had read as much as other men, I should have known no more than they.

-- Thomas Hobbes

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

-- Robert Frost

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

-- Susan Sontag

90% of the politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation.

-- Henry Kissinger

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

-- Mark Twain

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

-- Thomas Hardy

The world is a comedy to those who think; a tragedy to those who feel.

-- Horace Walpole

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

-- Clarence S. Darrow

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

-- Jean Rostand

Swans sing before they die/'twere no bad thing/Did certain person die before they sing.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The truth that's told with bad intent -- beats all the lies you can invent.

-- William Blake

Laws go where dollars please.

-- Portughese proverb

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

-- George Bernard Shaw

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