Gordon Haff's Last Word

By Courtney Andree | Friday, May 5, 2006

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

—George Bernard Shaw

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn’t changed who I am. My feet are still on the ground. I’m just wearing better shoes.

—Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.

—Fran Lebowitz

I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.

—Samuel Goldwyn

Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, but any means money.

—Horace, Epistles

I believe that every human has a finite number of heart-beats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

—Buzz Aldrin

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

—Samuel Johnson

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

—Seneca

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

—H. L. Mencken

I stand in awe of my body.

—Henry David Thoreau

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.

—Amos Bronson Alcott

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.

—Benjamin Disraeli

Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.

—Nikita Khrushchev

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

—John Quincy Adams

I drank to drown my pain, but the damned pain learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good behavior.

—Frida Kahlo

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

—Miss Piggy

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

—Henry Kissinger

Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To be the best in the company is the way to grow worse.

—Francis Quarles

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

—Elizabeth I

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

—Lillian Hellman

I too shall lie in the dust when I am dead, but now let me win noble renown.

—Homer

Words are the physicians of the mind deceased.

—Aeschylus

Gordon Haff's Last Word

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