John Hodgman

"Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies. (Or, for that matter, as true.)"

"Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that I am a friend to the creatures of the Earth when I am not busy eating them or wearing them."

"The silhouette was named for Etienne de Silhouette, the notoriously stingy finance minister for Louis XV, who ironically was himself incapable of casting a shadow, due to lycanthropy."

"There had been hoboes in the United States since there had been trains and liquor, which is to say, always."

"The geographic center of North America is historically located in Osborne County, Kansas. It is said that all armies will bow to the one who controls it."

"The decision to drop the atomic bomb - that wasn't Truman, but sweepstakes winner Penny Holkum of Palm Beach. And for that she received a case of Lucky Strikes and a lifetime supply of sadness."

"You can't fight a war on terror if you're ending a sentence with a preposition."

"This pie chart represents the $70 billion in tax cuts, and the majority of that will go to people making over $200,000 a year. Or, as the government refers to them, "citizens.""

"If you make the smokestacks out of children, who will you force to clean them?"

"Look at Dick Cheney. Financially he's obscenely wealthy, but he's clearly unhappy. I wouldn't be surprised if he's visited by no less than three ghosts a night."

"(on soccer) Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war."

"Like most experts, I've always defined a planet in common-sense terms: Can you beam down to it? Is it populated by green-skinned women? Would Galactus eat it for food?"

"And parents, some old fashioned kitchen wisdom for dealing with those lice: take your child and cover his hair with mayonnaise and shove him outside because he disgraced your house by bringing lice into it."

"Weathermen are the ponchoed buffoons who spend hurricanes outside, buffeted by winds, lashed by rains, struggling to stand erect. A mime's "walking against the wind" routine come horribly to life. Whereas meteorologists - we're the people who sent them out there."

"What better emblem for our nation, after all, than a level playing field, shaped like an octagon, where people of diverse cultural ass-kicking traditions can meet as equals and immediately start kicking ass."

"So long as you refuse to ever acknowledge failure, success becomes eternal, a downward curve, always approaching failure, but never quite reaching it."

"Science is not science. It's an art, like... art, in a way."

"For the first time in history, well-educated, affluent, white males are going to have their say."