Comedians From The United States

"Always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said: "A truck!""

"I was in a bar a few nights ago, moving from stool to stool, trying to get lucky... But there was no gum under any of them. And I hear giggling behind me. At first I don't mind, but the giggling continues... Finally, I thought "What's so amusing?" I turn around, and these two guys, for the last, oh, half hour or so, have been throwing darts into my head. It's a good thing I heard them! I said, "Look, you bums," 'cause I was angry now, "As soon as this game is over, hit the road!" But as I left that bar, one thing stuck in my mind..."

"I was with this girl the other night and from the way she was responding to my skillful caresses, you would have sworn that she was... conscious. … But I love her from the hair on her head to the tag on her toes."

"I was feeling a bit down, I went to a therapist a few times, at a hundred bucks a pop. But then I realized that no therapy session would ever cheer me up half as much as if I was just strolling along and found a hundred dollar bill."

"Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."

"Chapter 27: I Endorse Hillary Clinton"

"Chapter Four: A Huck So Unlike Finn: July 26, 2015"

"Chapter Three: The Horror! The Horror!"

"Chapter Two: The Abominable Showman: June 16, 2015"

"Chapter One: The Campaign Begins: Ready, Set, Go to Hell"

"Author's Note"

"When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence."

"There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off."

"Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening."

"The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around."

"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."

"Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking."

"I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit."

"There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head."

"We’re told cars are dangerous. It’s safer to drive through South Central Los Angeles than to walk there. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?"

"Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby."

"Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. "Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We'd better double up in the shower.""

"When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken."

"When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved."

"When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger."

"We tried to find the mayor. His secretary said he was at home. His wife said he was at the office. In Italy or France this would mean His Honor was having an affair. In Chabarovice it probably meant he'd run off to be a busboy in Stuttgart."

"War is a great asshole magnet."

"Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming."

"Two key rules of Third World travel: 1. Never run out of whiskey. 2. Never run out of whiskey."

"Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear."

"There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail."

"The typical old-fashioned diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting."

"The people who believe that, as a result of industrial development, life is about to become a hell, or may be one already, are guilty, at least, of sloppy pronouncements. On page 8 of Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that his study of the arms race gave him "a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: civilization is now capable of destroying itself." In the first place, the most horrifying fact in many of our lives is that our ex-spouse has gotten ahold of our ATM card. And civilization has always been able to destroy itself. The Greeks of ancient Athens, who had a civilization remarkable for lack of technological progress during its period of greatest knowledge and power, managed to destroy them fine."

"The observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The columns headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN were completely empty."

"The morning meal was served in traditional socialist fashion— very slowly, with the courses out of order so that the jelly arrived half an hour after the toast and the coffee didn't come until we'd called for the check. However, it was hard to be angry at a place that had ice cream, beer, and cigarettes on its breakfast menu."

"Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place."

"Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise."

"Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It's the mess left from people getting rich."

"Remember, FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it. FDA employees are first-class agonizers, world champions at losing sleep. When Meryl Streep got hysterical about Alar, they actually checked the apples instead of Meryl's head."

"Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty— their power and privilege— to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians."

"Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet."

"People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important."

"People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs."

"One thing that's certain about going outdoors: When you come back inside, you'll be scratching."

"On Friday, June 12, 1992, 110 heads of state gathered at Riocentro. They were indistinguishable in dress and deportment. Where was biodiversity when we needed it?"

"Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave."

"Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on islands because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there... Island logic also tells us that an increase in habitat size means an increase in number of species. But it doesn't necessarily. You can build your bed as large as you like and still get very few people to sleep with you."

"Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car."

"Man has been breeding livestock for ten thousand years and has yet to come up with a monstrous sheep that can trample buildings and graze a whole golf course for breakfast."

""Malthus,", says Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, "was right in predicting that the population would grow geometrically." Al, as the father of four children, should know."