Jews From The United States

"Now, most of the time you couldn't be too sure of the quality of the drug. Although, in my experience the stuff was always of a very high quality, because back then we didn't have business majors peddling lower-quality stuff in an effort to increase profits."

"[on Public Works Projects] You see what I felt they should have done for our first public works project is build a giant wall across the entire border of Canada...because THAT'S where the cold air comes from!"

"And even if they hadn't told me, I would have known it was the coldest winter ever. Because I have not had one thought! I have not been able to complete a sentence in my own head! I find myself walking around going "You know what, I should really... FUCK, IT'S COLD!""

"It was the coldest winter ever! I thought last winter was the coldest winter ever, but I was fucking wrong, wasn't I? You see, because I travel all the time. So last winter, I'd be in the midwest, and the blizzard would hit. And then I'd fly home, AND THE BLIZZARD WOULD HIT AGAIN!"

"[on WMDs in Iraq] If they couldn't find the weapons, which were the reason we went to war, then why didn't they make something up? Why did they stop lying?! My government has always lied to me; I'm comfortable with that! Son of a bitch! What's so tough?! They could have done it simply! Just send two kids to Kinko's - "I need a picture of a camel WITH A NUCLEAR WEAPON ON ITS BACK!""

"Everyone of you has a health that is unique and totally different from everybody else. Completely! Because we... are all like snowflakes."

"There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice. But they couldn't sell soy juice, so they called it soy milk. Because anytime you say "soy juice", you actually start to gag. And they put soy milk in with my Moo-Cow fuck milk, and it doesn't belong there, because we all know there's no soy milk, 'cause there's no soy titty, is there?"

""Acidophilus milk"?! What the fuck are you talking about?! "Acidophilus milk"?! Milk doesn't need a friend! That shit belongs in the yogurt section! "Lactose-intolerant milk"?! Kiss my DICK! If you're lactose-intolerant, you can't drink milk. So what's in the fucking carton? Get it outta there, get it away from my milk! It is talking to my milk and making it feel bad about itself!"

"And for all we study about health, we know nothing. Is milk good or bad?... I rest my case. You don't know. You don't know anymore, and a lot of you are sitting there thinking "Fuck, I'm an adult, I don't have to drink that shit anymore!" When I was a kid, you knew milk was good, 'cause there was only one kind of milk: Moo-Cow fuck milk, and that was it."

"The amazing thing is there are people who've never left this country who talk about the fact that we're the greatest country on Earth. How fucking dumb is that?! Cuz you don't know, if you haven't left here you don't know. There are countries that may be giving shit away every day! Canada's one of those countries. You know what they give away? HEALTH INSURANCE!"

"I was amazed to realize that we're the only country that tells the rest of the world, on a nearly constant basis, that we are the greatest country on Earth. And that... is a little fuckin' obnoxious. And I know it's obnoxious, because if you were in an office and there was someone there who came in every day and said "I'M THE GREATEST FUCKER HERE! AND YOU SNIFFLING SHITS WOULD DIE WITHOUT ME! AHAHAHA!", I can guarantee by the end of the week... you'd have killed him, and eaten him, just to try to possess his power!"

"Tom Ridge... is someone who has the leadership qualities of a gerbil. He was a part of coming up with is known as the color coded system of security. You know, orange, and yellow, and what ever the fuck the others are. And what's stupid about it is they have the color coding. LIKE WE'RE IN FUCKIN' ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!! There's no need for that. Because every time they tell us what the color is, then they have to fuckin' explain it, so get rid of the fuckin' color! Simplify it. There should be three levels of security: "Jesus Christ," "God damn it!," "FUCK ME!""

"There are no fights in Ireland, people just get so drunk they go, "GODDAMN, YA SONOFABITCH!" and pass out. And there's no Alcoholics Anonymous there, because if there's a meeting, it's always at the bar."

"They've gotta stop reporting wind chill. That's nonsense. It really is. I don't know where they came up with it, why they came up with it, but it's a lie. They come on, "Well, it's 27 degrees today, but with the wind chill, it's minus 3." … WELL, THEN IT'S MINUS 3, ASSHOLE! I don't need to know what the weather was like if the conditions were perfect!"

"Halfway through the winter, I decided I didn't want to be a comic anymore. I wanted to be a bear. Because bears are more evolved. It gets cold, and what does the bear do? He goes, "Well, I'm going to bed! This blows!" And then it gets warm and he goes, "Well, fuck, time to wake up!""

"Health clubs aren't healthy. In New York City, which has the most stairs of anywhere in the country, people pay money to go to a health club and use a stair master. When you live in a city, that has nothing but stairs and you pay money to use special stairs, that is not healthy behavior. It's fucking PSYCHOTIC!"

"We exhaust ourselves worrying about our health. We're obsessed with it. We worry about our health and when we worry about our health, guess what? We're not fucking healthy! We're so worried about our health that we are now the fattest group of fucks on the planet Earth! "Should I eat this or should I eat this? Well, I'll have to eat both!""

"[On Dick Cheney's Halliburton severance package] He's a guy who's in charge of determining our energy policy, and he's doing it with $31 million of oil company money in his pocket. Is anybody fucking home?"

"If you don't drink 56 bottles of water a week, scientists say you should take a garden hose at the end of the week and shove it up your ass."

"I didn't fucking spend my time living through the era of Vietnam to fucking come around to this fucking time and not having learned that the goddamn situation boils down to this: If you're against the war it doesn't mean that you're f-for the other side! If people show up with signs that go, "GO IRAQ, YOU FUCKERS GO!" then you go, "Holy Shit," then you beat the fuck out of them."

"Then there was the man who declared in court, he wasn't a person. "Excuse me, sir, why haven't you paid your taxes." "Well, as you can clearly see, I am not a person." "Well, you look like a person." "No it's all done with mirrors, trust me!""

"Some of these people have come up with some very elaborate arguments [for not paying taxes]. For instance, there were these guys, in Indiana and Nebraska, and they argued that Indiana and Nebraska weren't states, which was a pretty valid argument in the late 1700s. But in 1995 and '96, well, I saw a map and at that time, trust me, Indiana and Nebraska are shitholes, but they're states. I saw them! They were right there in the middle someplace. I may not be able to point them out immediately, but I know they're there."

"If I wanted to be bored by 6,000 pages of unreadable dreck, I'd read War and Peace four times."

"You know what would help the instruction form? Verbs! Verbs would be nice! Because they help you get to the end of a thought!"

"Britney Spears comes on and she's singing about Pepsi, except you don't know what she's saying, because she can't fucking sing, so what you have is this: titty titty titty titty titty titty titty, ass ass ass, titty titty titty titty, ass, ass, BIG ASS, titty titty titty titty titty titty ass ass titty ass."

"Or you'll get on your cell phone, which is really smart. "Oh I'm gonna be late!" That's fuckin smart: to drive with one of those fuckin things in your hand. It's bad enough that people are in supermarkets -- "Honey, I love you." FUCK YOU, okay? Shut-up! I'm trying to buy a tomato, okay, got it? I'm even carrying mine, this piece of shit. This is Sprint. [someone cheers] Oh.. FUCK SPRINT. okay? You work for those idiots, I need to talk to you. "Every call is crystal clear." Yeah, right: to yourself! You can hear you!"

"It [The Weather Channel] is the most watched cable channel in America. I'll repeat that. It is the most watched cable channel in America. They were worried about the terrorists immobilizing us, and a portion of our countrymen watch weather. 'Kay, you don't get any more immobile than that... unless you're in a goddamn coma. That means you're saying, "I'd go to the window, but it's too far." If you want to know what the weather is you go to a window and stick your hand out and if you want to know what the temperature is you drive by a bank."

"When they [N'Sync and Aerosmith] played, it wasn't music. It was the sound of chaos. I knew it was the sound of chaos because you could hear pigs being slaughtered. Women were weeping and men were gnashing their teeth, and there were sounds so horrible that I cannot repeat them to you, or you would flee from this room in horror!"

"Can somebody explain to me why Pepsi and Coke advertise? Are we missing something? Seriously, everyone in this room has drank enough Pepsi and Coke in their lifetime they could piss it for a week."

"Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch."

"“Molecular biology has no history for the young scientist,” one of the old guard declared not long ago. Sydney Brenner qualified that: “I hold the somewhat weaker view that history does exist for the young, but is divided into two epochs: the past two years, and everything that went before.”"

"Philosophers used to ask whether we are born with or invent our sense of time. Now we know that we have clocks woven into every one of our cells. Philosophers also used to ask how we know that the sun will rise tomorrow. In a sense we have that answer built into us, too. The clock is a kind of orrery in the heart of every one of our cells, revolving to help us keep time with our world, a model of the cosmos inside our heads that cycles whether we are in or out of sight of the sun. The revolution of the stars and the seasons is written in the turns of our DNA."

"“Ethicists are a mixed lot,” he says, “generally not worrying about their own problems, just somebody else’s problems.”"

"The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”"

"Some people seem to think that behavior is behavior only when it is a mystery, Hall continued. But once any piece of behavior is understood at the molecular level, it all comes down to metabolism, whether we are talking about the way a weaver ant folds a leaf, a weaverbird weaves a hanging nest, a human being learns and speaks Swahili, or a fly rises with the dawn and settles down at dusk. “Benzer was once subjected, in my earshot,” Hall said, “to some dumb question like ‘Is that the mind or the brain?’ But every aspect of mind and brain is ultimately metabolism! What do we think? Some kind of electric aura hovers around our heads?” We still seem to want something outside the mechanism, Hall said, some deus ex machina to save us from the clockwork that we have been exploring above and inside our heads for the last several centuries. It is now time for us to accept that behavior is as much a part of the material world as the stars above us and the atoms inside us. All behavior turns on molecular clockwork, Hall said, yet all behavior is fascinating."

"We do not lift a finger without three kinds of information: the information we are getting from our senses at that moment; the information we have gotten from our senses in the past; and the information our ancestors have acquired since life began on Earth—that is, the information that is represented by genes themselves. Evolution is learning. Species store learning in chromosomes the way individuals store learning in their brains and societies store learning in books."

"With the discovery of the clock gene, the sense of time, mysterious for so many centuries, was no longer a mystery that could be observed only from the outside. Now it could be explored as a mechanism from the inside. The discovery implied that behavior itself could now be charted and mapped as precisely as any other aspect of inheritance. Qualities that people had always thought of as somehow floating above the body, apart from the body, as if they belonged to the realm of the spirit and not of the flesh, as if they were supernatural, might be mapped right alongside qualities as mundane as eye pigment."

"One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer."

"All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there."

"The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance."

"All times seem special to those who live in them."

"What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself."

"“Our only real competition for domination of the planet remains the viruses,” the microbiologist Joshua Lederberg once said. “The survival of humanity,” he added, “is not preordained.”"

"We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once."

"Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer."

"Geneticists will tell you that. Evolution is always happening. What they mean is that the genes of this generation are not precisely what they were the preceding generation. Nor will they be precisely the same in the next. And evolution is that change."

"For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions."

"Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, “acid & Austere.” There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed."

"Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all."

"Watson sighs. “So in that sense you don’t have a free will. Your reactions are programmed. You know, you start asking the difference,” he says with a nod toward the Fly Room next door. “What free will is there in Drosophila? You put the question of the free will of a fly. And what’s really different about the fly’s brain from ours—which gives us free will? “I’m sure once we know how the brain works, we’ll no longer talk about free will in the Jesuit sense. It will cease to be, you know—” Freedom will cease to be a mystery requiring Jesuitical debate; it will cease to be a theological or philosophical question. “It will just be how the brain works. You will describe how the brain works. You won’t use the words ‘free will’; you know, you’ll understand…. Because you’re asking, how does the brain work?” He says in a softer voice. “That’s what you’re really asking.” The bell in the double-helical bell tower outside his office window begins to toll. “And that’s really the ultimate question to ask,” he says."