Dave Barry

Enjoy these six million Dave Barry quotes.... :D

"In some versions of my original contest column I had proposed, in a lighthearted manner, that we reduce the deficit by 'selling unnecessary states such as Oklahoma to the Japanese.' This caused a number of Oklahomans to send in letters containing many correctly spelled words and making the central lighthearted point that I am a jerk. They also sent me official literature stating that Oklahoma has enormous quantities of culture in the form of ballet, Oral Roberts, etc., and that the Official State Reptile -- I am not making this up -- is something called the 'Mountain Boomer.' So I apologize to Oklahoma, and as a token of my sincerity I'm willing to sell my state, Florida, to the Japanese, assuming nobody objects to the fact that Japan would suddenly become the most heavily armed nation on Earth."


"I probably should never have been there anyway, and it served me right when the two alert police officers fired up their siren, pulled me over, and pointed out that my car's registration had expired. I had not realized this, and as you can imagine I felt like quite the renegade outlaw as one of the officers painstakingly wrote out my ticket, standing well to the side of the road so as to avoid getting hit by the steady stream of passing unlicensed and uninsured motorists driving their stolen cars with their left hands so that their right hands would be free to keep their pit bulls from spilling their cocaine all over their machine guns. Not that I am bitter."


"I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up."


"There are many silly superstitions about lightning, and as a result many people - maybe even you - are terrified of it. You shouldn't worry. Thanks to modern science we now know that lightning is nothing more than huge chunks of electricity that can come out of the sky, anytime, anywhere, and kill you."


"The only flaw in the Hinckley trial is that it left a lot of people with the impression that psychiatrists are just a bunch of bearded voodoo doctors who espouse confusing and wildly contradictory theories that have nothing to do with common sense. This is totally unfair. Many psychiatrists are clean-shaven."


"Back in the old days, most families were close-knit. Grown children and their parents continued to live together, under the same roof, sometimes in the same small, crowded room, year in and year out, until they died, frequently by strangulation."


"Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet."


"Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough."


"Puns are little plays on words that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead."


"Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth."


"Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing."

http://www.quotedb.com/


Turbulence: This is what pilots announce that you have encountered when your plane strikes an object in midair. You'll be flying along, and there will be an enormous, shuddering WHUMP, and clearly the plane has rammed into an airborne object at least the size of a water buffalo, and the pilot will say, "Folks, we're encountering a little turbulence." Meanwhile they are up there in the cockpit trying desperately to clean water buffalo organs off the windshield.

If you're apprehensive about flying, let me assure you, as a frequent flier, that few experiences are more enjoyable than being seven miles above the Earth's surface in a crowded aging piece of machinery held aloft by principles of physics that you do not even dimly grasp while giant invisible gravity rays pound relentlessly on the roof.


In summary, then, we see that, because of the location and nature of their respective organs, women tend to have a more serious, thoughtful, and responsible attitude towards relationships than men do. I realize this is an absurd generalization, but my feeling is that if we can't have absurd generalizations, we might as well not even bother to write books.


New York is in fact a major tourist destination, drawing millions of visitors each year, the majority of whom are never robbed and stabbed and left on the sidewalk to bleed to death while being stepped over by enough people to populate the entire state of Montana. Their secret? They follow certain common-sense New York City safety rules, such as:
-Always walk at least 30 miles per hour.
-Always keep your money and other valuables in a safe place, such as Switzerland.
-Avoid unsafe areas, such as your hotel bathroom.
-Never make eye contact. This is asking to be mugged. In the New York court system, a mugger is automatically declared not guilty if the defense can prove that the victim has a history of making eye contact.


The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: "I bet that if we called this something like `escargot,' tourists would eat it." Then they had hearty laugh, because "escargot" is the French word for "fat crawling bag of phlegm."


Poland has experienced a tremendous amount of history due to the fact that it has no natural defensible borders, which makes it very easy to conquer. Many times the other nations didn't even mean to invade Poland; one night they'd simply forget to set the parking brakes on their tanks, and they'd wake up the next morning to discover that, whoosh, they had conquered Poland.


I'm an experienced South Florida driver, and almost getting hit is *nothing*. It's routine. It happens *every day*. I'm so used to it that I don't even bother to honk at motorists who almost kill me. Generally it's a bad idea to honk down here anyway, inasmuch as the South Florida motoring public is as heavily armed as Iraq, but not as peace-loving.


I disapprove of the F-word, not because it's dirty, but because we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently leads to violence. What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say, in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we've had time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the library, we could call each other up:
You: Hello? Bob?
Bob: Yes?
You: This is Ed. Remember? The person whose parking space you took last Thursday? Outside of Sears?
Bob: Oh yes! Sure! How are you, Ed?
You: Fine, thanks. Listen, Bob, the reason I'm calling is: "Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and ..." No, wait. I mean: "you may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill and ..." No, wait. (Sound of reference book thudding onto the floor.) S-word. Excuse me. Look, Bob, I'm going to have to get back to you.
Bob: Fine.


DAVE BARRY's GUIDE TO COLLEGE

ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in *your* paper, *you* say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple s tories, you should major in English.

PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.


June 14: Eight concerned parents in rural Georgia sue the local school district for teaching their children the alphabet, which can be used to form dirty words.



Computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By "they" I mean "computers": I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)



In most nations, when people say "football", they mean "soccer", which is a completely different game in which smallish persons whiz about on a field while the spectators beat each other up and eventually overthrow the government. I don't know why the other nations call soccer "football," but I suspect it has something to do with the metric system and I say the (heck) with it.


To understand the importance of financial planning for your retirement years, let's consider the famous true Aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ant.
It seems that many years ago, there lived a lazy grasshopper and a hardworking ant. All summer long, while the ant was busily networking with other ants and gathering food, the grasshopper sat around drinking vodka gimlets and watching "General Hospital." When winter came, the grasshopper had nothing to eat, while the ant was snug and warm in his cozy little house filled with putrefying chunks of road-kill raccoon. Finally the grasshopper, starving, came to the ant's door and said, "Can I have some food?" And the ant said: "Well, I suppose GAACCKK," and they were both crushed by rocks dropped on them by Boy Scouts on a nature walk. This was a very poor financial decision, when you think how much money these boys could have gotten for a pair of talking insects.


Socially prominent people are very fond of disease, because it gives them a chance to have these really elaborate charity functions, and the newspaper headlines say, "EVENING IN PARIS BALL RAISES MONEY TO FIGHT GOUT" instead of "RICH PEOPLE AMUSE THEMSELVES."


The presidential race heats up as George W. Bush proposes an idea that he came up with recently while reading an index card, which is to allow younger workers to take some of their Social Security money and, as the governor puts it, "investisize in the stocks market or professional baseball teams or whatever and thusly enjoy the labors of their fruits." Vice President Al Gore immediately criticizes this plan as a "risky scheme" that could result in "millions of dead senior citizens," which in turn "could impact global warming." Polls show that this is a hot-button issue with the public, with 50 percent of likely voters wishing they had two other candidates to choose from, and the other 50 percent agreeing.

homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/ Quotes/Modern_World/Dave_Barry.html