| 15 Feb, 2009 |
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The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep. My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes. We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years. Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it. The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible. The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself. Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors. Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks. Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim. A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. I find nothing more depressing than optimism. Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore. You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience. Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. People will buy anything that is one to a customer. There are more fools in the world than there are people. Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. Illusion is the first of all pleasures. I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise. Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure? Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity. To err is dysfunctional, to forgive co-dependent. The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth. One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else. An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens. The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you. The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it. |
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