“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”
Will Rogers quoted in “More Random Quotes” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #1 (9/03)
“Ted Williams once said of the latter group [sportswriters, possibly Bostonian in particular] that you could pour hot water on them and get ‘instant s—t.’”
Colby Cosh in Western Standard May 21, 2007 [again bending my normal ban on cussing but my objection is not that you should never swear, it’s that you should do so rarely… for instance here; I’d been holding off using this one but surely you admit it’s funny and could not be said in any other way].
“And then there are the really mega-freaky publications like Weekly World News that are so deranged parakeets will actually hold their shit in until something else is placed in the bottom of their cage.”
Dennis Miller The Rants [violating my normal rule against dirty words but they do have a place].
“You would make a good lawyer.”
A fortune in a fortune cookie I received in 1999; I believe it was meant as a compliment.
“The first time a lawyer was present when someone spilled lighter fluid all over themselves and then lit a match to inspect the stain, we as a species were doomed.”
Shannon McKinnon in Ottawa Citizen May 22, 1999
“I do not like to speak ill of any man but I strongly suspect yonder gentleman to be a lawyer.”
Samuel Johnson quoted without source in Tom Davey, For Whom the Polls Tell
“His jokes may be much worse in your opinion than they are in his opinion; but after all they must be jokes; they cannot be entirely shapeless mysteries, like many modern works of philosophy.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Sherlock Holmes” in A Handful of Authors, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“I hadn’t expected him to open up, since he is as pigheaded as I am steadfast, but he could have made some little comment.”
Narrator Archie Goodwin re himself and his boss Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout “Blood Will Tell” in Trio for Blunt Instruments