Dave Barry Um Quotations

Another foreign-policy triumph for Reagan was his 1984 visit to China, where he met for more than three hours with Mao Zedong before realizing that Mao was dead.

Don't get me wrong. I like Disney World. The rest rooms are clean enough for neurosurgery, and the employees say things like "Howdy, folks!" and actually seem to mean it. You wonder: Where do they get these people? My guess: 1952. I think old Walt realized, way back then, that there would eventually be a shortage of cheerful people, so he put all the residents of south western Nebraska into a giant freezer with a huge picture of Jiminy Cricket on the outside, and the corporation has been thawing them out as needed ever since.

Disney Resort and World and Compound, a place where your dreams really do come true, if you dream about having people wearing enormous cartoon-animal heads come around to your restaurant table and act whimsical and refuse to go away until you laugh with delight.

The doctor looked at my cardiogram and made that "hmmmm" noise that doctors are taught in medical school so they won't come right out and say "UH-oh!"

The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture finished and put inside boxes.

Instead of a permit system or regulations, the Forest Service needs to reduce worldwide population growth to limit the number of visitors to wilderness.

I guess libertarianism is always considered so weird and fringe that people assume that you're in the closet if you don't go around talking about it.

There are also a number of humans living up there (Canada), and in many ways they have a lifestyle quite similar to ours, including such traditional American activities as driving Japanese cars.

The Democrats believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Internal Revenue Service.

I say the American Medical Association ought to get the hell off the golf course and answer this question ...

In my experience, if you go to a hospital for any reason whatsoever, including to read the gas meter, they give you a tetanus shot.

I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I'm saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.

Earnest is our dog. She senses instantly that something is wrong, and guided by that timeless and unerring nurturing instinct that all female dogs have, she tries to lick my ears off.

I'm afraid that, in this chapter we must talk about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys.

I'm not saying that women don't think about sex also. I'm saying that women are capable, for at least brief periods of time, of not thinking about sex, and that most guys are not.

What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the middle of the night.

I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say - they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College - "I just hate to talk to a machine!" They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn't go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society.

Canada, as you know, is a major important nation boasting a sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture that was tragically destroyed last week by beavers.

Baby's room should be close enough to your room so that you can hear baby cry, unless you want to get some sleep, in which case baby's room should be in Peru.

The Russians will never be able to get their missiles thought the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.

The planes are crowded and noisy and late, and everybody hates everybody. If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meals.

Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with.

If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today's airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog?

It was you readers who really came through, proving once again that when the American people decide to "get involved" in a problem, it is best not to let them have any sharp implements.

We have been flooded with postal cards from all over the United States and several parallel universes. Just a quick glance though these cards is enough to remind you why this great nation, despite all the talk of decline, still leads the world in tranquilizer consumption.

The beer sold here in the United States is sweet and watery and lacking in taste and overcarbonated and just generally the lamest, wimpiest beer in the entire known world. All the other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer, and we are drinking Barry Manilow.

Real cars were made here in America: Fords, Chevys, Plymouths. These were large chunks of Detroit iron - cars that had the size, weight, and handling characteristics of aircraft carriers but worse fuel efficiency.

The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.

This (America) is a land of rich diversity, from the towering skyscrapers of Manhatan all the way to the towering mounds of garbage piled up next to the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud.

You can't have a bad time at Disney World. It's not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson.

The best time to go to Disney World, if you want to avoid huge crowds, is 1962.

Epcot Center also features pavilions built by various foreign nations, where you can experience an extremely realistic simulation of what life in these nations would be like if they consisted almost entirely of restaurants and souvenir stores.

We should call editorials what they are: columns written by committees.

If it weren't for marriage, men and women would have to fight with total strangers.

All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?

I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont.

Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.

Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean famous for its wild horses. I realize that the concept of wild horses probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you have never met any wild horses in person. In person, they are like enormous hooved rats. They amble up to your camp site, and their attitude is: We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

I watched as an extremely nerdy exhibitor - I'm talking about a guy who makes Bill Gates look like Brad Pitt ...

Modern cyberspace is a deadly festering swamp, teeming with dangerous programs such as 'viruses,' 'worms,' 'Trojan horses' and 'licensed Microsoft software' that can take over your computer and render it useless.

What gets me is, I waited in line for an hour to do this. I could have experienced essentially the same level of enjoyment merely by sticking my finger down my throat.

Many, many of you have written to me asking the following question: 'Dave, have their been any new advancements in the field of artificial falcon insemination, and could these developments be used to improve the American electoral process?'

Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money.

As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved.

The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

England is a very popular foreign country to visit because the people there speak some English.

Dogs make good pets because they are very loyal

Mousse was a Labrador retriever, which is a large enthusiastic bulletproof species of dog made entirely from synthetic materials. This is the kind of dog that, if it takes an interest in your personal regions (which of course it does) you cannot fend it off with a blowtorch.

The first animals to be successfully domesticated were dogs, which were a big help because they would bark all night and fetch thrown sticks, thereby freeing humans from having to perform these tedious yet vital tasks.

They have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can't move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed.

English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

The basic Roman ruin design is a pile of rocks with a little plaque saying "Roman Ruins" and a group of tourists frowning at it and wishing they were back at the hotel bar..

The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.

Of course God enjoys a good prank as much as the next infallible deity.

One key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium.

Nevada has a very dynamic economy, with gambling being the number-one industry, followed closely by blood donorship.

Europeans, like some Americans, drive on the right side of the road, except in England, where they drive on both sides of the road; Italy, where they drive on the sidewalk; and France, where if necessary they will follow you right into the hotel lobby.

When I say "dogs", I'm talking about dogs, which are large, bounding, salivating animals, usually with bad breath. I am not talking about those little squeaky things you can hold on your lap and carry around. Zoologically speaking, these are not dogs at all; they are members of the pillow family.

This (French-Kissing) is a really sexy thing to do, according to the French people, although you should bear in mind that they also like to eat snails.

This nation is so friendly that the leading cause of injury is getting passionately embraced by strangers.

Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order.

I had no shoes and I pitied myself. Then I met a man who had no feet, so I took his shoes.

In modern America, food is abundant everywhere except aboard commercial airplanes.

Granted, this system is insane, but we must not let sanity stand in the way of airport security.

Elsewhere in Italy is the lovely city of Venice, which each year attracts millions of visitors despite the fact that it is basically an enormous open sewer..

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret.

Japan has a low crime rate, unless you count the fact that approximately every fifteen minutes the entire Cabinet gets indicted for taking bribes.

... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them. Holiday shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a shopping bag. If your children object to being tied, threaten to take them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up.

Everybody in New York, including police horses, dresses fashionably, and whenever I'm there, even in my sharpest funeral-quality suit with no visible ketchup stains, I feel as though I'm wearing a Hefty trash bag. And it's last year's Hefty trash bag.

At the height of rush hour, people on the London underground actually say "excuse me." Imagine what would happen if you tried an insane stunt like that on the New York City subway. The other passengers would take it as a sign of weakness, and there'd be a fight over who got to keep your ears as a trophy.

Famous designers think nothing of putting their names on your clothing, but would have the servants set the dogs on you if you ever tried to put your name on their clothing.

The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap.

Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.

I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns.

Flying from the United States to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.

The method (of learning Japanese) recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan. And even then it's not easy.

It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight.

Although it was constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance budget of nearly $8, currently stolen, and it does a remarkable job of getting New Yorkers from Point A to an indeterminate location somewhere in the tunnel leading to point B.

The Soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for "Joey Bananas")

The Olympic movement simply cannot allow the Russians to become estranged, because Russia is a vital part of the world sports community, in the sense of having nuclear missiles.

I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

If he (The New York Taxi Driver) talked to me, he might lose his concentration, which would be very bad because the taxi has some kind of problem with the steering, probably dead pedestrians lodged in the mechanism, the result being that there is a delay of 8 to 10 seconds between the time the driver turns the wheel and the time the taxi actually changes direction, a handicap that the driver is compensating for by going 175 miles per hour, at which velocity we are able to remain airborne almost to the far rim of some of the smaller potholes.

We decide to start with the best-known sight of all, the one that, more than any other, exemplifies what the Big Apple is all about: the Islip Garbage Barge.

Within less than an hour, Chuck and I easily located what could well be the correct platform, where we pass the time by perspiring freely until the train storms in, colorfully decorated, as is the tradition in New York, with the spray-painted initials of all the people it has run over.

If for some reason you are unsure where to go, all you have to do is stand there looking lost, and within seconds a helpful New Yorker will approach to see if you have any "spare" change.

You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.

Never assume that the guy understands that you and he have a relationship.

When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer.

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

American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it.

The word user is the word used by the computer professional when they mean idiot.

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.

If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

In foreign countries such as Italy, the government puts strict-looking speed limit signs everywhere, but nobody ever sees them because light does not travel fast enough to catch the Italian drivers.

This year, U.S. airlineswill carry a record 143 million passengers, who will be in the air for 382 million hours, during which they will be fed an estimated total of four peanuts.