Quotes are sorted by who said them, alphabetically. Quotes are occasionally thematic, usually inspired by something in that day's update, but often just whatever catches my eye as I'm scanning my quotes page for a new one. BlackChampagne.com does not necessarily agree with or endorse the messages in the quotes of the day, and in fact it's often exactly the opposite. I frequently select quite a quote to illustrate an opinion or deed I find abhorrent. If you want to know my opinion a given quote, feel free to ask.

If you have a quote you think I might like, feel free to send it in, with a link for attribution, please.

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I Quotes

¤ "We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"
--Lee Iacocca

¤ "People want economy and they will pay any price to get it."
-- Lee Iacocca

¤ "It's not that chocolates are a substitute for love. Love is a substitute for chocolate. Chocolate is, let's face it, far more reliable than a man."
--Miranda Ingram

¤ "My qualifications to host a talk show? That's about the only job in America one does not need qualifications for."
-- Laura Ingraham, former host of MSNBC's Watch It!

Molly Ivins
¤ "You know, when a bleeding heart liberal like me has to sit around lecturing a Republican administration on fiscal responsibility, we're in a sorry pass. I watch the entire corporate and financial structure of this country running around raising money like crazy for the re-election of George W. Bush, and I am reminded once more that capitalism will destroy itself if you let it."
--Molly Ivins

¤ "Let me second the notion that this year, the Internet is to politics what television was in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "In WWI, we had citizens who used to go around kicking dachshunds, on the grounds that they were "German dogs." You notice people like that never go around kicking German shepherds."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "The only thing that smells worse than an oil refinery is a feedlot. And Texas has a lot of both."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "I don't quite understand why Congress is all upset and suing the vice president over who had input on the energy plan. You'd have to be dumber than a stump to think the Bush energy plan is anything but the product of the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "Less than one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all campaign contributions in the 2002 elections."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "One of the most profound insights I have ever had about our national life is that you can not outlaw bad taste in America."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "The top corporations that paid zero taxes from 1996 to 1998 --including AT&T, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chase Manhattan, Enron, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Microsoft, Pfizer and Phillip Morris -- gave $150.1 million to campaigns from 1991 to 2001. Public Campaign reports they got $55 billion in tax breaks from ‘96 to ‘98 alone, perennial legislation to gut the alternative minimum tax and billions in rebates to select corporations. Public Campaign also notes that we paid with a huge shift in who pays more into the federal treasuries: Three times as much money now comes from working people's payroll taxes as from corporate tax payments."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "Eric Schaeffer, head of the EPA's Regulatory Enforcement, quit in protest over the Bush administration's efforts to undermine tough legal action against dozens of aging coal-fired power plants that are in violation of federal law. The EPA believes 10,000 deaths a year are caused by the millions of tons of pollution by these plants. When 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, we promptly went to war -- one that is now spreading around the globe -- in order to get the killers. When American industry kills Americans, this administration accommodates them endlessly."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "[We should] stop our blind support of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians and get serious about forcing a settlement in the face of that yawning disaster. We are more pro-Israeli than the Israelis, who have a humongous public debate about their own policies, which rather clearly aren't working worth a damn."
-- Molly Ivins

¤ "Being instructed what to think by the peerlessly pompous Mr. Will, perched upon his superiority and apparently in a permanent state of dudgeon over everybody else's stupidity, is reminiscent of being bullied by a snotty teacher... Will is often worth reading if only so you can figure out why you disagree with him."
-- Molly Ivins

J Quotes

¤ "I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better."
-- Glenda Jackson

¤ "I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five."
-- Mick Jagger

¤ "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely reorganizing their prejudices."
-- William James

Thomas Jefferson
¤ "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
--Thomas Jefferson

¤ "I have examined all of the known superstitions of the World, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology.  Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth..."
-- Thomas Jefferson

¤ "The man who reads almost nothing is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
--Thomas Jefferson

¤ "The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites."
-- Thomas Jefferson

¤ "The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind... to filch wealth and power to themselves. [They] in face constitute the real Anti-Christ."
-- Thomas Jefferson.

¤ "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
-- Thomas Jefferson

¤ "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
--Thomas Jefferson

¤ "I'm originally from Iowa.  It took me a long time to realize we were free to go."
-- Jake Johannsen

Samuel Johnson
¤ "It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art."
--Samuel Johnson

¤ "Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned."
-- Samuel Johnson

¤ "What I gained in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country."
-- Samuel Johnson

Franklin P. Jones
¤ "One thing you will probably remember well is anytime you forgive and forget."
--Franklin P. Jones

¤ "Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger."
--Franklin P. Jones

¤ "Michael and I were devastated ... It looks as thought all I did that day was eat."
-- Catherine Zeta Jones, testifying against a tabloid that printed unauthorized wedding photos of Michael Douglas putting a bite of cake into her mouth with the headline "Catherine Eater Jones"

Erica Jong
¤ "My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw.  After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live."
-- Erica Jong

¤ "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."
-- Erica Jong

¤ "Only choose in marriage a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man."
-- Joseph Joubert

K Quotes

¤ "Movies are so rarely great that if we can not appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them."
-- Pauline Kael

¤ "I am anorexic for an opera singer... but I'm a fat anorexic."
-- Kiri Te Kanawa

¤ "Advice is probably the only free thing which people won't take."
--Lothar Kaul

¤ "My ancestors were Puritans from England.  They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at the time."
-- Garrison Keillor

¤ "Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold."
--Helen Keller

¤ "I've had a tough time learning to act like a congressman.  Today I accidentally spent some of my own money."
-- Joseph P. Kennedy II

¤ "The secret of success is knowing whom to blame for your failure."
--E. L. Kersten

Kierkegaard
¤ "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
--Kierkegaard

¤ "Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward."
-- Kierkegaard

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
¤ "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

¤ "Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

¤ "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

¤ "It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me. But it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

¤ "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

¤ "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
-- Martin Luther King

¤ "I've always thought that somebody's going to come along and say, 'You must give it back [your money]. This is trash, and you must give it back.'"
-- Stephen King

Grenville Kleiser
¤ "Life is so great in its opportunities and possibilities, that you should rise confidently above the inevitable trifles incident to daily contact with the world. Life is too precious to be sacrificed for the nonessential and transient... Ignore the inconsequential."
--Grenville Kleiser

¤ "There are many fine things which you mean to do some day, under what you think will be more favorable circumstances. But the only time that is yours is the present."
--Grenville Kleiser

¤ "It is often better to have a great deal of harm happen to one than a little; a great deal may rouse you to remove what a little will only accustom you to endure."
--Grenville Kleiser

¤ "Children: A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
-- Ronald Knox

¤ "I'm like an expensive menu.  You can look at it, but you can't afford it."
-- Anna Kournikova

¤ "The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all."
--Aung San Suu Kyi Nobel Peace Prize Laureate leader of Burma's democracy movement

¤ "Many of you may not be aware of this, but there are many differences between men and women. For example, men have penises and women have, well, something really weird and different and unnecessarily complex."
-- Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka

L Quotes

¤ "Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound."
-- Walter Savage Landor

¤ "He used statistics the way a drunkard uses lampposts - for support, not illumination."
-- Andrew Lang

¤ "Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own."
--Doug Larson

¤ "The Bible contains 6 admonishments to homosexuals and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn't mean God doesn't love heterosexuals, it's just that they need more supervision."
-- Lynn Lavner

¤ "I am deeply troubled about asserting these rights, because it may be perceived by some that I have something to hide."
-- Ken Lay, on taking the fifth about his roll in the Enron scandal

¤ "The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent."
-- Mell Lazarus

¤ "Think for yourself and question authority."
-- Timothy Leary

Fran Lebowitz
¤ "Children are the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat."
-- Fran Lebowitz

¤ "Very few people possess true artistic ability.  It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort.  If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass."
-- Fran Lebowitz

¤ "Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult.  Many people find smoking objectionable.  I myself find many -- even more -- things objectionable. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan.  I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs."
-- Fran Lebowitz

¤ "Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you."
-- Fran Lebowitz

Raymond Lederer
¤ "Lawyer: you signed the death certificate?
Pathologist: yes
Q: Before you signed it, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check to see if he was breathing?
A: No.
Q: Did you listen for his heartbeat?
A: No.
Q Well how could you be sure he was dead?
A: I've got his brain in a jar on my desk, but I guess he could be walking around practicing law somewhere."
-- Actual court transcript, compiled by Raymond Lederer

¤ "Lawyer: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in the voodoo occult?
Witness: We both do.
Lawyer: Voodoo?
Witness: We do.
Lawyer: You do?
Witness: Yes, voodoo."
-- Actual court transcript, compiled by Raymond Lederer

¤  "He was audibly tan."
-- Annie Liebowitz

¤ "Whenever I travel I like to keep the seat next to me empty.  I found a great way to do it.  When someone walks down the aisle and says to you, 'is someone sitting there?' just say, 'no one -- except the Lord.'"
-- Carol Leifer

Oscar Levant
¤ "Harpo, she's a lovely person.  She deserves a good husband.  Marry her before she finds one."
-- Oscar Levant to Harpo Marx, upon meeting his fiancée

¤ "I envy people who drink, at least they know what to blame everything on."
-- Oscar Levant

¤ "She has discovered the secret of perpetual middle age."
-- Oscar Levant

¤ "You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough."
-- Joseph E. Levine

¤ "I don't like any female comedians... A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but it sets me back a bit... I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies into the world."
-- Jerry Lewis, at the US Comedy Festival in Aspen Colorado, 2000

¤ "During sex I fantasize that I'm somebody else."
-- Richard Lewis

¤ "The church has tried everything to improve relations with the Jews, but they don't forgive us the slightest thing."
-- Vatican official Msgr. Carlos Liberati, on Jewish opposition to the scheduled beautification of Pius XI, the 19th century pope who abducted a 6 year old from his Jewish parents and raised him in Rome as a Catholic

¤ "Your opponent, in the end, is never really the player on the other side of the net, or the swimmer in the next lane, or the team on the other side of the field, or even the bar you must high-jump. Your opponent is yourself, your negative internal voices, your level of determination."
--Grace Lichtenstein

¤ "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
-- A. J. Liebling

Abraham Lincoln
¤ "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
--Abraham Lincoln

¤ "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."
--Abraham Lincoln

¤ "No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."
-- Abraham Lincoln

¤ "Things may come to those who wait. But only the things left by those who hustle."
-- Abraham Lincoln

¤ "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
--Abraham Lincoln

¤ "When the Know-Nothings get control, it [the Declaration of Independence] will read: "All men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
-- Abraham Lincoln

¤ "He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met. "
-- Abraham Lincoln, speaking about a lawyer

¤ "In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be wrong and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. "
-- Abraham Lincoln

¤ "The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. "
-- Abraham Lincoln

¤ "Television is a golden goose that lays scrambled eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar.  Anyway, more people like scrambled eggs than caviar."
-- Lee Loevinger

¤ "Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy."
-- Huey P. Long

¤ "He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle."
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Calvin Coolidge)

¤ "Art is long and life is short; here, evidently, is the explanation of a Brahms symphony." -- Edward Lorne

¤ "Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if you toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers amongst you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?"
-- H. P. Lovecraft

¤ "Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people."
-- James Russell Lowell

¤ "A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are."
-- Victor Lownes

¤ "I'm a movie star. Can I talk to my entertainment lawyer?"
-- Actress Natasha Lyonne, to a police officer, after crashing her car, while drunk.

M Quotes

¤ "His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.  Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner in their midst until it died of servitude and overwork."
-- William McAdoo on Warren G. Harding

Eugene McCarthy
¤ "Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope."
-- Eugene McCarthy

¤ "It is dangerous for a national candidate to say anything people might remember."
--Eugene McCarthy

¤ "Being in politics is like being a football coach; you have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important. "
-- Eugene McCarthy

¤ "The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay

¤ "Girl bands have to survive on instinct, wit, talent and quality of song. It's a piece of piss in a boy band. You can write the most contrived drivel for a boy band and sell millions, because teenage girls are in love with the members. They say love is blind. It's also deaf."
-- Andy McCluskey, of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, (OMD) songwriter for some girl band.

¤ "I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with most opinions often have the fewest facts."
--Bethania McKenstry

¤ "Literature -- even bad, honest literature -- changes you once you've experienced it well and fully. It makes you restive and always slightly hungry. It makes you feel not bigger, but incalculably smaller, because you're forced to realize that there are entire worlds -- locked up in distorted bits and fragments -- in more books than you'll ever have time to open."
-- Gavin McNett, Reaching to the Converted

¤ "He felt the dog was a queer-type dog and it made him angry."
-- Capt. Mike McQuaig, on a Florida man convicted of animal cruelty after blowing his dog away.

¤ "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."
--James Madison

¤ "Make your thinking orderly and free from emotional overtones, and you will see people and things as they are, with clarity and charity."
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

¤ "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers."
--Marilyn Manson

¤ "If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist."
--Norman Mailer

¤ "If you attack stupidity, you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it."
-- Samuel Marchbanks

¤ "Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. 'Harpo my boy,' he said, 'I'm going to give you three piece of advice, three things you should always remember.' My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation.  I was going to hear the magic password to a rich full life from the master himself. 'Yes sir?' I said.  And he told me the three things.  I regret that I've forgotten what they were."
-- Harpo Marx

Groucho Marx
¤ "I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury."
--Groucho Marx

¤ "I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it."
--Groucho Marx

¤ "Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped."
-- Groucho Marx

¤ "Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere."
-- Groucho Marx

¤ "We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity: gun powder and romantic love."
-- Andre Maurois

¤ "You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
-- W. Somerset Maugham

¤ "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on."
-- Louis B. Mayer

H. L. Mencken
¤ "Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
--H. L. Mencken

¤ "The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable."
--H. L. Mencken

¤ "No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her."
--H. L. Mencken

"Most people want security in this world, not liberty"
--H. L. Mencken

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