Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [117]
51. People are too careful with books. If you like a book, you ought to mark it up with a pencil. Publishers put too much money in the flimsy paper dust jacket on books. The first thing I do with any book that doesn’t have my picture on the jacket is throw the jacket away.
52. I don’t like to lock anything or take precautions against having it stolen because every time I do, I get the feeling the bastards have beat me a little by making me do it.
53. It doesn’t make sense to be against abortion and for the death penalty.
54. It’s too bad we seem to need six or seven hours’ sleep. Someone’s going to invent a way for us to sleep faster.
55. It seems wrong for a state to take money from the poor and ignorant by selling them lottery tickets to collect money to help the state provide welfare and education to the poor and ignorant.
56. People talk as though they like the country better than the city but they move to the city.
57. Farmers have been quitting the farm and moving to the city for years but you never see any of them there.
58. There’s an acute shortage of well-known people in America. The same ones keep appearing on television talk shows. Of course, maybe what we need is not more well-known people but fewer talk shows.
59. Ronald Reagan wasn’t as successful reducing the size of government as Franklin Roosevelt was in increasing it.
60. No one wants to read a lot of good writing. There’s just so much good writing a reader can take.
61. If the reviews talk about how good the acting is in the movie, I don’t go see it. Like writing, there’s just so much good acting I can take. Acting and writing shouldn’t call attention to themselves.
62. It no longer makes any sense to bother to use an apostrophe between the n and t in words like dont and isnt.
63. Most evenings I have two drinks of bourbon before dinner even though I am uneasily aware that the practice is difficult to defend against the charge that drinking is no different from using drugs. Drinking also isn’t compatible with my belief that our best hope for happiness is clear thinking, but I try to have my thinking out of the way for the day by the time I have my first drink.
64. Journalists are more honest than other businesspeople because honesty is a hobby with them. They’re amused by it. They talk about honesty at lunch. They aren’t naturally any more honest, but it’s on their minds.
65. There are more beauty parlors than there are beauties.
65. It’s harder to avoid listening to something you don’t want to hear than it is to avoid seeing something you’d rather not see.
67. We’re all proud of admitting little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don’t make any big ones.
68. I’m always surprised when a light bulb burns out.
69. It’s amazing that bees keep making honey, cows keep giving milk and hens keep laying eggs all their lives. There certainly isn’t much in it for them.
70. It’s too bad Jesus didn’t have a family.
71. Getting up early in the morning is a good way to gain respect without ever actually having to do anything.
72. It sounds funny in the house without the television set on.
73. I’d get a lot more reading done in bed if I read when I woke up in the morning instead of when I crawled in at night.
74. People who are wrong seem to talk louder than anyone else.
75. I don’t like any music I can’t hum.
76. Ice cream was just as good when they only had three flavors, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.
77. The middle of the night seems longer than it used to.
78. I’m satisfied with the money I make until I read how much baseball players are making.
79 . No matter how big the umbrella you carry or how good your raincoat is, if it rains you get wet.
80. When the telephone rings in a store, the person behind the counter will spend five minutes explaining something to the caller while all the customers who have bothered to come to the store stand