Dave Barry Quotes

My mother told me, “Son, it is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.” I have tried very hard to heed those words.

People are afraid to own their own homes. People are afraid their own government will catch them fixing their houses.

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

San Francisco leads the world in the category of Most People On The Sidewalk Holding Conversations With Purely Imaginary Companions.

Seriously? You won’t help me?” “Help yourself get killed? No, I won’t.

Guys are simple... women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically.

The problem was that Panama technically belonged to Colombia, which refused to sign a treaty leasing it to the United States. So Roosevelt sent a gunboat filled with marines down to Panama, just on the off chance that a revolution might suddenly break out, and darned if one didn't, two days later. Not only that, but the leaders of the new nation of Panama-talk about lucky breaks!-were absolutely thrilled to have the United States build a canal there. 'Really, it's our pleasure,' they told the marines, adding, 'Don't shoot.'

Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

I read a lot of lot non-demanding fiction.

The porpoises said hello to Molly. She told them all her teeth were green.

It may be meaningless, but at least it's a gesture.

I actually kind of like Janet Reno. She seems like a nice enough lady. But when you're basically going through the entire phone book trying to find women lawyers who don't have maids to pick the attorney general of the United States, how well can you do?

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism.

DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism, a complex string of syllables.

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 great thing about golf - and this is the reason why a lot of health experts like me recommend it - you can drink beer and ride in a cart while you play.

Of course, the truth is that the congresspersons are too busy raising campaign money to read the laws they pass. The laws are written by staff tax nerds who can put pretty much any wording they want in there. I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the US tax code, you'd find at least one sex scene. ("Yes, yes, YES!" moaned Vanessa as Lance, his taut body moist with moisture, again and again depreciated her adjusted gross rate of annualized fiscal debenture...)

My wife, like many women, actually LIKES wrapping things. If she gives you a gift that requires batteries, she wraps the batteries separately, which to me is very close to being a symptom of mental illness.

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

...light overcomes darkenss. A tiny match can illuminate the darkest room. As long as there is some light somewhere in the universe, [darkness] can be defeated.

The population of earth has reached 7 billion people, every single one of whom send you irritating emails to join something called "LinkedIn."

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.

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 wrote about why I didn't think libertarians are really doing this kind of thing so that they can have sex with dogs. I discussed some of the reasons that a person might want to live out of the control of our federal, state, local, and every other form of government. Actually, I don't think I even called myself a libertarian. I think Tom Shroder identified me as one.

Hardware: This is the part of the computer that stops working when you spill beer on it.

My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS.

I'm happy to start on one topic and end on another one entirely, as long as it's funny.

I was very pleased to get a Supreme Court justice suggesting a column, so I went and did a column about Beano. I went with my wife and another guy to a Mexican restaurant, which we thought would be the ultimate test for an antiflatulance product. There's a reason most of Mexico is located out of doors. And it worked. Several newspapers refused to run that column. But they did run advertisements for Beano.

You can be the smartest person in the world - which Bill Clinton is, and if he's not, his wife is - and care more than anybody else in the world - which he does, I don't doubt that for a minute. And you can care so much that you're willing to be dishonest - you can tell people one thing but do another because you really know it's for their own good. And you'll still screw it all up. Because the whole premise of what you're doing is wrong!

The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.

This was years ago, I think during the early [Ronald] Reagan years. I came up with a plan that everybody just pay $8.95 in taxes. Cheating would be allowed. But the incentive to cheat wouldn't be nearly as great if you only had to pay the $8.95. There were a few people who would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars under this plan. I think it was Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the guys who do the quiz shows. But almost everybody else would be off really cheap.

The hardest thing about being a guy is that women don't accept that you really are just a simple, pathetic, labrador retriever-like creature. That we live in a world were women actually expect you to think thoughtful thoughts, and have real emotions, which we don't have. Having to try to live up to the imaginary ideal that women have of what men are, instead of just being what you are, which is just a pathetic creature, but still.

How do these celebrities stay so impossibly thin? Simple: They have full-time personal trainers, who advise them on nutrition, give them pep talks, and shoot them with tranquilizer darts whenever they try to crawl, on hunger-weakened limbs, toward the packet of rice cakes that constitutes the entire food supply in their 37,000-square-foot mansions. For most celebrities, the biggest meal of the day is toothpaste (they use reduced-fat Crest).

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

People - just weird people are attracted to Miami. And they come there not for serious reasons, usually.

When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.

Advice to expectant mothers: you must remember that when you are pregnant, you are eating for two. But you must remember that the other one of you is about the size of a golf ball, so let's not go overboard with it. I mean, a lot of pregnant women eat as though the other person they're eating for is Orson Welles.

You should never pick up a newspaper when you're feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories.

Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it.

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.

The fact that Gene Weingarten and I and Bathroom Inventory are now part of some kind of Matrix of Poop strongly suggests that the Pulitzer is not what it once was.

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

Why can't Americans do their own taxes? Because the federal Tax Code is out of control, that's why. It's gigantic and insanely complex, and it gets worse all the time. Nobody has ever read the whole thing. IRS workers are afraid to go into the same ROOM with it.

You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government!

I have never had a point in my life to make. I'm just trying to entertain the reader.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.

I love Halloween. It reminds me of my happy childhood days as a student at Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., when we youngsters used to celebrate Halloween by making decorations out of construction paper and that white paste that you could eat.

Professional marriage counselors agree that the most productive and mature way to deal with marital anger is to stomp dramatically from the room. You want to make your move before the opponent does, because the first person to stomp from the room receives valuable Argument Points that can be redeemed for exciting merchandise at the Marital Prize Redemption Center.