Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.

Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.

Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.

The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way!

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.

I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.