Dave Barry Quotes

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

I feel ever more strongly the awful tragedy of our—the German race--predicament. It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot prevail against England. The English—the best race in the world—can’t lose. But we can lose and will lose, if not this year then next. The idea that our race should be beaten distresses me terribly because I am completely and utterly German.

Canadians can be funny.

I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.

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.

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?

Bargaining is a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues - the difference between the two being that the first is practised on the Continent, the latter in Great Britain.

The first time I came across the birds and the bees in actual flight, I couldn't identify the formation.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.

You can't be Canadian without being aware of at least one other country, the United States, 'cause it's so important to us. I think we sometimes like to think that, you know, Americans will pay attention to us from time to time, too.

Then, at the end of every hand, Miss Bolo would inquire with a dismal countenance and reproachful sigh, why Mr. Pickwick had not returned that diamond, or led the club, or roughed the spade, or finessed the heart, or led through the honour, or brought out the ace, or played up to the king, or some such thing; and in reply to all these grave charges, Mr. Pickwick would be wholly unable to plead any justification whatever, having by this time forgotten all about the game.

When the Dodgers left, it was not only a loss of a team, it was the disruption of a social pattern. A total destruction of a culture.

It's a wonderful way to live, and not a bad way to go, either. The average Frenchman is still smiling three months after he's dead.

The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm-tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse.

An exotic and irrational entertainment.

He was by no means opposed to hard labour on principle, for he would work away at a cricket-match by the day together, - running, and catching, and batting, and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley-slave.

Sometimes you're the windshield; sometimes you're the bug.

Let me see you ride a donkey over my green again, and as sure as you have a head upon your shoulders, I'll knock your bonnet off, and tread upon it!

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.

Then people ask me if I'm worried about the effects of global warming on my kids. Well, obviously I love my kids and I want them to live to be a 100. So that's another 1.8. My kids' kids? Three point six. I'll just tell them we moved to Phoenix.

Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.

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.

"Ah, Miss, hope is an excellent thing for such as has the spirits to bear it!" said Mrs Wickam, shaking her head. "My own spirits is not equal to it, but I don't owe it any grudge. I envys them that is so blest!"

Skeptic that I was as an adolescent, I had recently come to believe in a Supreme Being after thumbing through a Victoria's Secret catalogue.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.