Dave Barry Quotes

We hate our squalor.

There's basically filth everywhere, and there's no way to escape it.

But the most horrible spot .... lies....immediately south west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench....must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

If there is a Nobel prize for dirt and filth, India will win it, no doubt.

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

Kennel of filth

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.

I've stood around bogs wearing half a million dollars' worth of jewelry, up to my knees in the rot, thinking how much more or less the place smelled like a sewer than it did the day before.

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts - squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.

Spring makes everything look filthy.

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

Wretched Castile, yesterday the ruler wrapped in rags and scorning all it does not know.

Rather filthy 2 -- Filthy 10 -- Very filthy 45 -- Exceedingly filthy 7 -- Disgustingly filthy 26

Disease among the working classes is caused by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings.

Not much shall be feared nor expected from a people whose principal ministers, principal merchants, and principal generals consume day after day smoking tobacco and playing at chess, while the citizens and soldiers are sauntering in rags, sleeping against walls, or praying away their lives …. Such is the military and such the industry of Barbary.

The wounded wailing in the sun, The dead, the dust, the flies. The flies! Oh God, the flies That soiled the sacred dead, To see them swarm from dead men's eyes And share the soldiers' bread ., Nor think I now forget The filth and stench of war,.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

If you are walking through the hood and you notice the cracks in the sidewalk where all the weeds, pebbles, dirt and grit settle in, that's me.

I go down to the gym unwashed, like something dragged in from behind a truck.

All on the street, you get treated like a street cat: "All right, you've been eatin' enough, you're fat, get out of the way now and let somebody else come by."