Quote-o-rama:
The Straight Dope

http://www.straightdope.com

All quotes by Cecil Adams unless otherwise noted.

"If half the ingenuity the Teeming Millions waste on trying to avoid
 dieting and exercise could be devoted to something constructive, we'd
 cure cancer in a week."

"Whenever I start to fret that earthlings are becoming so intelligent and 
 sophisticated that I will soon be out of a job, something like cattle 
 mutilation comes along to convince me I'm going to be in business for the 
 next two million years."

"Cecil's rule of thumb for these things, Brad, is that the cuteness of the 
 story is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of its actually being 
 true."

"The word entered the English language in the 1600s and has since resisted
 the most determined efforts to throw it out again."

"(Probably not work safe, maybe not home safe, either.)"

"If I had been any cooler I would have been assumed bodily into heaven."

"...True Believers having no use for fractional numbers."

"Modern scholars use this theory to get laughs at cocktail parties."

"Although sounding like you know everything is not that hard when you get 
 to pick the questions. It's not like I'm going to start a column saying, 
 'Sorry, babe, I have no clue.'"

"Western musical notation has been an evolving system dating back at least
 to Greece and Rome. The Roman writer and statesman Boethius assigned 15
 letters to 2 octaves' worth of tones around 500 AD. The fact that 
 Boethius was later executed for treason is completely unrelated, I'm 
 certain."

"I never accused Freud of mere quackery. On the contrary, I think most
 fair-minded folk nowadays would agree that Freud elevated quackery to a
 whole new level. Phrenology, animal magnetism, and the like have been  
 consigned to the dustbin of history, but you'll still find intelligent 
 people praising Freud's pioneering contributions to our understanding of
 the human mind."

"I haven't heard from you guys in Baltimore for many a moon, Dana. Nice to
 see your preoccupations are as wholesome as ever."

"Leave the shaving cream on your face for at least a minute before you
 begin cutting, so that the beard is as soft and wet as possible. I know,
 sounds like foreplay. Shaving is one of those experiences that works on
 multiple levels."
					-SDSTAFF Dex

"So if you get stabbed with a lead pencil, you're not going to get lead
 poisoning, despite what my fourth grade teacher said. But if you do get
 stabbed and if any of the graphite gets lodged in the dermis of your 
 skin, it's likely to stay there for life. The result is a pretty much 
 harmless accidental tattoo, as one of my fourth grade classmates learned 
 the hard way. (I still say he deserved it for calling me 'some geeky 
 kid.')"
					-SDSTAFF bibliophage

"So what I'm saying is, a giant meteorite is probably nothing to worry
 about. But it could mean the end of life as we know it."

"(And no, I'm not reprinting the words to "Stairway to Heaven"--anybody
 who can't remember them after more than three decades of steady airplay
 probably can't read anyway.)"

"There are two schools of thought on Nostradamus: either (1) he had
 supernatural powers which enabled him to prophesy the future with uncanny
 accuracy, or (2) he did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks."

"Whenever this job starts to get boring, I know I can count on one of you
 screwballs out there in Baltimore to come up with something. You guys
 are a national asset."

"Cecil is aware that in humans the penis does not penetrate the cervix,
 but as should be obvious by now, there are many differences between human
 and porcine sexual practices, the principal exception being a girl I met
 in St. Louis in 1974. But I digress."  

"It's this kind of thing that makes you wonder how the country has gotten
 this far without somebody conspiring to sell it to the gypsies."

"I want to say, by way of preface, that I'm not making any of these 
 questions up. You ought to see the ones I don't answer."

"Greg, you shock me. What do you mean, you don't know how to research
 this? This is why God gave us the Internet, which has done more to 
 liberate human sexuality than any technology since Saran Wrap."

"Here at the Straight Dope, public service is our only goal."

"I realize this is a pretty bald way of putting it, but I've got only 600
 words to explain why there are two billion Christians today and only a
 couple million Zoroastrians."

"But they divorce because 'there was a hell of a lot more to making a
 relationship work than enjoying a great guy's sneezing over the
 weekends.' So true!"                   

"Ed, I said, the fact that it appeared on a Web page asking for your
 credit card number argues strongly against its having authentic
 19th-century origins."

"So even though Roger Moore said it, it's not true."

"But maybe cirrhosis is a small price to pay to feel like Toulouse-Lautrec."

"My personal feeling is, if the celebration progresses to the point where
 you're setting fire to the in-laws, you really shouldn't have opened that
 last jug of Manischewitz."

"Indeed, one of the reasons the Texans were so determined to win
 independence from Mexico in the first place was that the Mexican
 constitution outlawed slavery, which the Texans favored."

"Eye color is mainly a function of the pigment melanin. If your eyes have
 a lot of it, they're brown. If they don't, they're blue. (Some details of
 this explanation are in dispute, but don't worry about that now.) Green
 eyes result from yellowish flecks of fatty pigment against a dark
 background. Some men think a green-eyed woman is exotic. The truth is
 she's got fat eyes."

"In general onomatopoeia is not what it's cracked up to be. A balloon
 doesn't pop with a 'bang' or a 'pop' in the German spoken by some Swiss.
 A Swiss-German balloon explodes with a 'schnalz.'"

"There's also a big difference between drowning in fresh water and
 drowning in salt water. In a freshwater drowning, the inhaled water is
 quickly absorbed out of the lungs and into the bloodstream.
 Unfortunately, the water washes awa the wetting agent (surfactant) in the
 lung air sacs (the alveoli) that helps keep the sacs inflated. As a
 consequent, the air sacs collapse, oxygen can't get into the blood
 stream, and the victim expires. In a saltwater drowning, on the other
 hand, the inhaled salt water draws blood plasma OUT of the bloodstream
 and into the lungs. The subsequent fluid buildup in the air sacs prevents
 oxygen from reaching the blood, resulting in death. In other words, in
 salt water you basically drown in your own juices."

"This argument is appealing but stupid."

Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
Back to Quote-O-Rama HQ
Back to my home page