The High Price of Conjecture

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An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition. – Michael Korda

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she’s killed it. – Saki

A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times. – Karl Kraus

Psychoanalysis is the disease it purports to cure. – Karl Kraus

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture. – Anatole France

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost become prohibitive. – William F. Buckley Jr.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem. – John Galsworthy

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make a better soup. – H.L. Mencken

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The Only Satisfaction Comes from Survival

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Holidays are an expensive trial of strength. The only satisfaction comes from survival. – Jonathan Miller

I’ve been asked if I ever get the DTs; I don’t know; it’s hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DTs begin. – W.C. Fields

In Hollywood if you don’t have happiness, you send out for it. – Rex Reed

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. – E.M. Cioran

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of men. – Albert Einstein

It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly. – Anatole France

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. – Don Marquis

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. – James Thurber

Even the Audience Looked Bad

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If a loan is made for a moving picture, the president of the bank wants to write the story for you. The directors want to know who the leading lady is, and if they could, they would keep her as collateral. – Will Rogers

Each dance ought to spring somehow out of character or situation, otherwise it is simply a vaudeville act. – Fred Astaire

It was the kind of flop that made even the audience look bad. – Fred Astaire

About Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
She gave him sex and he gave her class. – Katharine Hepburn

Fred Astaire can dance a very intricate outline, and he makes it look so simple and easy. It gives the audience a sense of self-identification and a feeling that they, too, can do it. – Hermes Pan

The joy of my kind of dancing is that you never forget it’s an eternal fertility right. – Gene Kelly

A choreographer takes an idea out of his head and transposes it on people’s anatomy. – Gene Kelly

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Comedy - the Satire of Tragedy

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Hollywood is the only community in the world where the entire population is suffering from rumortism. – Bert Lahr

I thing you laugh at a great comedian because you want to cry. Laughter is never too far from tears. – Bert Lahr

Comedy is the satire of tragedy. – Harry Langdon

The oddest thing about the whole funny business is that the public really wants to laugh, but it’s the hardest thing to make them do it. They don’t want to cry, yet they will cry at the slightest provocation. – Harry Langdon

There are three things that are real to me – God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third. – Jerry Lewis

Three from the “king of comedy” – Max Sennett

Any little success I have had was because I was one of the mob and catered to the mod.

You know the art of screen slapstick has been mostly lost. Yet people love slapstick. The lowering of dignity is always funny. There is a great deal of humor in the combination of surprise and violence.

We were awash with pretty women, clowns, and storytellers who couldn’t write. We made a million dollars so fast my fingers ached from trying to count.

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You Have to Expect a Few Blisters

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All they ever did for me at MGM was to change my leading men and the water in the pool. – Esther Williams

You get tough in this business, until you get big enough to hire people to get tough for you. Then you can sit back and be a lady. – Natalie Wood

If you want a place in the sun, you have to expect a few blisters. – Loretta Young

In the language of screen comedians, four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh, and the boffo. – James Agee

Comedy offers a more pessimistic worldview than tragedy. Comedy deals, after all, with our limitation, not our freedom. It describes our trivial rather than our heroic concerns. – Herman G. Weinberg

Not only is God dead, but try to get a plumber on weekends. – Woody Allen

I failed to make the chess team, because of my height. – Woody Allen.

I know one star in Hollywood who hasn’t been spoiled by success and that is Mickey Mouse. – Eddie Cantor

I don’t relate to Mickey as a rodent but as a comic character of the grand proportion. Along with the swastika and the Coca-Cola bottle, Mickey Mouse is the most powerful graphic image of the 20th Century. – Ernest Trova

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