Robert Benchley Quotes - Page 2

This congestion in the post offices is due to what are technically known as "regulations" but what are really a series of acrostics and anagrams devised by some officials who got around a table one night and tried to be funny.

Except for an occasional heart attack I feel as young as I ever did.

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.

England and America should scrap cricket and baseball and come up with a new game that they both can play. Like baseball, for example.

It was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.

There is probably no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for end, than the returning vacationist.

The only cure for a real hangover is death.

If you look at eggs, you will see that each one is almost round but not quite ... Nature's way of distinguishing eggs from large golf balls.

Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

The art of cursing people seems to have lost its tang since the old days when a good malediction took four deep breaths to deliverand sent the outfielders scurrying toward the fence to field.

Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.

But ice-crunching and loud gum-chewing, together with drumming on tables, and whistling the same tune 70 times in succession, because they indicate an indifference on the part of the perpetrator to the rest of the world in general, are not only registered on the delicate surfaces of the brain but eat little holes in it until it finally collapses or blows up.

The ideal age for a boy to own a dog is between forty-five and fifty.

Consider the number of young people all over the world who are getting married, day in and day out, for no other reason than thatsomeone of the opposite sex looks well in a green jersey or sings baritone, and then tell me that divorce has reached menacing proportions. The surface of divorce has not even been scratched yet.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria.

There are two ways to travel, first class or with children.

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why the writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.

You want to go easy on the suicide stuff - first thing you know, you'll ruin your health.

The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the room. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.

I don't want to be an alarmist, but I think that the Younger Generation is up to something.... I base my apprehension on nothing more definite than the fact that they are always coming in and going out of the house, without any apparent reason.

If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.

Sheer madness is, of course, the highest possible brow in humor.