Tag Archives: humor

Robert Benchley on Homework

Posted on April 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he’s supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Robert Benchley

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Karl Kraus on Stupidity as an Elemental Force

Posted on March 20, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.”

Karl Kraus

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Dr. Johnson, Famously, on Quality and Originality

Posted on February 24, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Your manuscript is both good and original; the the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

Samuel Johnson

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Rotten Reviews: The Scarlet Letter

Posted on February 22, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Why has our author selected such a theme? …the nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor, with a frail creature of his charge, whose mind is represented as far more debauched than her body? Is it in short, because a running undertide of filth has become as requisite to a romance, as death in the fifth act of a tragedy? Is the French era actually begun in our literature?”

Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Church Review

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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H.L. Mencken on the Truth about Writing

Posted on February 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”

H.L Mencken

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Saul Bellow on Demagoguery

Posted on January 25, 2017 | 1 comment

“The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”

Saul Bellow

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Skepticism and Civilization

Posted on January 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”

H.L. Mencken

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Rotten Reviews: On Charles Dickens

Posted on November 29, 2016 | Leave a comment

“We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation…. Fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in The Dunciad, and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day.”

Saturday Review, 1858

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Georges Clemenceau on the Rise and Fall of American Civilization

Posted on November 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”

Georges Clemenceau

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Jonathan Swift on Competence

Posted on September 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”

Jonathan Swift

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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