"An epigram is the marriage of wit, and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce."

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More by Evan Esar

“An alert copyreader on a newspaper couldn’t believe it when he read a reporter’s account of the theft of 2025 pigs. That’s a lot of pigs, he thought, and called the farmer to check the copy. “Is it true that you lost 2025 pigs?” he asked. “Yeth,” lisped the farmer. “Thanks,” returned the copyreader, and corrected the story to read “two sows and 25 pigs.”

“Play: Work that you enjoy doing for nothing.”

“The personal comparative is marked by epigrammatic self-satire. It implies that everyone thinks himself better than anyone else, but only the egoist says so.”

“Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”

“Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.”

“The history of humorous writing discloses everchanging trends. Our fast-paced modern living is too impatient for the lengthy light verse and the leisurely essays of our forefathers.”

Resonant Thoughts

"With bowed head and bended knee the poor learned to receive from the rich what was only their due, had they but known it. Years of poverty had ground the spirit of independence right out of them; thes…"

— Joseph Arch

Politics1826–1919

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"If FDA officials err on the side of under-caution in approving an unsafe drug, they are attacked by the media and patient groups, and investigated by Congress. Their victims, sick and dead people, are…"

— Walter E. Williams

Economics1936–2020

#death

"To begin with, the new conquerors and rulers…were of a different faith from that of their predecessors… their principal achievements lay in a great systematization of agrarian exploitation and an imme…"

— Irfan Habib

Literature1931

#success

"The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, a…"

— Eugene V. Debs

Politics1855–1926

#philosophy