humor

"I have seen here a play on Faust, the most diabolic thing imaginable. The Mephistopheles is a masterpiece of caricature and intelligence. It is Goethe's 'Faust', but adapted; the principle features ar…"

"The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of …"

"“How, concretely, does one do Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz in a world of pretty well tattered scholarly paradigms?"

"And best of all, I grew old during that time, so that now I am a settled and mature old spinster with an opinion on every topic under heaven... I've also acquired... a sense of humor—so that I no long…"

"Succes is to meet every failure with no less enthusiasm*"

"There is a grim and ghastly humor -- the humor that is born of a pathetic philosophy -- which now and then strikes me in reading the bright and keen-witted work of our American paragraphers. It is a h…"

"I grew up believing that one person could make a difference. In Indiana, you saw that with basketball. The small town could beat the big town, like in the movie Hoosiers. That is one of the things tha…"

"Make them laugh, make them cry, or make them angry."

"And one of those plants, yellow and full of milky juice in pale stems, now puffed up with air, discharged only air from its hollow shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by th…"

"I jined up fer a frolic," laughed a tall fellow from Republic County with warts on his face. He turned to his messmate, a blond boy from Fort Scott. "Why did you come in?" "Wal, by Jack, because I tho…"

"With her alone I could be far away from everyone."

"The priestly guilds were highly mobile, with the result that cultic practices crossed ethnic lines over wide areas."

"His 2005 Boyle Lecture, also with bio information"

"Getting hit motivates me. It makes me punish the guy more. A fighter takes a punch, hits back with three punches."

"Shaking hands with the strangers of opposite sex is forbidden"

"It’s bad business meddling with the devil; it makes you superstitious."

"The ability to secure your own way and yet impress others with the idea that they are having their own way is rare among men; in women it is as common as eyebrows."

"I would like a bat with the words WHAT A ROTTEN WICKET-KEEPER stamped in large letters on the back of it."

"The worst advice Stan Lee ever gave me: “Work with the devil himself if he has talent."

"The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform."