Amusing Ourselves To Death Quotes & Sayings

Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis. — Martin Gardner

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. — Marcel Duchamp

Angry gets shit done. — Neil Gaiman

Falling in love and falling to your death feel about the same, I thought. And I almost laughed. — Shannon Hale

Death displays nothing if not variety in its methods, which are often surprising and sometimes amusing. — Alan Dean Foster

Where was his knife, upon which he relied? He had cut cheese for their noonday meal, and had packed the knife away with the cheese.
Aillas said: 'Sir, before we continue with this matter, may I offer you a bite of cheese?'
'I care for no cheese, though it is an amusing concept.'
'In that case, allow me a moment while I cut a morsel or two for myself, as I hunger.'
'I have no time to spare while you eat cheese; prepare instead for death. — Jack Vance

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant! ... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death — Leo Tolstoy

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding? — Anton Chekhov

I was not too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn't know. It was an easy way to take care of my sex drive of course, and I did enjoy all the holding and touching, but I hated the morning after. I'd wake up and find this strange girl sleeping next to me, and the room would reek of alcohol, and the bed and the lighting and the curtains had that special "love hotel" garishness, and my head would be in a hungover fog. — Haruki Murakami

I had the most beautiful set of theories you ever knew when I started out as a schoolma'am, but every one of them has failed me at some pinch or another. — Anne Shirley

The devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand. — Tom Waits

True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure. — Sidney Poitier

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is. — Mary Roach

I thought it was a novel."
"It is."
"What's it about??"
"You'll have to buy it to find out, but it's got everything: love, death and an amusing dog."
"This one's got a recipe for apple crumble," I said.
"Don't you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?" he said. — Marcel Theroux

I do not wish to help Jeremy Clarkson be amusing in the event of my death. — James May

Others try to remove guilt by shifting the standards of right and wrong in the name of cultural progression. One of the easiest ways to assuage guilt is to convince ourselves that our moral standards are impractical or outdated. Greed is not wrong; it's necessary in the good of ambition. Promoting ourselves is the only way to be successful. Lust is natural for contemporary men and women, and sex is expected regardless of marriage or gender. We attempt to remove our guilt by redefining right and wrong according to cultural fads. Yet guilt remains. No matter how hard — David Platt

Consumer spending is now plunging at serious-recession rate ... even if the rescue now in train succeeds in unfreezing credit markets, the real economy has immense downward momentum. In addition to financial rescues, we need major stimulus programs. — Paul Krugman

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. — James Anthony Froude

I intended that when the curtain went up the scene should confront the public like the exaggerating mirror in the stories of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, in which the depraved saw themselves with dragons' bodies, or bulls' horns, or whatever corresponded to their particular vice. It is not surprising that the public should have been aghast at the sight of its other self, which it had never before been shown completely. This ignoble other-self, as Monsieur Catulle Mendes has excellently said, is composed "of eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny; of the sense of decency, the virtues, the patriotism & the ideals peculiar to those who have just eaten their fill." Really, these are hardly the constituents for an amusing play, & the masks demonstrate that the comedy must at the most be the macabre comedy of an English clown, or of a Dance of Death. — Alfred Jarry

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. — Neil Postman

The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power. — Chris Hedges

I've got a prostate the size of a honeydew and a head full of bad memories. — Jerry Stiller

You think it amusing to have a death sentence imposed on us, sire? — Darren Shan

The question is the morning after. What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing? What happens in the region? What impact could it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed. — Kofi Annan

A movement in the vines startled her and an opossum scurried out, looked at Clare and flopped over in fake death. She had seen this twice before in her garden back home and it was difficult not to draw certain parallels, amusing ones, though if you played dead long enough the act of coming back to life was questionable. — Jim Harrison

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate ... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. — Henry David Thoreau

We shall make progress towards Swaraj only if we do everything thoughtfully and with understanding. — Mahatma Gandhi

Oh, certainly, 'The Wings of Death' is not amusing," ventured Mrs. Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like that of an obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to submit if his first selection does not suit. — Edith Wharton

America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death. — John Piper

When the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again. — Rose Macaulay