The insult hurled in anger can strike like a slap across the face. More satisfying, however, is the insult that while delivered in a subtle and subdued manner affects the recipient like a slow acting poison. Spanning the gamut of human expression from quip to diatribe, good insults aim for the heart. Demeaning and hurtful as it may be, the clever insult, well phrased and artfully delivered can be a thing of beauty.
Assembled here from numerous sites on the net is my collection of insults. Some may be apocryphal and for this I apologize. Some are not so funny through no fault of mine.
The list is long…very long. Pace yourself as this is a buffet of insults, a smorgasbord of slight. There are one-liners and there are dialogues. I’ve even included a 2,800 word epic of an insult (FLAMINGEST POST EVER at the very end) which is a must read. Enjoy!
LOOKS
• "A blank, helpless sort of face, rather like a rose just before you drench it with DDT."
John Carey
• "A four-hundred-dollar suit on him would look like socks on a rooster."
Earl Long
• "At first I thought he was walking a dog. Then I realized it was his date."
Edith Massey in "Polyester"
• "He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating."
Ayn Rand
• "He had a winning smile, but everything else was a loser."
George C. Scott
• "He makes a very handsome corpse and becomes his coffin prodigiously."
Oliver Goldsmith
• "He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own."
Margaret Halsey
• "He strains his conversation through a cigar."
Hamilton Mabie
• "He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years, or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble."
P. G. Wodehouse
• "He's a trellis for varicose veins."
Wilson Mizner
• "He's so fat, he can be his own running mate."
Johnny Carson
• "He's so small, he's a waste of skin."
Fred Allen
• "He'd make a lovely corpse."
Charles Dickens
• "Her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak."
Woody Allen
• "Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style. It will look ridiculous year after year."
Fred Allen
• "Her only flair is in her nostrils."
Pauline Kael
• "Her skin was white as leprosy."
S. T. Coleridge
• "His face is livid, gaunt his whole body, his breath is green with gall; his tongue drips poison."
John Quincy Adams
• "His face was filled with broken commandments."
John Masefield
• "His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin."
John Philpot Curran
• "His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with."
Charles Lamb
• "I see her as one great stampede of lips directed at the nearest derriere."
Noël Coward
• "Is that a beard, or are you eating a muskrat?"
Dr. Gonzo
• "It's like cuddling with a Butterball turkey."
Jeff Foxworthy
• "Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache."
Alan Bennett
• "She had much in common with Hitler, only no mustache."
Noel Coward
• "She looked as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth - or anywhere else."
Elsa Lanchester
• "She not only kept her lovely figure, she's added so much to it."
Bob Fosse
• "She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and has white spots on her yellow skin."
Heinrich Heine
• "She spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled pig."
Margot Asquith
• "She was a large woman who seemed not so much dressed as upholstered."
James Matthew Barrie
• "She was so ugly she could make a mule back away from an oat bin."
Will Rogers
• "She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand."
Saul Bellow
• "She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork."
Jonathan Swift
• "The tautness of his face sours ripe grapes."
William Shakespeare
• "When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry - for the clothes."
Josh Billings
• "Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum."
P. G. Wodehouse
• "Yeah, she's beautiful, but you can't find her IQ with a flashlight."
from "The Greatest American Hero"
• "You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation."
Irvin S. Cobb
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WOMEN
• "She's so pure, Moses couldn't even part her knees."
Joan Rivers
• "She was like a sinking ship firing on the rescuers."
Alexander Woollcott
• "She's been on more laps than a napkin."
Walter Winchell
• "She's got such a narrow mind, when she walks fast her earrings bang together."
John Cantu
• "She's the sort of woman who lives for others -- you can tell the others by their hunted expression."
C. S. Lewis
• "So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name."
Alan Bennett
• "She never lets ideas interrupt the easy flow of her conversation."
Jean Webster
• "She never was really charming till she died."
Terence
• "She not only expects the worst, but makes the worst of it when it happens."
Michael Arlen
• "She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious."
W. Somerset Maugham
• "She proceeds to dip her little fountain-pen filler into pots of oily venom and to squirt the mixture at all her friends."
Harold Nicholson
• "She should get a divorce and settle down."
Jack Paar
• "She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts."
Raymond Chandler
• "That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them."
Dorothy Parker
• She could carry off anything; and some people said that she did.
Ada Leverson
• "She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people."
Robertson Davies
• "She is such a good friend that she would throw all her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again."
Charles Talleyrand
• "She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake."
Margot Asquith
• "A woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
Rudyard Kipling
• "A woman will lie about anything, just to stay in practice."
Phillip Marlowe
• "A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinter legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to see it done at all."
James Boswell
• "A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's. She changes it more often."
Oliver Herford
• "Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the rest of her body."
John Vanbrugh
• "The chief excitement in a woman's life is spotting women who are fatter than she is."
Helen Rowland
• "Women are like elephants to me: nice to look at, but I wouldn't want to own one."
W. C. Fields
• "Women's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."
Rupert Hughes
• "Behind every great man, there is a surprised woman."
Maryon Pearson
• "Outside every thin girl is a fat man, trying to get in."
Katharine Whitehorn
• "Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses."
Elizabeth Taylor
• "Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible."
Margaret Mead
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DRAMA
• You have obviously spent so much time with your head wedged between your buttocks that your vision has been obscured by the reflection of your own putrid entrails. Anonymous letter to John Simon (NY drama critic).
• The conscientious Canadian critic is one who subscribes to the New York Times so that he knows first hand what his opinion should be. Eric Nicol, 1968.
• On the production "The Cupboard": Bare. Clive Barnes
• lt seems to be that giving Clive Barnes his CBE for services to the theatre is a bit like giving Goering the DFC for services to the RAF. Alan Bennett on the drama critic for the New York Times.
• Everybody who was anybody was there --- that is they were there till the end of the second act. Noel Coward on the first night in New York of the play "This was a man"
• Her own one-woman play about fatness... coming soon, no doubt, will be "Prepare To Meet Thy Dome", a searing drama about receding hairlines. Nick Curtis on Susan Gott's "Watching and Waiting".
• Where Shakespeare had written the word `O' she favoured us with an extended imitation of a hurrying ambulance.
• Kempinski's problems deserve understanding and pity -- but not a paying audience. Nick Curtis
• It is said that the quickest way to empty a theatre is to yell "Fire!" Another method slightly slowed, is to put on the current National Theatre production of "The force of habit".
• It is the kind of play that one might enjoy more at a second hearing, if only the first time through hadn't left such a strong feeling that once is enough. W.A.Darlington
• If I was Sir Peter Hall and had instigated such a production, I would take myself out to dinner and very tactfully but firmly sack myself over dessert. James Fenton
• During the overture you hoped it would be good. During the first number you hoped it would be good. After that you just hoped it would be over. Walter Kerr
• The Red I believe stood for communism. The Rainbow stood for the light in the heavens after communism took over. The audience stood for more than could be imagined. Walter Kerr on "The Red Rainbow"
• It had two strikes against it. One was that you couldn't hear half of it. The other was the half you could hear. Walter Kerr
• It has the depth of a cracker motto, the drama of a dial-a-recipe service and the eloquence of a conversation between a speak-your-weight maching and a whoopee cushion. Bernard Levin
• Prompter steals the show in UCLA Macbeth. L.A.Times
• [It has] dialogues that writers of cat food commercials might well spurn. Sheridan Morley on "No Sex Please --We're British"
• The hills are alive with the sound of cliches... Sheridan Morley
• A production of such mind-bending awfulness that only the laws of libel prevent me from dwelling on it at even greater length. Sheridan Morley
• Could it be time to change the brand of cheese? Barrie Stacey on the long running production The Mousetrap.
• I saw it at a disadvantage - the curtain was up. Arthur Wimperis
• Most ballet would be quite delightful were it not for the dancing.
• [Sir Laurence] Olivier brandished his technique like a kind of stylistic alibi. In catching the eye he frequently disengaged the brain. Russell Davies
• His perfomance is such that he is taking some kind of personal revenge on the play. Robert Cushman
• They make a remarkable ventrlioquist act. Together they amount to a prat with a perm holding a green duck with a squeaky voice dressed in a nappy. The only intriguing thing about their act is trying to work out which one is which Stafford Hildred on Keith Harris and Orville.
• No-one walked out of the perfomance, but several ran out.
• "Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Attributed to Samuel Johnson
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GROUCHO MARX
• "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
• "You know I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters?"
• "She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon."
• "I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception."
• "Don't point that beard at me, it might go off."
• "Why don't you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out?"
• "Either he's dead or my watch has stopped."
• "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."
• "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
• "I married your mother because I wanted children, imagine my disappointment when you came along."
• "Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honor; which is probably more than she ever did."
• "Don't look now, but there's one too many in this room and I think it's you."
• "From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
• "Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!"
• "Time wounds all heels."
• "Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know."
• "Do you think I could buy back my introduction to you?"
• "He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot."
• "I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury."
• I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.
• Go, and never darken my towels again.
• I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.
• "You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy and I bet he was glad to get rid of it." -
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WINSTON CHURCHILL
• "A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
• "Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others."
• "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
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REPARTEE
• Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I’d put poison in your coffee. Winston Churchill: If I were your husband I’d drink it.
• Lady Astor reproaching Churchill, “Winston, you are drunk,” to which he replied, “Indeed, Madam, and you are ugly—but tomorrow I’ll be sober.”
• "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
• "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
• "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one." George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
• "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second...if there is one." Winston Churchill in response
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OSCAR WILDE
• "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
• "She is a peacock in everything but beauty."
• "I don't recognize you - I've changed a lot."
• "He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone."
• "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
• "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." -
• "A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally."
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MARK TWAIN
• "I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight."
• "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
• "Had double chins all the way down to his stomach."
• "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
• "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
• "You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."
• "Be careful when reading health books; you may die of a misprint."
• "He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity."
• "His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere."
• "Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself."
• "God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."
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MAE WEST
• "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -
• "The finest woman that ever walked the streets."
• "She's the kind of woman who climbed the ladder of success - wrong by wrong."
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INTELLIGENCE
• "A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead."
Alexander Pope
• "A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post."
Tom Waits
• "A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits."
Alexander Pope
• "Did you eat a brain tumor for breakfast?"
from "Heathers"
• "Differently clued."
Dave Clark
• "Doesn't know much, but leads the league in nostril hair."
Josh Billing
• "End of season sale at the cerebral department."
Gareth Blackstock
• "Has the mathematical abilities of a Clydesdale."
David Letterman
• "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln
• "He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
Robert Redford
• "He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
Billy Wilder
• "He is brilliant - to the top of his boots."
David Lloyd George
• "He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea."
John Steinbeck
• "He is useless on top of the ground; he aught to be under it, inspiring the cabbages."
Mark Twain
• "He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
Joseph Heller
• "He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."
George Bernard Shaw
• "He knows so little and knows it so fluently."
Ellen Glasgow
• "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
Forrest Tucker
• "He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style."
Leo Tolstoy
• "He never said a foolish thing nor never did a wise one."
Earl of Rochester
• "He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop."
Sydney Smith
• "He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold."
John Ruskin
• "He used statistics the way a drunkard uses lampposts - for support, not illumination."
Andrew Lang
• "He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright."
Samuel Butler
• "He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong."
Benjamin Disraeli
• "His golf bag does not contain a full set of irons."
Robin Williams
• "His ignorance is encyclopedic."
Abba Eban
• "His mind is so open - so open that ideas simply pass through it."
F. H. Bradley
• "His mind is so open that the wind whistles through it."
Heywood Braun
• "I want to reach your mind - where is it currently located?"
Ashleigh Brilliant
• "I wish I'd known you when you were alive."
Leonard Louis Levinson
• "I would not want to put him in charge of snake control in Ireland."
Eugene McCarthy
• "If he ever had a bright idea it would be beginner's luck."
William Lashner "Veritas"
• "Little things affect little minds."
Benjamin Disraeli
• "Next-day delivery in a nanosecond world."
Van Jacobson
• "No more sense of direction than a bunch of firecrackers."
Rob Wagner
• "Please try not to be such a wiener-head."
Dave Barry
• "Sharp as a sack full of wet mice."
Foghorn Leghorn
• "She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."
W. Somerset Maugham
• "She is a water bug on the surface of life."
Gloria Steinem
• "She's descended from a long line her mother listened to."
Gypsy Rose Lee
• "Stay with me; I want to be alone."
Joey Adams
• "Teflon brain (nothing sticks.)"
Lily Tomlin
• "That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."
Douglas Adams
• "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."
Thomas Brackett Reed
• "Useless as a pulled tooth."
Mary Roberts Rinehart
• "What has a tiny brain, a big mouth, and an opinion nobody cares about? You!"
from "Murphy Brown"
• "What's on your mind? If you'll forgive the overstatement."
Fred Allen
• "When you go to the mind reader, do you get half price?"
David Letterman
• "While he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter either."
James Thurber
• "You look into his eyes, and you get the feeling someone else is driving."
David Letterman
• "A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits."
Edith Sitwel
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MISCELLANEUS
• "Why are we honoring this man? Have we run out of human beings?"
Milton Berle
• "We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault."
Ashleigh Brilliant
• "Well, I think we ought to let him hang there. Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind."
John Ehrlichman
• "What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank."
Liberace
• "You're a parasite for sore eyes."
Gregory Ratoff
• "Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week."
William Dean Howells
• "Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence."
Ashleigh Brilliant
• "The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind."
Joseph Stilwell
• "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
Jack E. Leonard
• "They don't hardly make 'em like him any more - but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway."
Hunter S. Thompson
• "I'll bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork."
Irving Brecher
• "You're a good example of why some animals eat their young."
Jim Samuels
• "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
Irvin S. Cobb
• "If you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies?"
Charles Pierce
• "In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority."
Ellen Glascow
• "I've had them both, and I don't think much of either."
Beatrix Lehmann (watching a wedding.)
• "Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life."
Ivy Compton-Burnett
• "I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here."
Stephen Bishop
• "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
Clarence Darrow
• "I never liked him and I always will."
Dave Clark
• "I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me."
Fred Allen
• "I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion."
Robert Louis Stevenson
• "I thought men like that shot themselves."
King George V
• "He hasn't an enemy in the world - but all his friends hate him."
Eddie Cantor
• "He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
Raymond Chandler
• "He's completely unspoiled by failure."
Noel Coward
• "He's liked, but he's not well liked."
Arthur Miller
• "I can't believe that out of 100,000 sperm, you were the quickest."
Steven Pearl
• "Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome."
Oscar Levant
• "Fine words! I wonder where you stole them."
Jonathan Swift
• "Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other."
Neil Simon
• "You had to stand in line to hate him."
Hedda Hopper
• "You have a good and kind soul. It just doesn't match the rest of you."
Norm Papernick
• "You're a mouse studying to be a rat."
Wilson Mizner
• "You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin."
Joe Orton
• "Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time."
Frederic Raphael
• "The perfection of rottenness."
William James
• "The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech."
George Bernard Shaw
• "There goes the famous good time that was had by all."
Bette Davis
• "Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles."
Jack London
• Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.""
Tobias George Smolett
• "Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee later than others."
Kin Hubbard
• "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity" thrust upon them.”
Joseph Heller "Catch-22"
• "The greatest thing since they reinvented unsliced bread."
William Keegan
• "No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have; and I think he's a dirty little beast."
W. S. Gilbert
• "Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only stupid."
Heinrich Heine
• "He's so snobbish he has an unlisted zip-code."
Earl Wilson
• "He's the kind of man who picks his friends - to pieces."
Mae West
• "He's the only man I ever knew who had rubber pockets so he could steal soup."
Wilson Mizner
• "He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head."
Margot Asquith
• "I will always love the false image I had of you."
Ashleigh Brilliant
• "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."
Woody Allen
• "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
Charles, Count Talleyrand
• "He was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."
William Faulkner
• "He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.”
Charles Kingsley
• "He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin."
Dorothy L. Sayers
• "He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both eyes."
Molly Ivins
• "He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes."
Fred Allen
• "He was trying to save both his faces."
John Gunther
• "A dork is a dork is a dork."
Judy Markey
• "Being attacked by him is like being savaged by a dead sheep."
Dennis Healy
• "Debating against him is no fun, say something insulting and he looks at you like a whipped dog."
Harold Wilson
• "Failure has gone to his head."
Wilson Mizner
• "God was bored by him."
Victor Hugo
• "Greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his friends for his life."
Jeremy Thorpe
• "He could never see a belt without hitting below it."
Margot Asquith
• "He had delusions of adequacy."
Walter Kerr
• "He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul."
David Lloyd George
• "He is a fine friend. He stabs you in the front."
Leonard Louis Levinson
• "He is a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight."
John Randolph
• "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
John Bright
• "He is an old bore. Even the grave yawns for him."
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
• "He is as good as his word - and his word is no good."
Seamus MacManus
• "He is mad, bad and dangerous to know."
Lady Caroline Lamb
• "He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
Samuel Johnson
• "He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."
H. H. Munro
• "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
Paul Keating
• "He is so mean, he won't let his little baby have more than one measle at a time."
Eugene Field
• "He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease."
Henry James
• "He made enemies as naturally as soap makes suds."
Percival Wilde
• "He makes a July's day short as December."
William Shakespeare
• "He must have killed a lot of men to have made so much money."
Moliere
• "He never bore a grudge against anyone he wronged."
Simone Signoret
• "He was a bit like a corkscrew. Twisted, cold and sharp."
Kate Cruise O'Brien
• "He was about as useful in a crisis as a sheep."
Dorothy Eden
• "He was as great as a man can be without morality."
Alexis de Tocqueville
• "He was happily married - but his wife wasn't."
Victor Borg
• "A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."
Benjamin Disraeli
• "Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
Al Capp
• "An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'd have someone to look up to."
Gene Fowler
• "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."
Fred Allen
• "I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all of the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's sake."
John D. Rockefeller
• "If all the girls who attended the Harvard-Yale game were laid end to end, I wouldn't be surprised."
Dorothy Parker
• "If there's anything disgusting about the movie business, it's the whoredom of my peers."
Sean Penn
• "In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club - the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."
Spiro T. Agnew (about the press, 1970)
• "Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles."
Henry VanDyke
• "Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls."
Jackie Gleason
• "Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write."
A. E. Housman
• "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it."
Moses Hadas
• "The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character."
Lyndon Johnson
• "This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be hurled with great force."
Dorothy Parker
• "This is one of those big, fat paperbacks, intended to while away a monsoon or two, which, if thrown with a good over arm action, will bring a water buffalo to its knees."
Nancy Banks-Smith (review of M. M. Kaye's "The Far Pavilions")
• "Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty."
Lillian Hellman
• "You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner."
Aristophanes
• "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." Clarence Darrow
• "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." Abraham Lincoln
• "I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here." Stephen Bishop
• "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." Irvin S. Cobb
• "He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." Samuel Johnson
• "He had delusions of adequacy." Walter Kerr
• "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." Thomas Brackett Reed
• "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them." James Reston (about Richard Nixon)
• "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." Charles, Count Talleyrand
• "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." Forrest Tucker
• "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...for support rather than illumination." Andrew Laing
• "Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte." Translation: "Sir, you are an impotent, conceited, obscene, hairy-buttocked, brainless, wicked, toadying, goatish, indecent, stable-smelling, hunch-backed, thick-lipped, stinking, turnip-shaped, feeble-minded, pimply, trashy, repellent, smarmy, foul-mouthed, greasy, gluttonous, loathsome, wooden-headed, whining, extremely low form of animal life." (no attribution)
• "His ignorance is encyclopedic" Abba Eban
• "Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour." Gioacchino Rossini
• "This isn't right, this isn't even wrong." Wolfgang Pauli, upon reading a young physicist's paper
• "He would make a lovely corpse." Charles Dickens
• "I worship the quicksand he walks in." Art Buchwald
• "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." - Jack E. Leonard
______________________________________________________________________________
FLAMINGEST POST EVER
From: [email protected] (Takeako Itsushira)
Subject: Jef Sewell: the joke of Usenet
Date: 1997/04/02
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
X-Deja-AN: 230313431
Organization: Hate
Newsgroups: rec.video.desktop
CAVEAT LECTOR
Expatiation into apothegm.
Mordant philippic #1.
Ara.
Jef Sewell <[email protected]> wrote:
>It is [partially] to your credit that you found that phrase particularly
>amusing, as it was intended to be a joke. Before you go patting
>yourself on the back for all your supposed wit, I'd like to point out I
>beat you to the punch, to spare a small pun. What do you think I was
>referring to when I put that line in there? Where you state "of course
>I'm making reference to the beating [that Alex took]..." demonstrates
>that in your mind the correlation just occured to you. I was referring
>to that rumour IN MY FIRST POST.
Well, Jef, frankly, NO ONE in Austin, Texas (not even on Usenet) wishes to
be subjected to your dullardry. That's why I am writing you. Quite
simply, I wish to gleefully pick apart your insipid ramblings just so
everyone here can have a little glimpse of what it's like to have the
fiercest succession of abjectly hurting charientisms thrust upon them at a
scientifically yet-inestimable velocity to the power of itself -- and not
be able to so much as quiver and choke back tears of regret for ever having
vocalized his/her irrelevant consciousness (that is; speaking his/her mind,
if, in fact, it could be considered as such -- a "possibility" which the
author soberly refutes and intends to completely invalidate by the end of
this post).
First things first, chum: drawing a comparison between Alex Jones and Fox
Moulder retains about as much intellectual validity as witnessing your own
mother naked. As I'm sure you know, since it's glaringly obvious that
you've experienced both, neither situation is particularly insightful or,
in any other manner, sagacious. For this alone, you are a glib,
retch-brained oligophreniac at best. It would, indeed, be the apex of
modern existence to strike you repeatedly in a back alley as you beg for
your ineffectual nothing-of-a-life, but upright organisms such as myself
have better things to do, like making you and your excerebrose would-be
pontifications rebarbative, irrefutable proof of just how mind-numbingly
simple it is to operate a computer. Your pitiable attempts at sardonic
wordplay are transparent, coprolalial shards of sophomoric faux-elocution
which, incidentally, resemble some of the lesser-evolved of Alex Jones'
xylocephalous utterances.
I don't know, personally or even remotely, the gentleman who wrote you the
scathing harangue, Jef, and I'm not thoroughly convinced that he finished
the job. All I profess to know in regards to these somewhat-dated messages
is that you need some remedial English lessons.
From what I have gathered, Michael Hall bit the child on the ankles, as
they say. There is no perspicaciously apparent ratiocination to surmise
that he didn't "get" your in-joke ... I'm relatively sold on the concept
that he, like me, just thought the joke sucked shit. Gasp, you pompous
idiot!
In fact, it sounded to me as if you and Alex Jones share more than just a
.sig file, if you get my drift. Are you, like, sleeping with him?
Anyway ...
It is for the maximized pleasure of all reading this post (except, of
course, Jef him/herself) that I bring immediate attention to the fact that
this inarticulate loser can't even spell "occurred."
Come on, Jeffy ... third-grade conjugations. Now, I know what alot of you
will declare in response to this: why place such massive importance upon an
insignificant fragment of an understood, albeit hardly-understandable and
utterly incomplete, "whole"?
It happens that I, unlike some of my well-wishing peers, find it completely
irresistible to do anything but impugn and denounce when I catch wind of
someone "flubbing their lines," as it were. If our little man Jef hadn't
been so smug in his retaliatory position, presumably because he couldn't
take being called-out as meager internet-fodder, perhaps nothing more than
a casual mention -- in place of this grandiloquent public mockery --
would've occurred.
If we cannot rely on the rudiments of language (e.g., those pesky RULES of
spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.) to communicate our opinions, ideals,
and cultural expectations, what, then, is to be the alternative? A system
wherein all participants are encouraged to make random substitutions for
commonplace words based on similarities in appearance, as is unquestionably
the case here? This is no different than, say, a careless interchanging of
the words "their," "there," and "they're" -- a prevalent error and, yet,
one that is irrefutably unforgivable when the antagonizing party is
willingly immersed in an ardent debate that, whichever the case, SHOULD be
eagerly intended by any deliberating parties to be both remembered --
preferably favorably -- and, likewise, contemplated by future scholars of
communication and media/infrastructure ontology.
So, by way of an easily recognizable, admittedly somewhat moot description
of an analogous situation, I extend: if you're not going to play by the
rules, Jef, don't bother playing at all, because SOMEONE will ALWAYS have
you pegged, and you'll invariably find yourself sidelined well before the
commencement of the second quarter. The phrasal device I just utilized is
known as a "metaphor," Jef.
It's clear to anyone with even HALF a corpus callosum that you are the
egregious sort of wanker who finds it appealing to substitute the British
spellings of CERTAIN English words, while others are inadvertently,
inexplicably left in their Americanised forms, respectively. I refer,
unmistakably, to your spelling of the word "rumor." Offer proof that you
were taught in the UK and I'll not only overlook this apparent blunder;
I'll apologize on this very forum and, perchance, even eat my own hands.
The assumption that you may have, at some point in your past, read a
British novel is not sufficient. Besides, you can't fool me. Your
rambling non-sequiturs and unintelligible obiter dictum are no match for my
tirelessly observant, undaunted apprehension of transformational syntax and
linguistics.
I refuse to believe for one-thousandth of a nanosecond that Jef is familiar
with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
It is the author's suspicion that Jef has never read a word in his life
regarding morphophonemics, lexicology, semantics, deep structure, harmony
in discourse, and the like.
Connotative inferences aside, the author aspires to interpolate the
heretofore-unsuggested conundrumic riposte; one of such alarming breadth
and dysphemistic sovereignty ... a work of unadulterated paradoxical
significance, breaking little Jeffy's heart all the while and,
simultaneously, repudiating other pompous know-nothings, thus discouraging
them from making asses of themselves, as Jef undoubtedly has.
>Though I'm relatively certain there
>are probably only ten or fifteen people out there following this
>particular thread, I'm confident that the higher minds would be inclined
>to side with me on this issue as I took no political stance to begin
>with. A small, modest attempt at social commentary was all I was making.
Your so-called "modest" attempt has been duly noted and subsequently
discarded as incognizant. I feel inclined to put faith into the assumption
that, because of the manner in which you address these "higher minds," you
are either soliciting their aid in this personal grievance or you somehow,
truly give credence to yourself as being a thinker of such distinction.
While the former is somewhat more likely, the author acknowledges Jef's
abecedarian leanings and respects that he, as a survival instinct of sorts,
may have employed a tactical characteristic exclusive to most fustian
weaker-minds: that of insinuating, instead of stating outright, one's
alleged intellectual status.
In other words, by merely interposing a suggestion that he is of the
upper-echelon intelligentsia, Jef has endeavored to create an obstacle,
though tragically not insurmountable, so as to dissuade further potential
criticism. After all, if he had offered, "I am a genius," would
authentication of this claim not be sought after by more than just a
handful of the net's more isomorphically-vindictive and, thus, attentively
more cruel, REAL heads?!
At least, I'm sure I wouldn't pass up such a golden opportunity.
Let me rephrase it for Jef.
You shouldn't be allowed the satisfaction of drawing breath, you nescient,
debilitated, floundering, elliptical, imbecilic, confounded, impercipient
heap of mental flatulence. Mindless ne'er-do-well simpletons like you
should be shot point-blank in the face with illegal sawed-off shotguns and
disposed of accordingly. I pity your family more than your
non-epigrammatic mind could conjecture.
>Apparently you just really have it in for some of ACTV's personalities
>and wait for any and every opportunity to scream and shout about it...
>It is cable access, dude. Might I recommend, with all of this raging
>passion you possess, that you consider popping on over there and getting
>a producer's license? I'm being quite serious, this time. Seems a
>waste of a lot of energy to sit on the dirt roadside of Usenet and throw
>rocks at unsuspecting passerbys when you could be driving a monster
>truck right over folks on the freeway of Access Television.
What, exactly (if you don't mind telling me, Captain Dipshit), are "passerbys"?
The term is "passers-by," you retarded prick. It's not that hard to
remember, dumbass. Those who are "passing by" would be the "passers" going
"by," right?
Author's note: I recognize that the term "passer by's" is accepted, as in:
"that passer by's name is Jef Sewell ... kill him!"
However, Jef, surely, did not intend this contemptible malapropism.
As a matter of fact, either way you look at it, Jef didn't punctuate it
correctly -- but who's keeping score?
Aside from me, that is.
The real shame here, Jef, is that you have to rely on reflections and
maximizers to strengthen your ersatz particulars and atone for your being
devoid of a brain stem. You, sir/madam, are an erroneous, blithering,
myopic, undiscerning dunderpate; a wlatsome, mephitic, yirning,
woodenheaded, braggadocio-spewing rodomontade; an incompetent, oblivious,
subliterate, menial, one-dimensional, perfunctory, expressionless,
derivative, banal, fifth-rate, uninteresting, incalculably subordinate,
garrulous, quixotic, superfluous wanna-be bitch; a drooling, hackneyed,
stereotypically unprepared, diarrhea-mouthed clone; a diseased, repellent,
lackluster, automated, flabbergasted, half-cocked, anthropocentric,
capricious, pedantic, sectarian, injudicious, laughable, piddling,
trifling, farcical, callow, indecent, buffoonish, puerile, negligible,
repetitive, unassuming, trite, inefficient, garden-variety,
unprepossessing, ambiguous, fallible, unlearned, perplexed, vacant,
oblivious, dense, preoccupied, sallow, unimportant, opaque, vacuous,
benign, smarmy, asinine, fat-witted, uneducated, misinformation-absorbing
anti-intellectual; a medulla oblongata-deprived, irrational, juvenile,
sempiternally-spurious tatterdemalion; an inerudite, unenlightened,
nonconceiving, tentative, gauche, vague ignoramus; an uninspired,
puddingheaded dunce; a tenderfoot; a neophyte; a dabbler; a middlebrow ...
nay, King of the Lowbrows; a huckster; a shyster; a sham; a dupe; a drone;
a greenhorn, novice dilettante; a goddamned fucking shit-sucking FOOL.
>I can say that to your credit AT LEAST you have the courage to be an
>equal opportunity discriminator. If at first you don't succeed, ad more
>hominum (Before you respond and say 'He can't even spell ADD!, know that
>I'm bending the phrase 'ad hominum', to suit my purposes. )
You dimwit jackass. You make me physically ill. Get the fuck off my
planet, you facinorous, napiform, labrose, quisquilian, papuliferous,
highfalutin, shit-eating dolt. You worthless nincompoop. You artless,
insensate, self-indulgent, diminutive, pimply, sordid, offensive,
stenching, empty-shelled, loathsome, yearning adherent. Your
polysyndetonic, weakly-embellished excursus has been laid open for all to
patronize and condescend; intent disregarded, conveying nothing.
Numbskulls like Jef don't deserve their own recrement.
I'd love to burn out his eyes with a soldering iron, run a catheter into
his ocular chasms, and fill his hollow cranium to capacity with boiling
urine, scorching out BOTH of his synapses ... but that circumstance would
be too inexorable and uncompromising, even for Jef Sewell, the dilapidated,
backward maroon.
On second thought, scratch that. Jef deserves SO much worse for all his
ill-established assertions. If not for the intimidation of
prison-sentencing, the man would already be defunct.
Don't sweat it, Jef ... no one's gonna say anything about the way you
spelled "ad." Not when there's a perfectly incorrect "hominem" to be
pounced upon.
TWICE, to be precise.
Ah, Latin.
Ad hominem - literally translated: to the man. Usually incorporated into
arguments dealing with a person's character. In this case, I can only
assume you were taking another "modest" jab at your attacker, in hopes of
defaming. Does it really hurt that much, you unlearned coddler? Why
couldn't you leave well enough alone, for God's sake?!
Michael Hall, to the best of my recollections, didn't make ONE faux paus in
his spelling. The only mistake made was in letting you get away with being
such a snot-nosed hack. Oh, by the way, just so you know, I didn't
misspell "ADD!"
More realistically, you couldn't even spell "misspell," could you?
Wah, wah, wah.
For your entertainment, I have intentionally misspelled ONE word in this
document, which I bet you can't find without the assistance of your
spell-checker. If you post the only acceptable rejoinder in under
twenty-four hours, I will mail you a fifty-dollar bill. No kidding,
shit-for-brains. I procure a bountiful sum of delectation for all of us,
in solemn observation of the incontrovertible certitude that the
unessential lump of subservient ineptitude that is Jef Sewer has neither
the capacity nor the motivational temperament to make the necessary
transition from maundering bureausis to the ostensibly distinct interests
of the split-brained, opposable-thumbed Homo-erectus anytime soon. He'll
be cowering in the corner of a shower stall, wishing he could get his rocks
off, if only into the expansive duodenum of some crack-addled transsexual
prostitute.
Face it, you bedwetting girl-man, you are unqualified.
You infantile amateur. Ante bellum, you may well have escaped this sort of
public ridicule. Unfortunately for you, something inside just wouldn't let
go until the final distressing chord.
Regrettably, Jef, you had to shoot off your fat mouth. Your marred
undertaking to feign concinnity and enhanced verbification proficiency have
not gone unnoticed by the society of elevated thinkers to which I belong.
We share trenchant fits of laughter everyday at your expense. You are a
product of and, as an undeviating consequence, a reticent contrivance for
the prevailing de facto modus vivendi; that is to say, you are nothing more
than the rounded-down mean-average and that, tragically, is all you shall
ever be. Idiocy-spilling cretin.
Coincidentally, the aforementioned "rounded-down mean-average" is
inestimably minor, a trivial pittance of the overall human potential. What
is so excruciating is that almost everyone is like you, Jef.
What's it like to be considered an unavailing clown by an entity of
indubitable substance? What must it feel like to have the pliant marrow of
your existence anatomized, cross-referenced, and scrutinized?
I know it hurts, crybaby.
And now everyone ELSE knows it, too, you detestable parasite.
Everyone knows that you are nothing more than a stammering, boorish,
apple-polishing, obstreperously boastful alcatote with a big, stupid chip
on his/her shoulder.
You prattling, squeamish, defiled, jabbering, stumbling, inelegant,
coaybtete-leranous, unlovable, twaddling, red-faced blatherskite.
You docile, obstropulous, ludicrous stinkard.
You skulking, sluggish, foppish lackwit.
You vexatious, fidgety, cumbersome, precarious, mutable, tremulous,
vitriolic, faltering, vacillating, inconstant, insecure, crisis-fearing,
shivering, haughty, defected agglomeration of shit-encrusted pig
intestines.
You fraudulent, heinous, meaningless, incapable, enervated,
disproportionate, unintriguing, anomalous, inbred, fetid, herpid, putrid,
pointless, useless, infirm, unacceptable, squandered, aimless, decaying,
inauspicious, naive, unpleasant, unskillful, inept, reasonless,
embarrassing, inopportune, cowardly, ignorant, bile-sucking filthmonger.
Ut supra, feeb, a priori, ex nihilo nihil fit, et alia, ad infinitum.
in re, res ipsa loquitur, persona non grata.
Ecce signum, ecce homo, ecce lapsus linguae, ad nauseam.
Compos mentis, cogito ergo sum.
De profundis.
Deus ex machina.
Jef Sewell -- eo nomine, infra dignitatem, lusus naturae, memento mori.
Horribile dictu, ars longa, vita brevis, ad extremum.
Et sequens ...
Jacta alea est. Quo vadis.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Pro bono publico, ad libitum mori.
Caveat ignoramus.
Ad astra per non aspera.
Ad extremum.
Lex taliones.
Ecce erratum.
Et cetera.
Veni, vidi, vici.
Summa cum laude.
Verbum sap.
Adsum.
Ad hominum (sic).
Just for the record, I haven't touched a dictionary, thesaurus, or any
other word book today. Have you?
I wouldn't waste the time on a piece of tedious dogshit like you, you
sniveling, congenital, adenoidal, cocksmoking faggot.
And, no, I'm not a homophobe, but for lack of a MORE appropriate insult ...
Fucking imbecile.
I hope Michael Hall and that other Michael you so espouse to abhor tear
into you. I'm sure both of them will believe that your continual
misspellings of the same word are all part of some secret, underlying,
sarcastic pleasantry.
Why don't you spend a little less time on Usenet, pal? The two Michaels
don't even seem to care. Guess that about fucks any theory you may have
had about him (Michael Hall) "wasting energy" here.
And to Mr. David Brian Scott, in the other Michael's defense, I'll inform
you without any further procrastination -- I've heard the Burroughs quote
BOTH ways, depending on which piece of cut-up you choose to reference.
Evidently, it is YOU who should stop pretending, chump. If I ever see you
in Metro (not that I frequent the establishment), I'll probably beat the
holy fuck out of you. As for Jeffy, you wouldn't know a logical statement
if it bit your shriveled prick off, so I don't consider your analysis of
Burroughs' proclamation (either incarnation) to be particularly intuitive.
What a winner you are.
A prize cluck.
Get a goddamned vocabulary before picking any future arguments, boy.
Go join your astral brothers beyond the comet.
And, as a final note that I'm satisfied even Jef will be able to
understand: go suck your whore mother's diseased schmendrick, you impotent
cunt.
No one could ever REALLY love you.
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