Dave Barry Quotes

You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

One day soon the Gillette company will announce the development of a razor that, thanks to a computer microchip, can actually travel ahead in time and shave beard hairs that don't even exist yet

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with.

But my point is that competitive eating is a real sport, and I considered taking it up. But when I thought about what this would mean sitting around for hours, stuffing my face with unhealthy food I realized it was basically the same thing as journalism.

If it weren't for marriage, men and women would have to fight with total strangers.

You must prepare yourselves, young people, because Uncle Dave's generation is getting old. We are almost ready to go to the retirement home to spend the rest of our days tapping our bedpans rhythmically in time to "easy listening" rock 'n' roll. We must pass the torch on to you, and you must grasp it, ideally by the end that is not on fire.

I never stop running. I'm not one of the weenies who drop out just because the electoral college votes. I'm still in the race. I'm an extremely corrupt candidate and I stress that in case anybody in our reading audience is interested in sending me money.

I know that all over America there's probably politicians sending out pictures of themselves signing that mandatory helmet bill, but it's bullshit. I say that as a parent.

'I'm sorry,' guys are always telling women, 'but I'm just not ready to make a commitment.' Guys are in a permanent state of nonreadiness. If guys were turkey breasts, you could put them in a 350-degree oven on July Fourth, and they still wouldn't be done in time for Thanksgiving.

Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years.

I had no shoes and I pitied myself. Then I met a man who had no feet, so I took his shoes.

Software: These programs give instruction to the CPU, which processes billions of tiny facts called bytes, and within a fraction of a second it sends you an error message that requires you to call the customer-support hot line and be placed on hold for approximately the life-span of a caribou.

Congress shall also create a tax code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox.

Lobsters displays all three of the classic biological characteristics of an insect, namely: 1. It has way more legs than necessary. 2. There is no way you would ever pet it. 3. It does not respond to simple commands such as "Here, boy!"

It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight.

Many things have been written, including by me, linking humor and pain. Mostly, in my case, the humor part keeps me sane. If I spent all my hours writing things like "Fatal Distraction," I'd become a brooding, erratic melancholic. I'd be Raskolnikov.

I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.

There's a test they can do to determine a baby's gender ahead of time; I think they insert a tiny photo of Leonardo DiCaprio into the uterus, and if the baby punches it, it's a boy.

If women were in charge of all the world's nations, there would be sincerely believe this - no military conflicts, and when there WAS a military conflict, everybody involved would feel just awful and there would soon be a high-level exchange of notes written on greeting cards with flowers on the front, followed by a Peace Luncheon

UNIVAC: a device, which contained 20,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,500 square feet and weighed 40 tons; there was also a laptop version weighing 27 tons.

It's a real smug self-righteous punk kid saying nobody has the right to tell him what to do and how dare you put a sign up saying that I can't go on your property?

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.

I guess the negative thing that happens to me is that I'm old now. They said there was a generation I was too young for and now some will say there's probably 10 generations I'm too old for. They'll say, isn't he dead or retired or whatever? Or it just becomes fashionable to say "Oh he's not funny anymore," which, I don't know, maybe to them I'm not. I'm more likely to hear that now than I am to hear that I'm unacceptably risqué.

I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say - they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College - "I just hate to talk to a machine!" They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn't go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society.

Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.

The problem with winter sports is that - follow me closely here - they generally take place in winter.

The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.

As the saying goes: "If you're not part of the solution, you're a newspaper columnist."

Meetings are places where dead ideas rise from their graves and eat the brains of the living.

I did all this stuff that was illegal when I was a kid. I drank beer when I was 15. I smoked cigarettes when I was 13. I drove to New York City when I was 14 - don't tell my son. Those things were against the law, but I did them anyway. I didn't become a heroin addict, although I probably could have gotten heroin somehow. I don't think my son would buy heroin at any price. He knows what it is, and he knows how stupid it is.

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.

Is there a medical rule that requires doctors-office personnel to treat you as though you have the IQ of a Cheeto?

The Internet: transforming society and shaping the future through chat.

Dogs love to go for rides. A dog will happily get into any vehicle going anywhere.

If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

The Internet "browser"... is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later.

This was years ago, I think during the early [Ronald] Reagan years. I came up with a plan that everybody just pay $8.95 in taxes. Cheating would be allowed. But the incentive to cheat wouldn't be nearly as great if you only had to pay the $8.95. There were a few people who would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars under this plan. I think it was Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the guys who do the quiz shows. But almost everybody else would be off really cheap.

I haven't been able to slam-dunk the basketball for the past five years. Or, for the thirty-eight years before that, either.

When I read that I had to go to Gettysburg.

The nuclear generator of brain sludge is television.

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

He's a boating enthusiast, although that phrase seems too weak to describe the level of his interest, kind of like describing someone as a heroin fancier.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which, as any American high school student can tell you, was an act that apparently had something to do with stamps.

Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve 'tax breaks,' which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money.

Basically Ken is a very gentle, home-loving person. I remember when one of his stick insects had a knee infection. He stayed up all night rubbing it with germoline and banging its head on the table.

There's an old saying among scientific guys: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, ideally by dropping a cement truck on them from a crane."

Whatever the needs of the public are, the government responds to those needs by getting larger.

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.

My son wouldn't go get heroin. If he did or didn't, it wouldn't have anything to do with whether it was legal or illegal.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

People don't think of writers as sex objects. The women who write to me and suggest that we ought to have sex usually turn out to be, like, eighty. And their letters always end with, "Just joking."

The major parties could conduct live human sacrifices on their podiums during prime time, and I doubt that anybody would notice.

If Peter was nine, and a new boy came to St. Norbert’s Home for Wayward Boys who said he was ten, why, then, Peter would declare himself eleven. Also, he could spit the farthest. That made him the undisputed leader.

I'm happy to start on one topic and end on another one entirely, as long as it's funny.

I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I'm saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.