Bayanisms

Get better acquainted with one of today’s most quotable authors. (That would be me.) Feel free to use any of the following quotes as long as you attribute them to Rick Bayan…

From the Tirades:

A middling mind always benefits from a lack of competition. – The 50th Tirade

The smaller the country, the greater the odds of one’s likeness eventually appearing on a postage stamp. Miniature nations like Andorra have probably immortalized prominent shepherds and taxidermists. – The 50th Tirade

Whether a writer has thirty readers or thirty million, he communicates with just one mind at a time. – The 50th Tirade

I was a volcano of cynicism rumbling and spewing after twenty years of dour dormancy, and I relished my monthly eruptions. I relished them the way a Puritan enjoys banishing cigarette smokers to the parking lot. I felt the rippling and triumphant glee of a righteous contrarian. If nature had fitted me for any activity other than eating, sleeping and Trivial Pursuit, this was it: the creation of darkly mirthful messages that would cheer the lonely outlaw souls of enlightened cynics from Missouri to Mozambique. – The 50th Tirade

Successful affectation convinces our potential adversaries (as well as prospective mates) that we’re higher on the food chain than they suspected. – Great Affectations

A significant chunk of American society has gone upscale in its tastes and identity, something that has never happened before in Yankee Land. You could almost call it a mass movement, possibly the first elitist mass movement in history. More of us than ever have the money to indulge in the telltale little luxuries that lift us above those OTHER masses. – Great Affectations

We’re all just blowfish trying not to be eaten before our time. What could be more human? – Great Affectations

My theory is that empty, ugly or indecipherable art makes the critics feel indispensable in their role as interpreters. No wonder they rhapsodize: they alone have the power confer meaning upon the meaningless. – Art for Slackers

There seems to be no end to meaningless and repulsive art. What should have been a mere transient ripple in the history of art — a temporary bout of hiccups, a touch of giddy irreverence following centuries of unrelieved greatness — has turned into a mindlessly destructive tidal wave. – Art for Slackers

You need more than a concept to create art; you need artistry. – Art for Slackers

We all have a point at which our very chromosomes scream for us to drop everything and save ourselves. – Beyond Work

The key to quitting successfully is to make sure you’re escaping TO something, not merely FROM something. – Beyond Work

Professional amateurs ditch the nefarious job establishment that oppressed them in the prime of life; they recover their senses and live the way nature intended them to live: free yet focused, admirably self-possessed, dignified rather than merely respectable, silly when it suits them, and abundantly happy in their work. – Beyond Work

Creating your own life is both exhilarating and terrifying, like being an explorer in the age of Columbus. You never know if your ship is headed off the edge of the earth and into the waiting gullet of some dark, devouring leviathan with bad breath. – Beyond Work

The writers’ workshops and graduate-school creative writing programs have spawned a race of thin-blooded craftspeople with little to say except in the manner of their saying it; they might as well be stitching quilts. – Trouble in Book-Land

Murder is a dark and loathsome business, nerve-wracking for the perpetrator and terminally inconvenient for the victim. – A Bug’s Death

Nothing turns a pacifist into a warrior like the invasion of his home turf. – A Bug’s Death

I began to realize that the secret of war — of all mass murder — is to deny the individuality of the designated victim. – A Bug’s Death

Terrorists think they’re killing symbols, but the blood is shed by individuals — people with unique dreams, experiences, fears, fingerprints, hobbies and personality quirks. To a terrorist, victims are interchangeable commodities; it makes no difference whose blood goes trickling down the sidewalk. When terrorism rules, the subtle distinctions between individuals become as irrelevant as the color of their underwear. – A Bug’s Death

Our cultural overseers have fled from sweetness and light for the better part of a century now — even longer in France. We’ve been cajoled into believing that scenes of idyllic beauty and contentment border on the banal and the bathetic. We’ve been instructed by our professors to shun sentimentality as if it were the handiwork of Beelzebub. – An Unsolicited Christmas Card

I learned that it wasn’t acceptable to write sweetly and sincerely from the heart; we had to deny the obvious truth that most of us humans crave warmth and happiness the way a houseplant leans toward the sun. – An Unsolicited Christmas Card

There’s no illusion so convincing — and so dishonest — as the affectation of naturalism. – An Unsolicited Christmas Card

Those with claims to intellectual rigor generally despise pretty things. – An Unsolicited Christmas Card

And what about Santa Claus—that jolly old elf, that bearded embodiment of Christmas cheer and generosity? Hah! A wanton hoax… a cruel jest perpetrated on generations of starry-eyed gentile tots… a deliberate set-up for the most shattering of letdowns… and, for countless proto-cynics, the sorry prelude to a life of perpetual disillusionment: the discovery that your favorite sentient being in the entire universe —someone you liked even better than God and MisterRogers—is a sham, a shadow, a myth, a nonentity. And worse yet, that you’ve been HOODWINKED. – Why I Can’t Hate Christmas

Month after month, most of us take a drubbing out there: jobs that crush our egos and fray our nerves… relationships that remind us of our jobs… stocks that plummet after we buy them and go through the roof the after we sell them… the endless cycle of hope and disappointment… a relentless onslaught of red lights, closed doors, new gray hairs, approaching death, and socks mysteriously missing after we do the laundry. And here’s the sad irony: the more childlike we are, the more the world tends to age and wither us. – Why I Can’t Hate Christmas

If you really want to know what makes our special brand of primate unique among all the denizens of our planet, pull up a chair. Here’s what I think, and see if you agree: we’re the only creatures capable of bungling our lives. – Uniquely Human, Uniquely Clueless

Humans are the idiot-savants of the animal kingdom. We’re born with astoundingly acute faculties in some areas — such as the ability to invent light bulbs or solve quadratic equations — yet we’re alarmingly clueless about basic issues like finding our way through life. – Uniquely Human, Uniquely Clueless

Does a porcupine worry about how he comes across to other porcupines? Do beagles need to attend self-esteem workshops? You’ll never find a rabbit confessing to millions of other rabbits that he slept with a squirrel. No moose has ever had its navel pierced. You’ll search in vain for the penguin that made a bad career move. When was the last time a squid lost a fortune in penny stocks or an armadillo entered a drug rehabilitation clinic? You have to give them credit: these creatures make us look like rejects from The Jerry Springer Show. No other species is so gifted as ours, yet none is so depressingly prone to self-induced failure and disaster. – Uniquely Human, Uniquely Clueless

The gods have always shown a distressing tendency to favor their most obnoxious creatures. – How to Be a Success

Why would the Creator of the universe, presumably a sagacious dude, concoct natural laws that ensure the triumph of the most reprehensible, the most conniving, the least admirable of creatures? – How to Be a Success

If you want to be favored by the gods, you have to emulate the starlings and the cockroaches. They care not for truth, beauty or the New York Times Book Review section. They view the world as a territory to be subdued, not enjoyed or passively appreciated. They subsist on grit, not wit. They revel in their ugliness. They have vitality, they make life miserable for others, they breed copiously, and they prevail. – How to Be a Success

Vanished, too, are the plainspoken, heart-of-gold Mabels, Marjories, Wilmas, Josephines, Irmas and Ethels of a dying generation. They could never have survived in the age of anise-encrusted tuna sashimi with drizzled leek sauce, and we’ll miss them. – The Museum of Discarded Names

Our taste in names mutates like our taste in music and clothing; today we reject names that remind us of mawkish ballads or high celluloid collars or oppressively ornate wallpaper. We’re living in a stripped-down, sexualized age that snickers cruelly at hopeless celibates like Myron and Gertrude. – The Museum of Discarded Names

I can assure you that in another fifty years or so, trendy names like Cody and Kaylee will seem as quaintly amusing as Egbert and Prunella do now. – The Museum of Discarded Names

If temperatures rise, can’t we just sit back in our hammocks and watch the palm trees sprout in New Jersey or Indiana or wherever we happen to be living? Places like Tulsa and Kansas City could certainly benefit from a touch of the tropics. – Notes from a Doomed Planet

You have to marvel at the ability of one lousy species to ransack an entire planet. – Notes from a Doomed Planet

I’d watch the solitary dove sitting on her nest, motionless and infinitely patient, her dark eyes sweet but vacant like those of a small-town manicurist waiting for a client. – The Doves’ Nest

We might be sandal-wearing vegetarians who listen to National Public Radio and contribute to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but who among us hasn’t occasionally felt impelled to crush the life out of a living thing, human or otherwise? – The Doves’ Nest

I have to confess that I’m still capable of being shocked by the depravity of human and animal nature. It’s part of what makes me a cynic but also what keeps me from hardening beyond redemption. – The Doves’ Nest

The practical drives out the whimsical. – On Becoming a Dullard

What’s so terrible about turning into our parents, as long as our parents weren’t terrible? – On Becoming a Dullard

Isn’t there an optimum level of sophistication beyond which we become ridiculous, like meticulously clipped miniature poodles? – On Becoming a Dullard

There are no eccentrics in the suburbs. – On Becoming a Dullard

To be dull and successful is a station in life to be envied, especially if you compare it to being dull and unsuccessful. – On Becoming a Dullard

Some of us run out of things to say, but we keep saying them anyway. We begin to repeat our ideas, like a watercolorist who belabors his brushstrokes until all spontaneity is successfully expunged. – On Becoming a Dullard

Do your deeds now, while the hormones run high and the heat of brilliance courses through your supple arteries. You’ll be rusting away soon enough. – On Becoming a Dullard

There’s something to be said for going dull around the edges. It might be nature’s way of preparing us for our eventual extermination. – On Becoming a Dullard

Nations are a lot like people: they can be soulful or expedient, overbearing or submissive, dutifully diligent or devoted to merriment. They’re given to bouts of sulking, squabbling, boasting, violence and even madness. They hold grudges and, when their grievances aren’t redressed, tend to seek bloody vengeance like cuckolded Jordanian husbands. Their vanity can be insufferable, whether they’re nuclear superpowers or sheep-infested Balkan republics. – Not Just Another Obscure Ethnic Group

The most common adjective used to describe Armenia is “beleaguered” – like Job, like Republicans at Berkeley, like a corporation in dire need of a turnaround before its share price sinks below the one-dollar level. – Not Just Another Obscure Ethnic Group

the camaraderie of cultural pessimism – Extinction Reconsidered

“We’re dinosaurs now,” I said. “We’re going to be as irrelevant and obsolete as all those Victorian writers with three names.” – Extinction Reconsidered

We want no part of the forced adaptation and mental streamlining that the brave new world demands of us. We’re damned if we’re going to jettison our favorite books and ideas to make ourselves more aerodynamic. And, of course, we’re damned if we don’t. – Extinction Reconsidered

I sometimes wonder if, given the chance to inhabit a more congenial universe — a world in which history majors reigned like bespectacled pharaohs or at least enjoyed parity with corporate supply-chain managers — outmoded characters like John K. and me could have flourished and borne ample fruit. Could we have been contenders, had class, been somebody? – Extinction Reconsidered

Imagine the architectural equivalent of twin Arnold Schwarzeneggers, and you’ve imagined the impact of the World Trade Center on the New York skyline of the early seventies. – On the Fallen Towers

Who would have dreamed that the monumentally bland World Trade Center would become a haunted place, comparable to the fields of Antietam or Shiloh? – On the Fallen Towers

We began to drink espresso and latte; we were distancing ourselves from the bowling alleys and split levels of postwar American culture, the way newly minted sophisticates distance themselves from their hopelessly square parents with the Buick in the driveway. – On the Fallen Towers

We had lost our innocence way back in the sixties, when the sun-dappled serenity of Beaver Cleaver’s world suddenly gave way to the unholy squawks of rock stars and radicals, assassins and Antichrists. Anyone remember Charles Manson? Anyone care to review the vocabulary used in American films of the past thirty-odd years? – On the Fallen Towers

Terrorists can tumble the buildings around us, but they’re powerless to destroy what’s inside us. Our souls are stronger than steel and concrete. As long as we’ve built them on solid foundations, they’ll survive any assault the terrorists can devise. – On the Fallen Towers

They’re joyless enthusiasts, these disturbers of the peace. They’re obsessive-compulsives with energy to burn. They make themselves irritable and add immeasurably to the irritability of their neighbors. Nobody finds them easy to love, and they’re even less fond of us. They’re willing to die to make their point, unlike most lawyers and essayists. – Fanatics on Parade

A fanatic is a martyr-in-waiting. – Fanatics on Parade

People are beginning to question why religious folk are so driven by the fervor of their beliefs. Have they been brainwashed? Have they lost their sanity in their search for salvation? Do they honestly believe that their own sect possesses an exclusive pipeline to the will of God? Why do they grow so peevish if we don’t buy their beliefs? Why can’t they just let us go peacefully to hell? – Fanatics on Parade

You don’t need religion to be a fanatic; you just need fanaticism. – Fanatics on Parade

So why don’t they look happier, these robust warriors for the truth? Why the grim faces, the splenetic rhetoric, the restless and irritable posturing? Why can’t their fanaticism be leavened by enthusiasm, as if they actually enjoyed advancing their cause? Why can’t fanatics be more like birdwatchers or amateur photographers — merry hobbyists who love what they’re doing because it warms their souls with simple childlike joy? – Fanatics on Parade

For all their energy, fanatics are a dour race. – Fanatics on Parade

I suspect that fanatics tend to look so grim not because their side is engaged in a struggle to prevail, but because their ideology denies and disdains essential human needs like comfort and happiness. – Fanatics on Parade

The true fanatic is a walking pamphlet. – Fanatics on Parade

Our culture has become hard, mean and dirty, like motel sex that bangs the headboards but produces not a scintilla of real romance. – Filth

We’ve been witnessing an unprecedented flight from virtue, because virtue bores us. – Filth

Our pursuit of the perverse is like an addictive drug; we require ever-higher doses to attain the same level of titillation. We’re already sated with the quarreling inbred lovers who infest daytime television. Rock musicians have to do more than smash their guitars and expose themselves onstage. -Filth

In any clash of cultures, the side with the most energy prevails. – Filth

The land is being engulfed by suburbia. And wherever that happens, suburbanites are sure to follow. – Flesh and Mortality

On the whole, it is a good day to hibernate. – Flesh and Mortality

What do you want from me? I’m only a sack of flesh! – Flesh and Mortality

Unlike a friend, a dog won’t drop you to make a good career move. – On the Uses of Friends

Couples need friends for one obvious reason: so they don’t have to talk to each other when they go out for a good time. – On the Uses of Friends

The very qualities that once signified a civilized human being — wit and whimsy, gentlemanly manners, a sensitive and articulate mind, an appreciation of books and art — now serve to warn you, more often than not, that your prospective chum probably harbors a lavender gene or two. – On the Uses of Friends

A pseudo-friend is the social equivalent of fast food: a useful creature who can be called upon to deliver a tasty illusion of friendship without the expense and bother. – On the Uses of Friends

What about the curious phenomenon of online friendships? Are they genuine or pseudo? Can you establish a lasting bond with someone whose nose and teeth you’ve never seen? – On the Uses of Friends

No matter what we’re doing at the moment, the majority of us would rather be doing something else. – Letter to the Future

The person who gains a measure of control over his life is regarded as a curiosity and a sage; our culture entitles such characters to write bestselling self-help books. – Letter to the Future

In our time we still delight in killing healthy animals and trees, and occasionally each other. We make war and hamburgers with equal enthusiasm. – Letter to the Future

No matter how thoroughly you’re connected to your technology, you can’t suppress the inner ape. – Letter to the Future

Better to be merry some of the time, and miserable some of the time, than to be merely well-adjusted all of the time. – Letter to the Future

When I was a mere pup, no older than some of the unopened soup cans in my cupboard today, I used to believe that God looked like Arthur Godfrey. – Will the Real God Please Stand Up?

God appears to be fairly enthusiastic about sex. The entire pageant of life revolves around the act of procreation. We tend to grow extinct without it. If God had cast a dim eye on the felicities of conjugation, he would have had us reproducing like mushrooms or amoebas. Instead, he invented genitals. – Will the Real God Please Stand Up?

God may be preoccupied with species, but he seems to delight in tormenting certain types of individuals. Crazy people, sickly people, the weak, the ugly, the maladjusted, the shy, the stupid, the overly intelligent, the insecure — chronic sufferers all. He values pluck and aggressiveness; the go-getter who builds his own successful sheet-metal business is the Good Lord’s fair-haired boy. – Will the Real God Please Stand Up?

God has the most fun with artists and writers: he inflames them with the desire to rival his own creations, then douses their overheated ambitions with a cold spray from the garden hose of reality. – Will the Real God Please Stand Up?

What do we make of a Providence who destroys as readily as he provides? Can we still be friends? Or do we need to keep genuflecting while we duck for cover? – Will the Real God Please Stand Up?

If you’re working hard enough to make a fortune these days, chances are the concept of leisure will be as alien to you as a lava lamp was to John Quincy Adams. – Good Life, Bad Life, Better Life

An essential component of The Bad Life, most of us would agree, is dwelling in a trailer park. Everything you hold dear is contained in an oblong metallic crate that attracts funnel clouds from the heavens with depressing regularity. Your neighbors tend to have more children than teeth; they play commercial country music half the night while habitually leaving garbage and dead pets below your kitchen window. Your environment smells vaguely like the inside of a dumpster, though you use a household deodorizer that makes it smell like a banana-scented dumpster. – Good Life, Bad Life, Better Life

“It is an easy matter to accept both the goodness and the unfairness of the world with an indifferent heart; then you are respected as a realist. Just as easy is it to overlook the unfair, for then you enjoy the sunny life of an optimist. If you delude yourself that you can overcome the unfair, you gain a reputation as an activist. But to see the unfair and rail against it – while admitting that YOU CAN DO NOTHING ABOUT IT – that is the difficult and thankless calling of the cynic. Your reward is that everyone hates you.” – Grand Illusions

One evening a few weeks ago, a stranger called and offered to give me a piece of choice real estate, absolutely free, with only a single obligation: to be buried there. – A Grave Story

I’m not sure I’d want anyone gawking at my freshly laundered remains, my mouth tightened into a weird smile, nose already drooping, physical quirks on view for everyone’s extended perusal. “I didn’t realize he had such floppy earlobes,” I can imagine them thinking. “Look at the bulge under his chin; he should have gone with a larger collar size.” “He really did have one long eyebrow — a UNIBROW — didn’t he?” “Look at the honker on him, may he rest in peace.” – A Grave Story

A closed casket generally elicits polite disappointment. Granted, you rarely hear anyone grumble, “I drove halfway down the turnpike for THIS? A CLOSED BOX?” But you can’t blame them for wanting the real goods: that rare and privileged glimpse of a silent, motionless object that used to be one of THEM: animated, intelligent, foolish and proud. Viewing a dead body gives a live body strange comfort. – A Grave Story

You’re in HECK, my friends — the lesser, more mundane version of Hell that most of us inhabit on a daily basis. No sulfurous fumes or eternal fires emanate from this sunless abode… nothing as nightmarish as Dante’s infernal cesspools, drizzling embers or winged demons. No, those cinematic special effects would be too dazzling, too diverting, too stimulating to the senses. Heck isn’t a Steven Spielberg production; it’s more of a minor afternoon soap opera. The souls of the Darned are condemned to pass their days in sulking, inner conflict and chronic disappointment. – A Living Heck

It’s important not to confuse Heck and Hell. Heck is working long days in a windowless office, solemnly and with scant hope of advancement — while your younger colleague, who scored 219 points lower than you on the Verbal SAT, has just been promoted to vice president. Hell is being personally demoted by that vice president and moved into a cubicle. – A Living Heck

Heck is being summoned for jury duty. Hell is being sentenced to a maximum-security prison and finding that your cellmate wants a more meaningful relationship. – A Living Heck

Heck is feeling compelled to check all the water faucets before you leave the house. Hell is a lifelong case of paranoid schizophrenia in which you think you ARE a water faucet. – A Living Heck

Any job with a whiff of nobility automatically paid less than one that called upon our crasser instincts. Thus an assistant editor of a literary magazine was forever doomed to be outearned by an assistant buyer of ladies’ undergarments. Society was rewarding those folks who had been callous enough — or shrewd enough — to resist the enchantments of art and philosophy. – How I Became a Cynic

I make my living in the business world, but my soul will never be completely at ease there. I must be constituted differently on a genetic level from your average MBA, who seems to thrive in an environment I consider semi-lethal — the way certain strains of bacteria thrive on antibiotics. – How I Became a Cynic

Most of us are born with a gift for seeing through sham and chicanery. An untutored child is quick to spy a fraud — and wonderfully eager to kick him in the shin. – Humbuggery

By now, most of us have accepted without question that thin is better than plump, young better than old, extroverted better than introverted, energetic better than reflective, north better than south, blond better than brunette. We read the books everyone else is reading, see the movies everyone else is seeing. We’ve been sold on the concept of cool to the extent that most of us are terrified to be our lovable dorky selves. We’ve been snookered by the cult of celebrity, so we confer automatic prestige on anyone whose face regularly appears on a screen. – Humbuggery

The trouble with received opinions, as with all fashions, is that they tend to change unexpectedly. When one faction is deposed and another takes its place, the rules change, too. – Humbuggery

Let me uncork the bottle of bile once more and fling some pungent last words before your expectant eyes. I take up this task solemnly and with a sniffle of regret that happens to coincide with a minor head-cold. I’ve now taken up the same task seventy times and I won’t be doing it again. Friends, this is my final tirade. – Hello, I Must Be Going

Cynical humor thrives in peaceful and affluent times. We feed on the follies of the assorted pretenders, charlatans, overinflated eminentoes and other amiably clownish characters who seem to proliferate in such eras. – Hello, I Must Be Going

The new century, from what I’ve seen of it, promises to make the Great Depression look like a lawn party. – Hello, I Must Be Going

The gap between haves and have-nots continues to expand to a degree unseen in our enterprising republic since the original Gilded Age. It’s almost as if Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick are still partying on that manmade lake above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, blissfully unconcerned that the dam could burst and inundate all those nameless working-class folks in the row-houses below. Fifty years ago, you had to travel to Brazil or Manhattan to observe such sharp disparities between rich and poor. Now you simply have to check the annual incomes of your local CEOs and compare them with yours. – Hello, I Must Be Going

Not since the Viking era has a generation of Western males embraced brazen stupidity to this degree. Boys seem set to become the lumpenproletariat of this century — sullen unskilled laborers bound in servitude to a savvy ruling class of diligent, well-educated women. – Hello, I Must Be Going

Global warming might be a fever the earth is running in an attempt to ward off a deadly infection known as homo sapiens. – Hello, I Must Be Going

Over the past six years I’ve tried to give a voice to one of our most neglected minority groups: the intelligent and sensitive outsiders who constitute a vast, overlooked fraternity of the thwarted. Society makes it difficult for such gentle outlaw souls to thrive and express their talents. Out of necessity they take jobs that grate against their best instincts; they work in environments that crush or trivialize their spirits; they put up with chronic frustration and subtle rejections; they watch the rewards go to drones and bullies; naturally they become cynics. Yet through it all they refuse to surrender their integrity. That accursed integrity: keep it and you lose; lose it and you win. But keep it they must. – Hello, I Must Be Going

Be merry in your cynicism, and proud. Steer clear of ideologues and fanatics; embrace kindness and heartiness and open laughter. – Hello, I Must Be Going

I’m starting to wonder if too much bad news might be hazardous to our health, mental and otherwise. I wonder if the world’s woes might be pressing down too heavily on my underdeveloped shoulders — or on yours as well. – I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

How many opportunities the world gives us to ruin our lives or have them ruined by others! How many opportunities for grief, pain and perpetual anger! How many ways to die before our time! – I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

What can we do when there’s nothing we can do? – I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

I stand before you today humble yet proud, ambivalent yet resolute, small yet tall. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

I will not shrink, I will not fold, I will not wrinkle in the service of my country. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

We Americans are traditionally an extroverted and unpretentious tribe. We laugh at ponderous French philosophers and dour German Expressionists, assuming we’ve heard of them in the first place. We prefer the crisp light of a fast-food restaurant to the dark haze of a Rembrandt self-portrait. We favor the practical over the profound, as we always have, as perhaps most of us should; after all, doers don’t have time to be dreamers. But lately, my fellow Americans, I’ve come to believe that our souls are in peril, that they’re in danger of turning into a hard and opaque plastic substance like our credit cards and cell phones. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

I see most of us applauding and worshipping mediocre celebrity-gods, those flimsy successors to Zeus and Aphrodite who, thanks to our support, amass more wealth in a single month than most of us do in a lifetime. How readily we forget that our pop culture is an artificial creation of the entertainment industry, not an expression of our own souls. How easily we mistake energy for talent, glibness for charm, sarcasm for wit. Smart one-liners can disguise a dumb culture. Always remember, my fellow Americans, that celebrities aren’t better than you — they’re simply more famous. I’d urge you to stop reading about their charmed lives and start creating your own. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

I see turncoat university scholars dismantling the monuments of Western civilization to serve a political agenda — an agenda dictated by their own hysterical resentments and borrowed beliefs. They teach propaganda instead of poetry, class war instead of classics. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

I see a nation of a thousand subcultures, ingrown and inbred: MBAs and performance artists, bikers and rare book collectors, computer hackers and health-food fanatics, rock climbers and Rastafarians. I call it the boutiquefication of the American spirit. We’ve become fragmented and fussy, more attentive to our little storefronts than to our common welfare. Individualism within a single nation is healthy and commendable; conformity within a thousand sub-nations is not. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

Prejudice is the psoriasis of the human condition: it’s unsightly and it never completely vanishes, but with a little care we can keep it under control. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

In any free society, there will always be those who rise through their own efforts, those who have success handed to them, those who fail and those who never try. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

We desire a truly uncomfortable degree of comfort. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

Would Lincoln feel at home in postmodern America? Would Washington or Jefferson or Louisa May Alcott? Can you picture Mark Twain lecturing to a university faculty today, his audience frigid with the intellectual ice of political correctness? Can you imagine Ben Franklin’s opinion of multi-level marketing schemes? Can you see Teddy Roosevelt pacing the aisles of Toys R Us in search of action figures to pacify his young sons? Would Will Rogers like the men who run Wall Street? – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

Despite the best wisdom of Thomas Jefferson we can’t really pursue happiness at all. We have to live in a way that generates happiness as a by-product. – The Cynic’s Inaugural Address

For many of us, making a decision sets the cosmic Rube Goldberg machinery in motion; eventually the duck will press a lever and a bowling ball will drop roundly on our head. – Indecision

Sheep, being essentially decision-impaired creatures, will follow anyone who appears to know where he’s going, even if he’s headed across the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour. – Indecision

Think about us poor writers, eyes fixed upon a blank screen, faced with an infinite number of possible ways to say what we want to say — assuming that we actually KNOW what we want to say. It’s just us and the English language, all 514,886 glorious words of it (and that’s only my best guess; I’m sure the roster is continually expanding). Do we start our first sentence with “The,” “When,” “How,” “Purple” or “Pulchritudinous”? And after that, then what? It’s back to sifting through those same 514,886 words for an encore. The more words you know, the harder it is to decide which ones to use. Let’s face it: writing is one damned decision after another. If we’re dedicated to our craft, we make a few thousand of those decisions in a day. If we’re any good, at least 98 percent of them must be correct and true. You can see why I try not to write every day. – Indecision

Did you ever notice that the happiest folks seem to lack a gene for seeing the world as it is? – Inequalities

What I’ve never understood is the utter triviality of the qualities that most people consider sexually alluring, like a cute little nose, a dimple in the chin, or a ravenous and insatiable lust that virtually wafts from the pores. – Inequalities

As you may have surmised, the real world is run by people of slightly above-average intelligence. Those at either end of the bell curve are generally made to suffer. To be intellectually gifted is to be as disadvantaged as a moron, with one minor difference: morons are happier. – Inequalities

In a society that prizes productivity, attractiveness and social skill, the poor woman appeared to be a triple failure. She couldn’t possibly aid the cause of commerce, entice a reasonably normal mate with her comeliness, or keep the conversation rolling at a dinner party. She was a sad bundle of misfiring neurons. Most of us have no use for malfunctioning citizens, and we can be as ruthless as ten-year-old bullies in weeding them out. – A Slight Case of Insanity

You don’t see a lot of fully bloomed lunatics or even eccentrics in the business world; the typical workplace is a ghetto of militant sanity. – A Slight Case of Insanity

When I was a chronically frustrated and neurotic young liberal arts graduate — still living with my parents at twenty-seven, half-buried in musty books and generally unemployed, my progress blocked on every front — I used to fear that I’d go mad. I wondered how my disorder would manifest itself: whether I’d simply lurk in malignant shadowy solitude while the fevers spun bright hallucinations in my brain, or whether I’d go out in a sudden eruption of violence and cause my family considerable embarrassment by gunning down pedestrians from a rooftop. I hoped it wouldn’t be the latter, and I convinced myself that I’d make a fine eccentric if I could learn to enjoy my malady. That’s the secret of all the great eccentrics: be proud of your oddity, indulge it like a hobby and render it harmless. – A Slight Case of Insanity

I’m grateful to anyone who makes me think, because that much-underrated activity keeps my increasingly torpid middle-aged brain from turning into an oversized walnut. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

American readers keep fattening the bank accounts of feel-good writers, though I submit that if any of their books actually worked, the public wouldn’t need to keep buying more of them. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

True cynicism is a lament for the loss of ideals, the decline of standards, the destruction of virtue. We cynics observe the sorry state of current human affairs, we feel the loss deep in our innards, and we attempt to recapture some of our dignity by sniping at the sources of our disgruntlement. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

But we know there’s nothing we can do to fix the problems that really chafe our sensitive hides: that society’s rewards so often go to the wrong people, that the bad tends to drive out the good, that we suffer for clinging to noble convictions, that dogs die young, poets die poor and investment bankers die ridiculously rich without producing much of value. Most normal folks adjust to these harsh realities the way zoo animals adjust to their cages. They’re realists. We resist those easy adjustments, not out of choice but out of a naturally unbending temperament. We’re cynics. What we can’t change and can’t accept, we have to be cynical about. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

Cynicism may be ineffective as a long-term solution, but at least it provides short-term comic relief. By laughing at the sources of our woes, we gain some satisfaction, a sense of control and the sweet taste of harmless revenge. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

if I were a politician or a CEO, I might be wary of cynics, too. We’re thinkers and watchers, not doers. We’re not inclined to lead, follow or get out of the way. It would be more convenient, of course, if we did get out of the way. As it is, we observe the faults and follies of the appointed potentates, often in silence — but they know we’re on to them. We cynics are a perpetual thorn in the side of leadership. You’d think they might appreciate us for keeping them honest. You’d think our thorny presence might persuade them to examine their own motives and appetites. But no, they simply revile us and enjoy denouncing us from the pulpit. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

I’m not convinced that we need to be cynics for life; for most of us, cynicism should be a passing phase, like an afternoon thunderstorm: we need it to relieve our parched souls, stimulate growth and deepen the greenery of our minds. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

To procreate is the ultimate act of faith; few parents can afford to be cynics. But they’ll be better parents if they’ve already been steeled by the knowledge that all is not for the best in this most baffling of all possible worlds. They’ll be forewarned that life is unfair and that virtue doesn’t guarantee victory. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

The current work climate will continue to breed cynicism like malaria unless the people in power recognize that human resources shouldn’t be exploited in the manner of milk-cows or wood pulp. – Letter to a Conscientious Critic

How fitting it is — and how exasperating — that the secrets of happiness and longevity seem to be inextricably linked. You master the one, and the other comes with the package. You fail at one, and you fail at both. – Lady Longevity

It’s friction that wears out our engines and sends us to the junkyard while the race is still on. – Lady Longevity

We’re continually forced to watch the favored alpha males reap a lopsided share of the spoils: inflated incomes, professional pats on the back, enhanced socioeconomic standing and the attentions of comely women, frequently including their wives. – Love and the Single Cynic

The lonely guys are easy to recognize: tense, lumpy, prematurely graying, already primed for their first heart attacks. Deprived of a woman’s touch, their bodies produce no calming endorphins to ease their burdened nerves. As their arteries fill with fatal sludge, so do their souls.- Love and the Single Cynic

Love-starved men can be dangerous; when their frustrations overcome what’s left of their senses, they’re alarmingly prone to florid outbursts of psychopathic behavior. You can be reasonably sure that Jeffrey Dahmer, John Hinckley, Jr., Son of Sam and the Unabomber did not partake of the conventional bedtime festivities. – Love and the Single Cynic

Now, in the ridiculous prime of my middle age, I’ve finally tasted the intoxicating potion reserved for the most unreserved lovers, a heady brew that simultaneously jolts the senses and wraps them in a comforting quilt of blissed-out tranquillity. I’ve experienced the exhausting exhilaration of unfettered, over-the-top love. And after quaffing such a brew, there’s no going back to root beer. – Love and the Single Cynic

His most civilized traits have only proven that he’s not an alpha male. His genes won’t do. – Love and the Single Cynic

That’s what separates our special breed of ape from all the other species that have populated this planet: we don’t have to answer to our genes. Those little hereditary dictators may try to direct us, but we have the power to say NO. – Love and the Single Cynic

What we need is a romantic geiger counter that will start clicking wildly when a suitable prospect approaches. – Love and the Single Cynic

The Pennsylvania Dutch — plain and fancy alike — are a race of ardent and unapologetic meat-eaters. They display a fondness for anything smoked, pickled, or fried in lard, a culinary quirk that seems to preserve them to an astounding old age, the way the French thrive on butter, goose liver and ripe cheeses. – On Eating Our Fellow Creatures

“We like you, Mr. Soldier, but we need your body to help us secure oil-rich territory in a distant land. Nothing personal. Oh, we could have avoided the conflict in the first place, but the oil companies are so demanding that… well, you understand. Good luck, and we’ll give your family a nice new flag if you come back in a body bag.” – On Eating Our Fellow Creatures

The sun seems to be hanging a little lower in the sky for men these days. Our generation is witnessing the slow descent of the bearded ones, those bold and brawny toolmakers who wear their reproductive organs on the outside and never stop to ask for directions. – What’s Left for Men?

Women no longer require the brute strength of males for protection against large carnivorous mammals and club-wielding foes; they simply need to pack a semi-automatic. – What’s Left for Men?

Despite several documented cases of men outliving women, males in general are statistically more likely to perish from virtually every affliction known to our species — including suicide, overwork and driving into telephone poles. – What’s Left for Men?

Men are chronically overrepresented among the ranks of idiots and psychopaths. Whenever you hear about a serial killer who stashes body parts in a basement freezer, you can reasonably assume the perpetrator is a lifter of toilet seats. – What’s Left for Men?

New Age culture is essentially a celebration of passive, spiritual, non-invasive, quiescently vegetarian (i.e., anti-male) values. No arterially clogged beefeaters need apply. Men must wear sandals and smell of incense at all times. – What’s Left for Men?

The so-called Men’s Movement was an abortive comedy: clandestine pow-wows in the woods, participants wearing antlers and beating drums, and the ghastly sound of grown men sobbing over their lost Cub Scout uniforms. – What’s Left for Men?

Granted, men will continue to dominate selected fields of endeavor; the lumber business, strip-mining and metallurgical engineering seem safe for the moment, as do the Mafia and model railroad clubs. Women will always require the services of men to move furniture and extract dead rodents from roof-gutters. No woman will ever whack seventy homers in a season against major league pitching — unless the pitchers are women. – What’s Left for Men?

Look upon the achievements of our fathers, O ye men, and rejoice! It was men — yes, my friends, MEN — who built such memorable monuments as the Step-Pyramid of King Djoser, the Baths of Caracalla, the Woolworth Building and the first Wal-Mart. MEN composed Pachelbel’s Canon and all of Schubert’s string quartets. It was a MAN who penned the immortal lines, “Hail to thee blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert!” MEN wrote the popular songs “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” A MAN invented the lightning rod, bifocals and the Franklin stove. The Battle of Hastings was fought primarily by MEN. – What’s Left for Men?

MEN have discovered and named many fine places, like Hispaniola and the Bay of Fundy. We’re more proficient than women at arm-wrestling, fresco-painting, ice hockey and particle physics. – What’s Left for Men?

So let’s renew our male mission and wear our antlers high on our heads. Let’s stand up straight, aim well, and exercise our prerogative to leave the seat up. After all, we’re MEN, and we hold a proud heritage in our hands. – What’s Left for Men?

We’ve developed a national business culture that expects its citizens to live for work, to become efficient units of productivity within that dirtless communal farm known as the Corporation. – More Work

Before the economic boom of the last two decades a boundary existed between work and personal life, like a firewall between adjoining buildings. You toiled diligently for a prescribed number of hours and you earned the right to go home. The remainder of the day was yours to take a long walk, tell your children a bedtime tale or build a replica of the Woolworth Building out of balsa wood. – More Work

Unions tend to be congenitally confrontational; they reduce the act of work, which should spring from skill and enthusiasm, to something like a prenuptial agreement: everything’s predicated on the assumption that the two sides are destined to become snarling foes. – More Work

Whatever happened to evenings on the front porch in the company of family and friends? Will they become distant folk-memories, like taffy-pulls and mammoth hunts? – More Work

Unless you honestly look forward to spending every weeknight with your boss, simply refuse to surrender any more personal territory. That means engaging in a little low-key rebellion. It means learning to say “I would prefer not to” when you’re already overloaded. It means doing your best work, leaving at a reasonable hour, disconnecting yourself from your connective gadgets and making your own kind of music in the cool dusk of your private hours. You have a right to reclaim your time and savor it without guilt. – More Work

The personal life isn’t dead until you let it die. – More Work

Why should the fortunes of individuals or species be determined solely on the basis of how effectively they ADAPT? What about intrinsic traits like character, wit, kindness, imagination or the ability to recite the Gettysburg Address in Pig Latin? As far as I’m concerned, a world that values adaptability over singularity gets the kind of creatures it deserves, like ticks and yuppies. – Down with Natural Selection!

The bully has sensed that the bookworm is different from the herd: physically inert, a bit withdrawn, feeble of limb, eccentric. In other words, the bully has surmised what the gods already know: this boy is “unfit” for the battles of life. So what does the bully do? He isolates the bookworm from the herd, pummels his body and lacerates his self-esteem, making him even less likely than before to thrive in the world, find a suitable mate and pass along his genes. Wittingly or not, he has aided the ruthless forces of natural selection. – Down with Natural Selection!

Fortunately, nature has been charitable in one respect: most bullies are also fairly stupid. This fellow won’t win a graduate fellowship at Yale. But he’ll probably run his own construction firm and earn five times as much as the little scholar he pummeled. He’ll win the favors of a susceptible woman, sire more children than the bookworm, discard his original mate in favor of a trophy wife, sire still more offspring, buy an absurdly large boat and spend his golden years comfortably developing skin cancer in the Florida Keys. He’ll still be stupid, but in the eyes of the Darwinian gods he’ll be the eternal fair-haired boy. – Down with Natural Selection!

It’s called moral relativism, and it goes something like this: Ask not what’s good or evil; ask what’s in it for me. – Down with Natural Selection!

True individualists are always at odds with the universe. Set adrift by their peculiar tastes and interests, they spend their lives searching for kindred spirits and a compatible mate. They are hopelessly out of step with the business world and its trivial urgencies. Their priorities are not the priorities of their neighbors. They are unique; therefore they are alone. – Down with Natural Selection!

Eccentricity, no matter how brilliant, has never been a propagator of nations. – Down with Natural Selection!

If my relatively slim list of obligations occupies all my discretionary time, I can only marvel at the schedules of the lusty majority, with their marriages and multiple offspring, their evening MBA courses, soccer games, home-finance spreadsheets, alternate-day sex, roof repairs and health-club workouts. Have they secretly discovered the 36-hour day, or are they simply aliens with a superior penchant for metabolizing cranberry muffins? Do they ever stumble upon an uncrowded moment in which they can ponder the constellations from the comfort of a hammock? – Obligations

I’m convinced that these so-called inanimate objects have a will, a positive desire to torment their animated companions. – The World Is My Obstacle Course

Like any maladjusted liberal arts graduate, I was hopelessly unsuited to the business of making a living. – The World Is My Obstacle Course

Writing was sublime torture. Some days I’d advance by a single paragraph; other days I’d actually retreat, having crossed out more than I had written. My efforts began to resemble the struggle along the Western Front during World War I — all that bloodshed over a few yards of territory. – The World Is My Obstacle Course

The significance of the trick latch began to grow in my fevered mind until it embodied everything that had mysteriously evaded me: success, sex with nubile women, creative power, ease of accomplishment. It was the Northwest Passage and the Rosetta Stone, the elusive shortcut without which we’re condemned to flap and flail our way through life. It was admission to the circle of grace, the promise of just rewards. It was the Holy Grail and Moby-Dick. It was nothing less than the inscrutable mind of God separating the wheat from the chaff, the blessed from the damned, the fit from the unfit, the winners from the losers. This was one powerful and omniscient little latch; it seemed woefully underemployed as a minor automotive gadget. – The World Is My Obstacle Course

I knew from that evening onward, as I had suspected before, that success would never come to me without strenuous effort, demoralizing defeats, frustration and exasperation — that I was essentially a Nixon rather than a Kennedy, except that I didn’t wear dark suits and black oxfords when I walked on the beach. – The World Is My Obstacle Course

I was disturbed last week by a strange and inexplicable feeling that settled over me in my cubicle. I became aware, as one becomes aware of rosy-fingered dawn or a dead woodchuck on the front steps, that I no longer resented my job. – The Courage to Be Ordinary

Like most writers who prostitute their skills to earn a grown-up salary, I lived perpetually in a state of low-key rebellion against the confines of my job. I saw myself as a Grand Prix driver forced to tool around town in a 1966 Dodge Dart. Not to rebel was to surrender… to die the inner death… to take a headlong plunge into the vast casserole of mediocrity. Now, suddenly, I could smell the lima beans. Was I already simmering in the covered dish from which no talent ever escapes? – The Courage to Be Ordinary

Those of us who set out to be singular individuals use up prodigious amounts of energy in the cultivation and maintenance of our singularity. We read singular books, travel to singular places, search for singular mates, grow singular houseplants, think singular thoughts, develop singular neuroses. We’re obligated to resist the bland and lethal enticements of mental stability. – The Courage to Be Ordinary

Why is it so hard for us self-described singular types to let go of our singular ambitions — those wanton deceivers, those robbers of time and energy, those dubious substitutes for a life of honest warmth and texture? Why persist in our costly aspirations when our singularity fails to deliver, like a slot machine that refuses to pay out after 40 or 50 thrusts of the handle? – The Courage to Be Ordinary

The hard truth is that I’d probably make a depressingly second-rate ordinary person — certainly below average by the standards of first-rate ordinary people. – The Courage to Be Ordinary

After a lifetime of singular aspirations, it takes courage to admit it was all a noble flop. It takes as much courage to embrace the ordinary, especially if we have no aptitude for it. Do we dare to eat Velveeta? – The Courage to Be Ordinary

We liked the pointed archways and sculptural details of Princeton’s Gothic dorm quadrangles, and we wondered how it would have changed us to live in such congenial cloisters for a full four years. We half-believed we could have absorbed the wisdom of the ages simply by dwelling amid those arches and spires on a daily basis. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

We passed monuments erected to dead Princetonians by other Princetonians, also dead. We felt the pride they took in their Princeton blood, the pride of belonging to a noble and fortunate tribe. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

Plato reads the same at Rutgers as he does at Princeton, and Shakespeare’s verses smell as sweet even at Montclair State. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

You can give yourself a first-rate education, but you can’t confer prestige upon yourself. Prestige is a golden aura that descends upon you from your surroundings, permeates you to the core, and eventually glows outward from your own soul. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

Rutgers had given me a good enough education to make me realize what I had missed. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

I felt as if I had to proceed through life with the words “Second-Rate” stamped boldly across my forehead. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

I wondered how graduates of lesser schools than mine dealt with their shame. Didn’t they all feel like shooting themselves? Prestigious schools, more than any other institution, put the lie to American egalitarianism. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

Their college years had been the 1950s — the John Cheever fifties, not the Elvis fifties. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

Residents of gated communities long to bask in the company of others like themselves: those who have mastered the unwritten code, read current books but rarely literature, stay aggressively healthy, and dedicate their lives to the nurturing of high-status offspring. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

The members of the new elite derive their self-esteem and their mutual regard from remunerative accomplishments rather than family background or quirks of speech. – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

Does it mean anything these days to have a well-stocked, finely-tuned mind — or have mere money and position taken over the fort? – The Prestige Gap: a Lament

The funny thing is that there’s nothing funny about profanity. Our professional jesters typically use vile language as a kind of verbal Viagra: to boost the potency of flaccid material, to overpower rather than tickle the audience. Still, we snicker and applaud; the comic goes home a conqueror. – A Meditation on Profanity

Profanity in America — like so much else in our prematurely dilapidated culture — is a doltish and sorry spectacle. Most of it, curiously enough, centers around four institutions that we as a culture simultaneously revere and despise: sex, the human body, parents and religion. – A Meditation on Profanity

After dropping a critically important wing-nut into the hidden recesses of our car’s engine, we ask the creator of the universe to banish that wing-nut to the infernal regions, where it would entertain no hope of future salvation. No harp or feathered wings for that accursed nut; no romping amid the smiling cherubim and seraphim. Down it plunges into the murky and incinerating depths from which no wing-nut ever emerges — sort of like the recesses of the engine where we lost it in the first place. – A Meditation on Profanity

People who pepper their speech with gratuitous profanity, whether in person or on a big screen, are figuratively shoving their private parts in our faces. – A Meditation on Profanity

Most of us look forward to the delights of the bedchamber, yet what do we say when we want to curse an adversary? We command him to enjoy those pleasures forthwith! Yes, as a punishment for your transgressions, may you experience the most delirious sensations known to the human body! – A Meditation on Profanity

It’s time we recognized that a little indulgence in salty language can be beneficial to our health. And that too much of it can make us sick. – A Meditation on Profanity

For all their fame and wealth, celebrities like Martha Stewart are still flesh-and-blood creatures, born with two legs, two lungs, a gall-bladder and a spleen. They need water and oxygen to survive. They’re invariably mammals. Like the rest of us, they’re descended from apelike creatures that prowled the ancient African plains. – Rare Bird

There are no great people today, only famous ones. – Rare Bird

The next time you visit a good newsstand, try to find a political magazine for moderates. You’d have better luck searching for a unicorn. – A Raving Moderate

I find myself suspecting the motives of these generally affluent brie-eating lefties, especially the ones who send their children to exclusive private schools. Yes, they devote themselves to worthy causes like equal opportunity, but apparently some people (notably their own offspring) deserve to have more of those equal opportunities than others. – A Raving Moderate

In certain favored circles, cheering for the underdog is the surest way to ingratiate yourself with the best people. – A Raving Moderate

Both left and right seem to have embraced the euphemistic way of life, disguising their vaguely unpalatable causes with a coating of verbal candy. – A Raving Moderate

Euphemism is always the enemy of truth, just as dogma is always the enemy of individuality. – A Raving Moderate

We need a more radical middle, a middle with the courage to write manifestos and stage dramatic rallies that receive televised evening news coverage. I can see our moderate demonstrations now: “Support a woman’s right to choose, but only before the second trimester!” “Save the whales, but let’s not get silly about it!” – A Raving Moderate

For far too long the creed of the true moderate has been “Yes, but…” We see a few virtues amid the follies of the left; we spot some legitimate conservative arguments amid the naked self-interest; we find the average and live with the results. – A Raving Moderate

I felt the incomparable contentment of a six-year-old who knows in his heart that the world is a safe and wonderful place, despite the dragons under the bed and the witches in the woods, because his parents are there to protect him. – Household Relics: an Elegy

The cherishing of relics is by nature an unrequited love; the things can’t love us back. – Household Relics: an Elegy

A good conversation will take you to places you never intended to visit. So will an inebriated bus driver, but a conversation is much more likely to improve your life. – To Scam or Be Scammed

The human population is neatly divided into tricksters and suckers, just as nature splits the animal kingdom into carnivores and those that provide the meat. Every last one of us is a scammer or a scammee. There’s no middle ground. – To Scam or Be Scammed

Though I rail against cosmic injustices like death and baldness, I tend to trust the individual humans who populate my landscape. Sometimes I trust them to the point of imbecility. – To Scam or Be Scammed

Why do we repeatedly listen to the guy who tells us to look down at his finger, then thwacks the underside of our nose? Because we don’t think like scammers; we think like scammees. – To Scam or Be Scammed

Evil imams promise a green and orgiastic paradise to youthful suicide bombers. (Word of advice: Never fall for any deal that requires your death as a prerequisite to benefits. That includes life insurance.) – To Scam or Be Scammed

The scammers are in the business of selling us hope, and the hope they sell us turns out to be a sham. They’ve lied to us; that’s their crime. We’ve bought the lie; that’s our folly. – To Scam or Be Scammed

I recommend defeatism in moderation, like alcohol and saturated fats. – To Scam or Be Scammed

Imagine an Iroquois hunter surveying his green domain from a rocky promontory three centuries ago, and you’ve imagined everything today’s cubicle warriors have forsaken: the primacy of instinct, of the senses, of being alive in the moment. – The Sensory Deprivation Blues

What was I doing in this bloodless and synthetic place? Hey, people — this is MY LIFE we’re squandering! I want to hear the roll of the ocean and feel the wind on my cheeks. I want to laugh, love, play, write books, smell the mossy woods, eat roasted meat and quaff nut-brown ale. But if I wanted to make a living, I had to forfeit the sensations of life — at least during daylight hours — 49 out of 52 weeks a year. That was the deal. I had to choose between numbness and poverty. I chose numbness. – The Sensory Deprivation Blues

The humid sky grows heavy, pressing upon the trees and fields like an overweight lover upon his tolerant mistress. – In Praise of Sloth

When I’m alone and idle, I like to take the heat as it comes. Why hide behind a protective shield of air conditioning designed to make me more productive than I’d prefer to be? – In Praise of Sloth

I’ve always been inclined to sloth, though necessity and ambition have diverted me from my natural aptitude. More of us would practice this happy vice if not for the unforgiving pressures of our work-demented civilization. – In Praise of Sloth

Today, of course, the world belongs to the energetically gifted, with their hummingbird metabolisms and unnatural lust for 14-hour workdays. The prevailing law is “survival of the fastest,” which doesn’t bode well for those of us who move our lips when we read. The swift alone are equipped by nature to endure the surly demands of a working world gone haywire… a world of overstuffed schedules and escalating pressures that harden the arteries of mere mortals. These speedy metabolic mutants are the “haves” of post-industrial society, in sharp contrast to the relatively poky “have-nots;” they constitute a new aristocracy of energy. – In Praise of Sloth

Outmoded concepts like grace and nobility have fallen to the armies of lean and mean. Pop culture has pinned Western civilization to the mat. – In Praise of Sloth

Unlike our hyperkinetic counterparts, the sloths of the world harm no one. We seek no advantages from friends or adversaries; we observe and reflect in silence; we make soothing music; we appreciate the beauties of sunlight and shade, the blazing orange of an oriole against the cool green of a willow, the ancient aroma of antique books. We feel connected to our world without carrying a cell phone and beeper. – In Praise of Sloth

I’ve never counted myself among the fleet of tongue. I sit in awe of veteran glibsters like Robin Williams and Bill Clinton — people who can fill hours of airtime with fluent and often coherent chatter. For me, just leaving a thirty-second message on an answering machine taxes all my improvisational resources to the limit. – Speechophobia

A confident speaker can command the attention of an audience without notes or nerve pills. A phobic speaker hopes merely to walk off the podium without a major cardiac event. – Speechophobia

Even Martin Luther King wouldn’t be able to rescue this speech. – Speechophobia

I felt the palpable relief of constipated souls who finally dump their burden. – Speechophobia

To give a speech is to present ourselves as a complete human package for the approval of our audience. In the mute spaces between our chosen words, what we’re REALLY saying is, “Look at me, regard my clothes and bearing, see how I comport myself on the podium, watch my mannerisms for telltale signs of courage or fear, decide for yourself if I’m intelligent or lamebrained — a valid and eloquent human being or an utter and dismal failure.” – Speechophobia

Maybe the majority of speakers fail to persuade us of their eloquence, yet almost none ever collapse in a heap of sweat and bones. Utter failure is almost unheard of, and I’m convinced that’s why most of us live in terror of mounting the podium. We don’t want to be the first and only human catastrophe ever glimpsed by our audience. – Speechophobia

Why this gnawing fear of self-destructing before an audience? That’s easy: we spend our lives building an image that our fellow-humans will respect, and a single disaster could undo it all within minutes. We’ll be exposed as idiots or incompetents — or worse yet, we’ll be exposed as our real selves, quivering with dark and lamentable pathologies that we never reveal in public places. With the swiftness of a terrorist attack, we could be ripped open and toppled to our foundations, our gnarled innards on view for all to see. – Speechophobia

Can you imagine Kafka or Kierkegaard doing a commercial for Diet Coke? “Drink it if you must. But you’re going to die anyway.” – Is Suffering Unfashionable?

Nothing is so miserable as the feeling that we’re alone in our misery: we suffer; therefore we’re abnormal. – Is Suffering Unfashionable?

We pay a kind of obligatory homage to men who sweat their way to success. – By the Sweat of Your Brow

Kennedy was a consummate actor; Nixon, a transparently bad one. – By the Sweat of Your Brow

Most of us succeed just enough to keep us lusting for more. That’s how the establishment ensures that we stay productive. By doubling our efforts we might reap a ten percent gain. – By the Sweat of Your Brow

If you possess the gift, you don’t sweat visibly like the rest of us. Yes, you still have to work, technically speaking — but your work fills you with secret joy and energy. You glide through frictionless days, youthful and incandescent. You express your talent as naturally as you breathe or sleep. It’s only a matter of time before your gifts are recognized and (unless you’re unfortunate enough to be a writer) financially rewarded. – By the Sweat of Your Brow

Success without sweat must be the headiest of drugs. You’re one of the elect, you know it, and you shrug it off to put the commoners at their ease. – By the Sweat of Your Brow

“Wherever two or three men are gathered in enmity to your nation, there you must strike. Yet bombs and warriors are powerless to defeat such a foe, because two or three men can move as easily as the flies that torment an ox. You are at war with a swarm of flies, and you will never catch them all. It is an impossible task.” – A Tale of Two Tribes

So what do I have to be thankful for? For one, I haven’t died yet. Nobody has tried to embalm me or write my obituary. My lease on this particular body has yet to expire. For the time being, I can continue to enjoy galumphing around this intriguing planet, eating broccoli and pretzels, getting caught in the rain, and watching green lights turn red as I approach. – A Cynic’s Thanksgiving

My body has survived the year in reasonably pristine condition. I still have my original arms, legs, and head. – A Cynic’s Thanksgiving

I must remind myself that I’m fortunate to be who I am. After all, I might have entered this world as a horned toad or a wombat. Or a mollusk. Or one of those blind, hairless molelike creatures that spend their entire lives in underground burrows. Or a bureaucrat, which is essentially the same thing. – A Cynic’s Thanksgiving

I’m grateful that I don’t live in Lubbock or Fargo or Novosibirsk — or a lot of other places I’d rather not live in. I only live in ONE place I’d rather not live in. – A Cynic’s Thanksgiving

Unlike clams and badgers — unlike any other known life-forms on this planet — the human animal requires a palette of brightly colored illusions to overpaint the dark-hued canvas of reality. – On the Treachery of Time

We respond to direct-mail sweepstakes in search of riches, though our odds of winning are approximately those of a chicken attempting to fly nonstop from New York to Lisbon. – On the Treachery of Time

There’s no returning to the badminton nets of our youthful summers; no “do-overs” for the time we muffed our first date with Betty Sue Blackwood. The past recedes along with our dead dogs and grandparents, along with Napoleon and Josephine, Lucy and Desi, the forgotten inhabitants of Babylon, the lost mammals of the Pleistocene, and the quivering creatures that crawled out of the primordial sea. – On the Treachery of Time

We’re forced to watch time wrest our youth from us like a schoolyard bully relieving us of our lunch money. – On the Treachery of Time

Our fifties are like a toaster: in goes a supple young man, out pops a dried OLD man ready to be consumed — assuming he pops out at all. – On the Treachery of Time

To a child of six, one year is an entire universe of discovery and jubilation, a vast arena in which every experience tastes like a delightful new ice cream flavor. Peach today, peppermint crunch tomorrow. A year represents a massive chunk of a child’s life. To a veteran of fifty campaigns, a year encompasses a mere two percent of the territory, a barely perceptible blip of forgotten meals, talking heads and immemorial chores. – On the Treachery of Time

We’re sledders upon a snowy slope, all of us, headed down a long run over a field of dazzling white into a dark forest below. – On the Treachery of Time

Most of us spend the first half of our careers struggling to fit a mold. It’s not always a mold that conforms to our own contours. If it doesn’t fit, it becomes more confining than a straitjacket. It becomes a premature grave. – Interview with an Unemployable Man

“We get ourselves locked into a corporate hierarchy that values energy and glibness over intelligence and education. Not only doesn’t our education help us advance, it actually HOLDS US BACK. We’re regarded as oddballs if we’d rather read Thoreau than play golf. If you want to rise within an organization, you have to resemble the people in power. And you can bet that the people in power don’t read Thoreau. They’re former frat boys… corporate jocks. So if the people in power play golf, I’d better play golf, right? Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to putter around with a stupid club on a bright summer afternoon when the hills and forests are beckoning to me. Play golf? Hah! I’d rather eat a bowl of pork ice cream.” – Interview with an Unemployable Man

“I’ve known people in my business who spend their days scrutinizing mailing lists or writing job bags for advertising projects. God, it’s awful work. And yet they’ve actually convinced themselves that they’re at the center of some vast direct-mail solar system… that all the planets and moons revolve around their job bags and mailing lists.” – Interview with an Unemployable Man

“Just once, I’d like a job that actually pays me to communicate the contents of my mind.” – Interview with an Unemployable Man

Soon all traces of its existence will be gone — obliterated like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, expunged like blacksmith shops after 1910, erased like a quadratic equation on the blackboard in Mr. Brown’s algebra class. – Tale of a Virtual Village

The Internet is a vast and curious paradox: essentially a technogeek’s medium used to promote “cool” culture, with all the prescribed edginess of attitude that one must adopt to attain the exalted rank of coolness. Of course, we also see an abundance of sweaty hucksterism on the Internet; seekers of wealth can’t always afford to be cool. – Tale of a Virtual Village

The Internet is changing us gradually but unmistakably, the way TV and suburbia changed us after World War II. We now inhabit an electronic realm of megabytes and pixels, gaudy colors and cheesy icons; we’re increasingly immune to the subtle enticements of sunlight, woods, lakes and Chopin. – Tale of a Virtual Village

We’ve acquired an appetite for quick, artificial, path-of-least-resistance stimulation; we’ve lost our patience with punctuation, capital letters and other bothersome clutter from the pre-electronic age. – Tale of a Virtual Village

The Internet allows us to shed our veneer of civility, the glossy layer of inhibition that keeps us from acting out our most obnoxious fantasies in public. Safely shielded from retribution by distance, anonymity and a reasonably durable screen, we’re now free to let the furies fly — to tweak our online oppressors, stomp on our inferiors, skewer the pretentious and roast our adversaries until they’re dark and crispy on the outside. We never have to worry about being punched in the nose or whacked upside the head; a challenge to a duel is just as unlikely. Here you see the flip side of our new ability to create fake identities: the Internet also gives us the freedom to be our nastiest, nakedest selves — the people we’ve always been afraid to be in real life. – Tale of a Virtual Village

I’ve never been able to fathom why some people should find other people so irritating. Maybe I’m an irritating sort of person myself, so it takes a truly obnoxious individual of world-class caliber to impress me. For whatever reason, I seem to be unusually tolerant of other people’s quirks and peccadilloes. I’m one of those cynics who rail against human degeneracy but can’t help liking most of the individual Clydes and Clarissas who comprise the species. That’s my misfortune. – Tale of a Virtual Village

Pop culture has already replaced Western civilization as the main attraction in our great communal circus-tent. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

The new media sexualized our culture, probably forever; we could no longer respond to the matronly virtues of the old masters. So we went for the easy babe with the long legs and flashy smile. We climbed into bed with pop. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

But lately the folks who have upheld the banner of high culture seem to be more interested in pretty food, California wines, lifestyle issues, and renting an exquisite villa in Provence or Tuscany. They’ve become pleasure-seeking missiles. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

People of European ancestry simply don’t seem to procreate with much enthusiasm. As the United States and even the nations of Western Europe grow progressively less European in their ethnic make-up, general interest in distinctly European art-forms will continue to wane until they’re finally shoved into the attic of history. How can we expect an increasingly Afro-Hispano-Arab-Asian populace to muster an interest in fugues and sonnets, especially when WE can’t? It’s like expecting a Texan to enjoy sitar music or a Frenchman to play the banjo. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

When I was younger and less cynical, I actually felt impelled to fight the unraveling of our culture. I wanted to fly the banner of Western civilization in the face of effete charlatans and barbarians alike; I longed to fight the indecipherable poets, the paint-spatterers, the harsh and unmelodious composers. I needed to confront the turncoat humanities professors, the dweebish philosophers quibbling over symbols and semantics, the rude rappers, the surging wave of incivility that threatened to engulf the land. But one can go mad fighting the inevitable. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

The Pandora’s Box of contemporary culture has unleashed a cloud of demons into the air, and there’s no stuffing them back inside. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

Something tells me we could use a thorough cleansing by the more genial and barbaric subcultures growing in our midst. – Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?

In the early hours of a luminous summer afternoon, in the company of twittering swallows and gregarious geese, my fiancée Anne D. and I sat down to lunch on the verandah of a rustic inn overlooking Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek. We had just signed the papers for our new century-old house, and my Neanderthal brain still twitched from its recent encounter with closing costs and escrow accounts, points and fixed rates, security instruments and land transfer companies. Now I looked out at the sparkling creek and its leafy green gorge, and at the way the sun pierced the canopy and sprinkled the scene with glittering patches of light. It was one of those Monet days. This was life to my liking: a good meal enjoyed out of doors in a nearly natural landscape, in the company of a bright and comely woman I was about to marry. Only a scoundrel or a chain-smoking newspaper reporter could be cynical in such a salubrious setting. – Why Do We Bother?

I couldn’t stop thinking about the convoluted details of our recent real estate transaction. It had been like one of those sweaty nightmares in which you have to solve some impossible equation relating to the square root of Norway and the hypotenuse of cheddar cheese. – Why Do We Bother?

Show me any evidence of progress in human society, and I’ll show you an ambitious soul in search of status. – Why Do We Bother?

Progress, like any serious disease, brings with it an assortment of nasty complications. – Why Do We Bother?

The quest for status is natural to any social creature above the level of an earthworm. – Why Do We Bother?

You can’t stand motionless during a Manhattan rush hour, especially at Times Square; you’re swept along by a great wave of seething, overheated humanity, slithering and pulsating like the world’s most colossal living organism. – Work

I observe the onrushing crowd and peer at the individual faces: the sharp-featured professionals and lumpy subsistence workers, the successful and the damned, the youngsters with giddy aspirations and the older ones whose souls have already succumbed, whose inner lamps have been extinguished — all freshly liberated from the office and headed into the wilderness of private life. – Work

I hadn’t counted on the STRESS of working in New York, the barrage of new and bewildering body signals: the shockwaves of adrenaline, the random firing of neurons, the weird sensation that my head was floating somewhere above the rest of me and that the sidewalk was undulating like a sea serpent beneath my feet. When I had to interact with abrasive individuals — and New York boasts the world’s greatest collection of abrasive individuals — it felt as if my brain was being grated like mozzarella cheese. – Work

Teddy Roosevelt would be proud of them — the way they embrace the strenuous life without concern for the daily bruises or the mental taxation or the deteriorating condition of their arteries. The working world is not for sissies. – Work

You can pay workers to work, but you can’t pay them to love it. – Work

Does the prospect of promotion feed some primitive need to rise above our peers in the social hierarchy, to peck our lower-ranking colleagues without fear of being pecked in return? Are we simply chickens with opposable thumbs? – Work

The job helps define who you are, just in case you’re not sure; it connects you to something heftier in the universe, more substantial than the flesh-and-blood limits of your mortal body. You can put your mind at ease when some brash inquisitor asks you what you do for a living; “I’m a claims adjuster,” you can tell him with rippling pride — for you’re actually telling him who you ARE. You’ve anchored your place in the cosmos, and both of you are relieved. In a world that takes a dim view of thinkers, you are what you do. – Work

WORK. It’s a short, harsh, nasty word, and it doesn’t sound any better in French (“travail”) or German (“arbeit”). – Work

I was by nature a reflective Type B personality forced to adapt to deadline-driven Type A environments for a quarter of a century, which probably doesn’t bode well as a longevity indicator. – Work

I had a limited tolerance for corporate hierarchies; why should I be lower on the totem pole than someone who doesn’t know the capital of Norway, for example? – Work

Imagine Beethoven sitting down with his boss to discuss his annual performance review; picture Picasso filling out a “Goals with Company” form. The idea is absurd; original minds need room to exercise their originality. Tigers and artists grow edgy inside a cage. – Work

Hundreds of employees are hurrying past me in dense waves of muscle, shoe leather and determination. How strange to be a mere observer of the timeless parade, an almost spectral and irrelevant presence. – Work

I was one of the rush-hour people — but never in my heart, never happily. And now I’ve renounced their life of daily discipline, of duty and obedience — for what? For more time to live, loaf, write, explore and enjoy the pursuit of happiness. Will I begin to make my mark? Will I grow stale, plump and soft-minded? Will I find my bliss while I still possess a body? Who knows? I’ve taken a blind leap into a great “maybe.” All I know for sure is that I drove myself daily for a quarter of a century, close to my capacity and often beyond — and now I’ve stopped. How did I do it all those years? How does anyone? – Work

From Some Cynical Guy:

Executives are professional optimists; they have to put their troublesome nay-saying inclinations in a little box before they can pass through the metal detector that leads to the corporate boardroom. Soon enough they forget what was in the box, and they don’t miss it. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

After all, being a cynic is grueling and ill-compensated work; medical studies tell us that cynics tend to die off at a rate several times that of the general populace. We’re prematurely condemned to become plant food, while our optimistic brethren survive another ten or twenty years to grow begonias and coo about their grandchildren. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

Cynicism, the good doctors tell us, turns out to be as potentially fatal as smoking unfiltered cigarettes or consuming significant quantities of lard. A cynic grumbles about injustice, and his reward is an even GREATER injustice: a hasty trip to the compost heap. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

The world needs its cynics the way Margaret Dumont needed the Marx Brothers, the way Snow White’s stepmother needed the magic mirror to tell her she was no longer the fairest in the land. After all, what is a cynic but an honest and unrepentant observer of the hard truth? – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

The truth may set you free, but it can also get you into hot water. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

I say it’s time we rehabilitated the public image of cynics. We have to remind the tidy-lawn folks that we’re not a patch of crabgrass in their midst. We’re more like dandelions, adding a dash of color to the monotonous green expanses of the suburban lot. We sprout wherever the conditions are favorable; we hold our bright heads upright until the Great Lawnmower comes along and lops them off. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

The biting sarcasm that most people associate with cynics is simply the flip side of a keen, almost painfully overdeveloped sensitivity to injustice and folly. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

Remember that I’m significantly increasing my odds of premature death with each cynical word I write. – Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy

Wall Street has become the world’s gaudiest and most spectacular casino. All it lacks is a billion-dollar resort hotel with simulated Venetian canals and Wayne Newton on the marquee. – The Great Casino

I have to wonder why it doesn’t bother anyone — why it doesn’t cause the least twitch of unease — that the entire economy of the Free World rests in the hands of GAMBLERS. They might not be smoking cigars around a table in a dimly lit back-room; they might not wear green eyeshades or answer to names like “Louie the Turk.” But they’re gamblers all the same, and worst of all, they’re US. – The Great Casino

We’re a forward-looking nation, we always have been, and it hardly matters if the current generation thinks Andrew Jackson was one of the Jackson Five. – History Is History

“History” is a safely genderless word; it doesn’t mean, and has never meant, “his story” and is never, ever pronounced, even by the British, as “his story” — though the preponderance of its leading characters have been lifters of toilet seats. – History Is History

let’s look briefly at the French, who have ascribed gender to such apparently sexless objects as chairs and tables for a thousand years. I can assure you that I’ve never detected genitals of any sort on chairs and tables, yet the French enjoy infusing everything in their universe with a soupcon of sexual allure. Maybe that’s why they can ingest all that brie and goose liver without clogging their arteries; they inhabit a world that hums with the perennial interplay of male and female, and it keeps them open and alive. “Vive la difference!,” they exclaim, and you’ll notice that even the word “difference” has an assigned gender (it’s female). – History Is History

Why anyone would deliberately choose ugly music over sublime music is one of the great mysteries of the ages, but it happens every day, and it’s been happening for most of the past half-century. – Thoughts While Listening to the Car Radio

When the good is driven out, you can usually point to the superior energy of whatever takes its place. – Thoughts While Listening to the Car Radio

Stroll through the marketing and P.R. departments of most companies and you’ll hear lilting female voices chewing out their underlings, many of whom are hapless young men wondering why the real world reminds them of grade school. – Where Men Are Men

Whenever you read about an especially painful example of doltish behavior, like someone tickling a poisonous snake on the chin and paying the consequences, the perpetrator is almost invariably male. – Where Men Are Men

Yes, a fundamentalist Islamic America would be paradise for men. We could recline in our spacious tents by evening, nibbling camel jerky and swapping tall tales about the time we chugged 18 consecutive yogurts back in college. We’d recapture the elusive dignity of manhood and wear our towels proudly on our heads. – Where Men Are Men

Corpsehood is forever, and it’s about as much fun as filling out an income tax return. – Adventures in Heart Attack Prevention

I refused to spend the rest of my natural life eating rabbit food. Rabbits live in a state of continual fear and die young anyway. – Adventures in Heart Attack Prevention

I’m starting to suspect that what we eat can’t harm us unless we fret about it. After all, fear probably raises our cholesterol more than a wedge of Camembert. – Adventures in Heart Attack Prevention

From The Cynic’s Dictionary:

Nobody loves a cynic. His friends grow tired of his airy detachment and cutting irony. His colleagues find him peevish and aloof. Productive citizens chide him for refusing to lead, follow or get out of the way.  – Preface

Let me assure you that I am not a cynic of the hard-boiled school–one of those narrow-eyed miscreants who view life through a noxious cloud of cigarette smoke. I am (as I suspect you are) actually a disgruntled idealist–a sympathetic fellow with a fondness for dogs and most children. – Preface

The age has slapped me on the face; with this book, I challenge it to a duel. – Preface

Let me goad the obnoxious, defend the defenseless, play like a cat with whatever smacks of folly, and attack bullies from the incomparable safety of the printed page. What could be more fun? – Preface

ACADEMIA: A chronic disease characterized by a compulsion to write lengthy specialized treatises in unintelligible vocabularies, for the purpose of rising in the esteem of those similarly afflicted.

ANGST: A form of misery caused by too much thinking; a phenomenon probably incomprehensible to anyone who owns a recreational vehicle.

ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION: Procreation without recreation.

ATHEISM: A godless religion that retains all the dogmatic posturing of the faiths it so confidenly denies, with few of the consolations.

AUTHOR: A writer with connections in the publishing industry.

BANK: Where money automatically increases in value, especially when we need to borrow some.

BEER: An intoxicating golden brew that reemerges virtually unchanged an hour later.

BLAME: Tossing the hot potato of responsibility to an innocent bystander, usually a male of European ancestry.

BOOKCASE: A piece of furniture used in America to house bowling trophies and Elvis collectibles.

BOSS: A personal dictator appointed to those of us fortunate enough to live in free societies.

CHIC: Considered smart without the deadening implication of intelligence.

CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

CLIQUE: A group of insiders who greet outsiders with their backsides; a closed circle of asses.

COMMITTEE: A grotesque creature with multiple heads and twice as many feet, no three of them pointing in the same direction.

CREDIT CARD: Plastic passport to the valley of the shadow of debt.

CONSULTANT: A jobless person who shows executives how to work.

CYNIC: An idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision.

DENIAL: How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist.

DIET: The temporary triumph of will over metabolism.

DIVORCE: Termination of a marriage before either spouse can terminate the other.

DNA: A complex organic molecule characterized as the building block of life and appropriately shaped like a spiral staircase to nowhere.

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY: A term used by psychologists to describe any household occupied by two or more related individuals.

EXECUTIVE: One who executes middle managers, esp. while wearing an expensive suit.

FAD: A folly committed by enough of the right people to confer upon it the badge of status.

FASHION: Today’s rage, tomorrow’s chuckle.

FUNDAMENTALIST: Anyone who takes the Word of God too seriously.

FUNERAL HOME: A stately manse occupied by transients who continually receive visitors but lack the energy and inclination to entertain them.

GOLF: The fine art of driving hard, avoiding the rough, surmounting traps and hazards, aiming straight, and arriving on the green at last, only to end up in a hole in the ground before your companions. The favored pastime of businessmen and their cronies, probably without a full appreciation of its metaphorical implications.

HEIR: The idle offspring of a workaholic.

HIP: Smartly attuned to the latest cutting-edge cliches.

HOMETOWN: The community that nurtures us during our formative years, so that we might attend a good school, succeed handsomely and spend the rest of our lives somewhere else.

IDEOLOGUE: Typically an obscure humorless zealot who finds fulfillment by spouting the ideas of famous humorless zealots.

IQ: The number that predicts the extent to which one will perform successfully on future IQ tests.

LAWYER: A professional advocate hired to bend the law on behalf of a paying client; for this reason considered the most suitable background for entry into politics.

LECHER: A stud with liver spots.

LOOTING: A public shopping spree generously sponsored by local merchants in the wake of a riot.

LOSER: Anyone too incompetent to master the ways of the world, or too proud.

LOTTERY: The equivalent of betting that the next pope will be from Duluth, or that the parrot in the pet store window speaks Flemish.

MANAGEMENT: A class of semi-skilled corporate hirelings whose rise within the organization correlates directly with the amount of work they delegate to their more talented underlings.

MATH ANXIETY: An intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 mph.

MENTOR: A kindly tutor who attempts to spare a young apprentice ten years of mistakes by imparting the accumulated wisdom from thirty years of mistakes.

MIDLIFE CRISIS: The sickening realization, usually at the onset of middle age, that we’ve spent the last ten years buttoning up into the wrong buttonholes.

MORALITY: A traditional code of decency that went out the window about the same time as belief in eternal damnation.

MUGGER: A benevolent citizen of the streets who frequently spares the lives of total strangers in exchange for any cash and valuables in their possession.

NECKTIE: A decorative noose worn by businessmen.

NEGOTIATING: The art of persuading your opponent to take the nice shiny copper penny and give you the wrinkled old paper money.

NEIGHBORS: The strangers who live next door.

NEUROTIC: Sane but unhappy about it.

OBITUARY: A final summation of our lives that, for most of us, occupies about three inches of space in what will shortly become cage liner for our neighbor’s parakeet.

ORGASM: The punch line some women just don’t get, generally because their mates have a tendency to rush through the joke.

PORNOGRAPHY: A two-dimensional substitute for that which the consumer cannot accomplish in three.

POSITIVE THINKING: Self-improvement through self-deception.

POWER: The ability to make our fellow humans squirm, sweat and stammer on command. Often regarded as an aphrodisiac; actually a potent laxative that, when ingested by people in high places, causes everyone below to run for cover. POWER BROKER: The man who hands out the laxatives.

PROFESSIONAL MODEL: Cheekbones that sell cosmetics; hipbones that sell anorexia.

QUAGMIRE: Any situation more easily entered into than exited from; e.g., a guerrilla war, a bad marriage or a conversation with an insurance salesman.

QUALITY OF LIFE: What an industrialized nation is said to offer when enough of its citizens are suffering from terminal stress.

RETIREMENT: The liberation of a captive butterfly just as its wings begin to crumble.

REVOLUTIONARY: An oppressed person waiting for the opportunity to become an oppressor.

SCIENCE FICTION: Fairy tales for nerds.

SMILE: To expose a portion of one’s skeleton as a gesture of goodwill toward a fellow human.

STATE-OF-THE-ART: Soon-to-be-obsolete.

STEREOTYPE: A shoe designed to fit all feet within a particular ethnic or social group. When the shoe fits, as it sometimes will, the salesmen exchange sly winks across the room.

TEMPS: Migrant workers in business clothes.

TRAILER PARKS: Latter-day Gypsy camps scattered throughout the vast American hinterland; humble places of abode where aspirations die young and tornadoes gravitate like flies to roadkill.

UNEMPLOYMENT: The usual alternative to overwork.

URBAN RENEWAL: The replacement of old inner-city slums with newer, uglier ones.

URINAL: The one place where all men are peers.

VIRGIN: A young innocent who in former times was sacrificed to the gods but who now merely lives in disgrace.

VOTING: The right of our citizens to do as they please behind a curtain, as long as they do it alone.

WAKE: 1. A convivial soiree with a preserved corpse in the room. 2. What the mourners would be visibly startled to see the corpse do, esp. those expecting a sizable inheritance.

ZOO: A pleasant and instructive wildlife park, lately denounced for depriving animals of their right to starve or be eaten alive in their natural habitats.

From Bayan’s IdeaLog:

A good education spoils us for life in the business world. After studying history or philosophy with any conviction, it is impossible to become a dedicated sales representative.

There is a healthy optimum level of civilization, with barbarism on the one extreme and decadent excess on the other. When a civilization declines, both extremes engulf the center. Look around you; we’re being engulfed.

We apologize when we inadvertently step on a stranger’s foot, but we’re full of righteous bluster when we bomb half a million strangers into oblivion.

The world belongs to people with IQs of 120. Anything much greater or less amounts to a liability. 

Blowfish and status seekers puff themselves up so as not to be devoured by more formidable creatures. If my car window sports a Princeton decal, you can’t eat me.

Just as some mutant strains of bacteria thrive on the antibiotics we’ve developed to eradicate them, some people flourish in settings that would be lethal to the rest of us. They can work 14-hour days and actually stride out of the office with more energy than when they checked in. They don’t require vacations or hobbies or quality time with their pets. We call these mutants “winners.”

Some of us never quite recover from our discovery that the world is cruel. We don’t become cruel ourselves; we become cynics.

I used to dismiss the nonthinkers of the world as second-rate creatures, but now I almost envy them. How many of our proud ideas are truly original? And why strain our brains with pointless abstractions when there’s music and ice cream to be had? You can’t hear a hypothesis; you can’t taste an aphorism.

No prefabricated political, theological or philosophical system ever satisfies an honest thinker. Ideologies are the second-hand clothes of the intellectual world.

Our fears tend to cluster around what we value most. The suburbanite fears losing his job or his family; the fop dreads losing his looks; the writer quakes at the thought of losing his mind.

How many original minds wither from chronic stress and hopelessness before they can make their mark? How many potential Shakespeares have been crushed by drudgery, rejection, failure or frustration before we could hear from them? The artists who prevail today tend to be the ones with a knack for schmoozing with the gatekeepers.

We humans are the only animals that require coaching on how to live.

Why is it so hard to find compatible souls in our human communities, when so many of us feel blissfully content in the company of a good dog?

It seems to me that the whole point of fashion, whether in clothes or ideas, is to proclaim loudly that we like the unlikable because the right people like it.

The free world appears to be founded on a system that rewards us for a single skill: the art of exploiting opportunities and people. Without this skill, we might as well pack up and move to Paraguay. I have to wonder who originally decided to base our success or failure on such a narrow and morally suspect criterion. In my ideal cosmos, we’d be rewarded for being able to write amusing essays or draw a reasonably accurate map of North America.

Those who succeed early and easily develop the energy and self-confidence to keep succeeding; those demoralized by early losses tend to keep losing. Occasionally a loser will break the pattern and prevail. Watch out for such men: our Lincolns and our Hitlers arise from the same stock.

Life is a vast flow-chart, a branching river of contingencies that can lead us to happiness or misery. It’s no wonder that a strange paralysis strikes so many of us when we come to a fork.

One mistake in 10,000 chances could be fatal.

Woe unto the employee who quotes Thoreau at a department meeting.

I will always regard it as a minor tragedy that goodness and whimsy are not survival traits.

It turns out that real life resembles high school more than it does college: social skills almost always trump pure intellect; acceptance by the right crowd will get you farther than thinking for yourself. But postgraduate life also represents a return to the common sense that we temporarily abandoned in favor of seductive theories and ideologies. We can’t survive in the real world unless we unlearn the theoretical.

Too many of us waste our lives waiting for our lives to begin. At some point we just have to leap off the diving board in the dark — and trust that the pool is filled with water.

The United States is neither as great as its own politicians assert nor as evil as its detractors insist. I’d like to believe that America is the Tigger of the world: essentially good-natured, unrefined, overendowed with energy and continually bouncing uninvited into other people’s homes. In the end we exhaust them and break their china, and they plot to have us removed. But I can see one fundamental difference emerging already: Tigger wasn’t cursed with self-righteousness.