The Big Curmudgeon 2,500 Outrageously Irreverent Quotations from World-Class Grumps and Cantankerous Commentators

by Jon Winokur in stores May 30, 2007

Genres:

Non-Fiction, Pop Culture

Themes:

humor , reference

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Cur•mud•geon origin unknown. 1. archaic: a crusty, ill-tempered, churlish old man; 2. modern: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner.

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.” –Gore Vidal

“Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the earth?” –Stephen Colbert

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” –Robert Frost

“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.”

–Benjamin Disraeli

“They say Democrats don’t stand for anything. That’s patently untrue. We do stand for anything.” –Barack Obama

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” –Henry Kissinger

“Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.” –Bill Cosby

“Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.” –John Osborne

“If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater, suggest that he wear a tail.” –Fran Lebowitz

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” –Niels Bohr

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CAUTION: World-Class Curmudgeons At Work

“If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.” –James McNeill Whistler

“I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.” –Alfred Hitchcock”

“Anybody who hates dogs and loves whiskey can’t be all bad.” –W.C. Fields

Favorite animal: Steak –Fran Lebowitz

Favorite color: I hate colors. –Ian Shoales

“France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can’t tear the toilet paper.” –Billy Wilder

During dinner at the Colony, Harpo Marx asked George S. Kaufman if there was anything you could get there for fifty cents. “Sure,” Kaufman answered, “a quarter.”

“My heart is pure as the driven slush.” –Tallulah Bankhead

“I’ve decided to skip ‘holistic.’ I don’t know what it means, and I don’t want to know. That may seem extreme, but I followed the same strategy toward ‘Gestalt’ and the Twist , and lived to tell the tale.” –Calvin Trillin

“Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.” –Fred Allen

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” –Robert Frost

“Life is a zoo in a jungle.” –Peter De Vries

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, and soft music.” –Vladimir Nabokov

“Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.” –John Barrymore

“What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.”

–Charles Baudelaire

“The surest way to be alone is to get married.” –Gloria Steinem

Oscar Levant to an obnoxious acquaintance: “I’m going to memorize your name and throw my head away.”

Selected Excerpt
Interview with Joeil Stein: Participatory Narcissist

Joel Stein grew up in Edison, New Jersey, where he attended J.P. Stevens High School. He received a BA and MA from

Stanford University in 1993. After stints as a fact checker, reporter, and sports editor, he is currently a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a regular contributor to Time. His journalistic method involves inserting himself into various situations and writing about how they affect him.

JW: You wrote a column titled “Why I Hate Dogs”…

JS: First of all, I hate all animals, very logically, in descending order. So, for example, large swarms of ants gross me out, but a single ant I’m totally cool with. Pet giraffes freak me out. But dogs really creep me out. They’re the only animals I know of that are sexually interested in breeds five hundred times smaller than them. They’re worse than frat boys. Dogs are way too eager for human approval. They have more interest in us than their own species. What kind of creature gets its joy from a different species? Dogs have decided that we’re the best, whereas other animals are totally happy to ignore us.

JW: What about dog owners?

JS: They think it’s totally okay to have their dog jump on you and lick you, as if you enjoy it. And why do they get offended when I refer to their dog as “it”? Was I supposed to be checking out its genitals the whole time?

But what can you expect from people who love their dog so much that they’re willing to walk behind it and pick up its feces with their own hands? I’ve yet to meet a woman for whom I’d do that. Dog salons, dog psychologists, dog antidepressants.…While the homeless go ignored, thirty million Americans bought their dogs Christmas presents last year. People knit things for their dogs. A woman I know throws her dog a Bar Mitzvah every year. And that leash-on-a-reel thing that takes up forty feet of sidewalk…hey, save yourself some money: Let your dog run free and use a large stick to trip people with instead.

JW: Do you hate children as well?

JS: No, I like children. I just don’t want one. They really get in the way of your lifestyle. And let’s face it: Children are idiots. If you’ve ever had a long conversation with a child, it’s appalling how much they don’t know: “You’ve never seen The Jeffersons? You’re four years old—what have you been doing with your time?” The conversation’s over. You walk away. That’s why we don’t let them have jobs. Can you imagine an office full of children? They’d spend all day telling dumb jokes and talking about their poop. It would be like it was before women entered the workplace.

JW: You’ve been a critic of children’s television, particularly Sesame Street.

JS: Sesame Street is being destroyed by idiot cuteness. It still has sharp, funny writing, but the show is being taken over by that patronizing, babytalking Elmo. He’s passive and self-obsessed, always referring to himself in the third person. When I watched Sesame Street in the seventies, the human cast and the Muppets didn’t talk down to me with baby voices. Now the human cast gets very little airtime, and the show is dominated by Elmo, Baby Bear, and, now, Abby Cadabby—preschoolers enamored of their own adorable stupidity. The lesson they teach—in opposition to Oscar, Big Bird, Grover, or Bert—is that bland neediness gets you stuff more easily than character. We’re breeding a nation of Anna Nicole Smiths. I went to the Sesame Street set and had lunch with the human cast members and they’re not happy with the “Elmo-ization” either.

JW: How would you fix the show?

JS: I’d take Elmo and his buddies and give them their own show for the idiot spawn, and then give Luis, Gordon, and the cool Muppets their own “Classic Sesame” for the kids who will someday actually contribute to society. Whichever of the two shows you watched would serve as a litmus test for the rest of your life. If we can’t save all the kids, let’s at least save the ones who can master speaking in the first person. The rest we’ll use for reality TV stars.

JW: You wrote in a Los Angeles Times column, “I don’t like being touched by strangers. And by ‘strangers,’ I mean anyone I’m not having sex with.” When did you first notice this aversion?

JS: Some time in the nineties, when women started hugging you and kissing you on the cheek when they met you. Then guys started hugging you. I don’t even like to high-five! I just don’t see the point. I got sent on a story where I had to get massages. Most people I know love massages, but I was very uncomfortable. I mean, here I was paying someone to give me pleasure and she was trying to make me feel good without turning me on, and that just seemed stupid. I’m incapable of separating pleasurable touch—or any touch, from sexuality.

JW: You wrote a column about spicing up your marriage…

JS: Don’t try to spice up your marriage. Any concerted effort to fix your marriage is doomed. It’s too late. Whatever patterns you’ve established…just accept them. Whatever you to try to do to spice up your marriage will be depressing. Every way of introducing something new is essentially buying that Valentine’s Day teddy that they sell at Target. You know: the see-through one with the red heart on it. If my wife ever walked out in that, I’d know the marriage had hit bottom. For that column I watched an advanced sexual techniques video. It was porn with average people instead of porn stars. Watching regular people have sex in regular lighting? Not good. Not just not good as in a total turn-off, but not good as in, “Oh my God, that’s what I look like?” Horrifying! I also went to an all-female party where they were selling sex toys. I learned that women don’t like penises, but they do like plastic things shaped like penises. Which made me realize that it’s just men they don’t like.

JW: What did you take away from your story about political conventions?

JS: In 2000, I went to both the Republican and Democratic conventions, but all I learned was that both parties love education, respect the military, and prefer the middle class to both poor and rich people. I hate the middle class. Biggest group of whiners ever. They have two shticks: “We’re being ignored!” and “We’re shrinking!” These are their constant complaints. Out entire tax code is screwed up because of the middle class. They get every break in the world. It’s crazy. Our Constitution was designed to prevent the middle class from having too much power! I blame everything on the middle class.

Take the mortgage tax break: Why do we bend over backwards to give money back to the middle class for no legitimate reason? Maybe it’s because there are so many of them and they vote. Helping people own a home while poor people have to rent them? When did that become okay? We give them tax breaks for having kids! I almost wouldn’t mind them getting all these breaks if they’d just stop whining about being ignored.

JW: One of your columns was about substituting for a radio talk show host.

JS: Yes, I filled in as the host of the Mike Gallagher Show. The conservative listeners didn’t like me very much, partly because I was really bad at it, but basically because they thought I was a liberal, even though I didn’t say one liberal thing. I had invited a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on to talk about cockfighting, of which I’m an advocate. I guess just having the PETA woman on the show made listeners think I was a liberal. A caller said she was a terrorist, which I agreed with, since the organization totally disrupted last year’s Victoria’s Secret fashion show. Then he said she was the same as Osama bin Laden. I questioned that, mostly because PETA hasn’t killed anyone. He said that all terrorists were equal and that parsing out evil made me a sympathizer. I questioned his epistemology, at which point he called me a "stupid liberal kike," which caused the switchboard guy to hang up on him. That switchboard guy ruined all the fun.

Since that show, I’ve come to love the PETA people. I completely disagree with their philosophy, but I think everything they do is awesome. They’re the pranksters of our time.

JW: Have you no common philosophical ground with PETA?

JS: Well, I’m down on poultry. I haven’t completely cut it out, but I’ve cut way down on poultry consumption. I realized I wasn’t enjoying it. It’s the white bread of meat. I don’t think people enjoy it, except for a nice rotisseried chicken perhaps, or coq au vin, certainly. But when they just put a lump of chicken on their salad, I don’t think they’re enjoying that. It’s mindless chicken consumption. So I began to ask myself, Should animals really be killed so I cannot enjoy something? I’ll just have tofu instead. But I’m not giving up pork.

JW: You’ve written several columns about television, particularly daytime TV.

JS: I ventured the theory that daytime talk-show hosts follow some reverse Darwinian law whereby they get less and less threatening every generation. Then I realized something: Know what works best on daytime television? Lesbians. The average American woman sitting at home during the day has a lot in common with a Rosie [O’Donnell] or an Ellen [De Generes]. They have the same anger issues.

JW: What about Oprah?

JS: Oprah is the opiate of the female masses. She teaches women to build self-esteem by confronting the past and setting goals instead of feeling good the old-fashioned way, by having casual sex. The whole idea of talking openly and sharing your feelings is antithetical to the old-time values of emotional repression on which this country was founded. Oprah’s magazine has articles on coping that suggest that you “make prioritizing a priority.” There’s also an awful lot of talk about angels. Her solution to everything is telling you to tack a note to your mirror. Tacking a note to your mirror accomplishes nothing but blocking you from seeing your fat self.

Oprah and other women’s shows are popular because men don’t watch television. Men neither watch TV nor buy anything. (I’d love to see a study of what men do with their time.) Women read books, women read magazines, women watch TV, women do the shopping. What are men doing with their time? Is there that much golf and pornography in the world?

JW: Men have the Spike channel…

JS: How embarrassing is that? I’d rather watch a lifetime of Lifetime.

JW: For another column, you voluntarily deprived yourself of television for a whole week.

JS: It wasn’t that bad. I’ve always watched a lot of TV, but I only have it on when I’m watching it. I don’t use it as a background the way some people do. It’s depressing when the whole family is having dinner and the TV is on in the background, like it’s another member of the family.

JW: You’ve written about some powerful institutions, from Big Oil to Q-Tips to Wal-Mart.

JS: I know it’s surprising to see a different gas price every time you stop at Texonobil, but hey, it’s a supply-and-demand thing. We seem to accept massive fluctuations in the stock market, real estate, and the popularity of John Travolta, but for some reason we think gas should always cost the same amount, plus 0.99 of a penny. Yes, I feel bad for people who have to drive to work and can’t afford higher gas prices, but we have to understand that in a capitalist system, there are times when things get hard and we have to cut back. Remember sugar rations in World War II, or that Christmas when there weren’t enough PlayStation2’s to go around? We got through that, and we’ll get through this.

There is, however, the possibility that my attitude may all have to do with the fact that I don’t own a car.

I wrote a column about how evil Q-Tips are and how a huge percentage of ear injuries are due to Q-Tips. The cotton-swab industry is so powerful that no one—not politicians, not journalists, not even rap artists—has had the cojones to stand up to it. Countless Americans have suffered serious eardrum injuries as a result of cleaning their ears with Q-Tips, and countless others have come down with tinnitus. We’ll never know the real numbers because the FDA doesn’t require manufacturers to report swab malfunctions. Where is the outrage? Well, I’m not afraid to speak out. By the way, two months after the column ran I had to go to the doctor with a bloody ear— yes—because of a Q-Tip!

JW: And Wal-Mart?

JS: Wal-Mart tries very hard not to offend its customers, which makes it do stupid things, like pulling Midge, a pregnant, married doll; making Nirvana change the song Rape Me to Waif Me ; and forcing the Goo Goo Dolls to redesign the cover of A Boy Named Goo because a Wal-Mart executive thought the boy with blackberries smeared on him looked like a child-abuse victim. But I love Wal-Mart, not only for the prices, cleanliness, and service, but also for employing people who would otherwise be knocking on my door with religious literature.

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