Dave Barry Quotes

There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater,you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"

Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling.

It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate.

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.'

Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.

Spain travel tip: If bathroom genders are indicated by flamingos, the boy flamingo is the one with a hat. I learned this the hard way.

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business.

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club

Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: Imagine what it does to your TEETH! So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve.

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.

Dogs would make totally incompetent criminals. If you could somehow get a group of dogs to understand the concept of the Kennedy assassination, they would all immediately confess to it. Whereas you'll never see a cat display any kind of guilty behavior, despite the fact that several cats were seen in Dallas on the grassy knoll area, not that I wish to start rumors.

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

All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears - of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required".

Cigarette sales would drop to zero overnight if the warning said "CIGARETTES CONTAIN FAT.

Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro.

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

We are talking about mutated women, the result of cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. If a normal woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person.

One popular new plastic surgery technique is called lip grafting, or 'fat recycling,' wherein fat cells are removed from one part of your body that is too large, such as your buttocks, and injected into your lips. People will then be literally kissing ass.

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

Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers.

The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.

It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.

To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.

Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything.

I believe that we parents must encourage our children to become educated, so they can get into a good college that we cannot afford.

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies.

The word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning “ability to,” and bics, meaning “withstand tremendous boredom.

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.

The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness.

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism.

The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything.

Never lick a steak knife.

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.