About a year ago in this space I brought together a collection of high class insults onto which I had stumbled. Readers responded with their own favorites, and I added a few more over time. As such, below is what now I guess now qualifies as an annual installment in ways to indicate your feelings without raising your voice or using foul language. The intent, however, remains the same: to indicate your opinion in the most sublime of ways.
"His speeches were an army of pompous words marching across the landscape in search of an idea. Occasionally these meandering phrases would capture a straggling thought, and bear it triumphantly within their midst, a slave , until it died of servitude and overwork." H. L.Mencken on Warren G.Harding.
"You may not be the dumbest person on earth, but when he dies..." Anonymous.
"That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No’ in any of them." Dorothy Parker.
"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." Thomas Brackett Reed.
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." Charles, Count Talleyrand.
"She was never really charming until she died." Terence, Roman playwright.
"A sheep in sheep's clothing." Winston Churchill on Clement Atlee.
"He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened." Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin.
"A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity." Mark Twain.
"You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it." Groucho Marx.
"She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Dorothy Parker speaking of Katharine Hepburn.
"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt." Robert Redford.
"She is a peacock in everything but beauty." Oscar Wilde.
"There are two things I dislike about you, sir: your face." Anonymous.
"I bequeath all my property to my wife on the condition that she remarry immediately. Then there will be at least one man to regret my death." Heinrich Heine.
"I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage." Oscar Wilde.
"A retail mind in a wholesale business." David Lloyd George on Neville Chamberlain.
"He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match." Aneurin Sevan on Clement Attlee.
"He couldn't see a belt without hitting below it." Margot Asquith on David Lloyd George.
"He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty." Sam Houston on Thomas Jefferson Green.
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." John Bright on Benjamin Disraeli.
"He slept more than any other president, whether by day or night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored." H. L. Mencken on Calvin Coolidge.
"If a traveler were informed that such a man was the leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect." Benjamin Disraeli on Lord John Russell.
"If he fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anybody pulled him out that, I suppose, would be a calamity." Benjamin Disraeli on William Gladstone.
"How can they tell?" Dorothy Parker on hearing that Calvin Coolidge had died.
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself." Mark Twain.
"I could do without your face, Chloe, and without your neck, and your hands, and your limbs, and to save myself the trouble of mentioning the points in detail, I could do without you altogether." Martial, Roman poet.
"If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell." General Philip Sheridan.
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." Dorothy Parker.
"The only man who can strut sitting down." Harry Truman on Thomas Dewey.
Bessie Braddock: "Sir, you are drunk." Winston Churchill "Bessie, you're ugly. But in the morning, I'll be sober."
"It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. But I grow lyrical." H.L. Mencken on President Warren G. Harding's inaugural address.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves a good quote. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review and The Scarsdale Inquirer.
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