Humor Quotes

The slang for the rectum is prison wallet.

~ Mary Roach

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

~ Mary Roach

The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)

~ Mary Roach

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.

~ Woody Allen

Scientists need to invent a way to make DNA work like in cartoons.

~ Ryan North

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

~ Charles Darwin

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell

~ Arthur C. Clarke

NASA spent millions of dollars inventing the ball-point pen so they could write in space. The Russians took a pencil.

~ Will Chabot

During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)

~ Mary Roach

With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing My Liver Belongs to You and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting higado, and bumper stickers would proclaim, I [liver symbol] my Pekingese.

~ Mary Roach

And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.

~ Ben Goldacre

Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.

~ Harlow Shapley

The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.

~ Mary Roach

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.

~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.

~ Tom Lehrer

With great power comes great dissipation.

~ Timothy Poston

Also unfortunately, Congress is far too busy asking if baseball players are really as strong as they seem and trying to choke bankers with wads of cash to grant more funds to such trifling matters as the avoidance of space bullets, so they won't give NASA the money

~ Robert Brockway

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them

~ Otto Weininger

Do you remember his science project, Harry Sue, on the trajectory of spitballs? I tell you, that modest little display taught our students more about physics than I could accomplish in a weeklong unit at the middle school

~ Sue Stauffacher

Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB— 'Taking Care of Business'— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.

~ Mary Roach

It's called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for 'Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,' an example of PLEASE— Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.

~ Mary Roach

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn.

~ Ian Mcewan

The definitive study of the herd instincts of astronomers has yet to be written, Fernie said, but there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction across the plain. At a given signal from the leader we whirl about, and, with equally firm determination, thunder off in quite a different direction, still in tight parallel formation.(quoting an observation made by astronomer J. Donal Fernie)

~ Michael Brooks

The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the remark.

~ Carl Sagan

It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ (Lit.: 'Thing-ies') or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five 'flavours', known as 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'sex appeal' and 'peppermint'.

~ Terry Pratchett

I'm convinced that Theoretical Physicist is just another way of saying BS Artist.

~ J.c. Cassels

If no one ever deviated from currently accepted mainstream Science - we would still have the Flat Earth Society!

~ Mary Nash Stoddard

It's cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science.

~ Jonathan Maberry

Nature has no originality--I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats--repeats--repeats--repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.

~ Mark Twain

Something but not nothing because nothing is an infinite possibility.

~ Kyle Kipple

Q: But what do you think that the Bible, itself, says? Don't you know how it was arrived at?A: I never made a calculationQ: What do you think?A: I do not think about things I don't think about.Q: Do you think about things you do think about?A: Well, sometimes.

~ Scopes Trial

...it seems to me that sometimes-or perhaps I might venture most of the time-occurrences have no cause at all. New stars appear and old ones vanish. Short hats become popular again. Things are as they are and do as they please for absolutely no reason at all.

~ Galen Beckett

Gwynned lies two days westwards; still further south, the weregeld calls. Mayhap with All-Father Woden's favour, my deeds may yet inspire the skalds.

~ George Gordon Byron

A general principle concerning the gender of bears has been established years ago by bear supervisor König from Bern, after over thirty years of observation. It allows for predictions and states, in short, that when a female bear bears three cubs, and they aren't all male or female, it will invariably be either two males and a female, or two females and a male.

~ Wolfgang Klein

As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year old deceased Romanian woman with oedema, your answer should be no.

~ Caitlin Doughty

Turns out even NASA can't improve on duct tape.

~ Andy Weir

Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the science of sciences. Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds.

~ Alfred Korzybski

Hoh, Boy! Freddy snorted, slapping his palm to his forehead. I hope you never donate your brain to science. It would set civilization back fifty years.

~ Bertrand R. Brinley

From an illustration in her Animals of a Bygone Era: a Leptictidium, an extinct rabbit-like animal who left no descendants, says: Too bad, because we were really cute.

~ Maja Säfström

And we're not lost.We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.

~ Blake Crouch