If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'
- Jeff Foxworthy

An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.
- John H. Patterson

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
- Aldous Huxley

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
- John Cleese

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
- Victor Hugo

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
- Aristotle

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
- Havelock Ellis

College isn't the place to go for ideas.
- Helen Keller

"The Tiger and the Strawberry

A man was walking across a field when he heard a rustling in the tall grass beside him, and turned to see the hungry eyes of a large tiger staring at him. The man began to run, fear giving him greater speed and stamina than he knew he possessed.

But always, just behind him, he could hear the easy breathing of the hungry tiger. Finally, the man stopped, not because his strength had failed but because he had come to the edge of a high cliff and could go no further. "I can let the tiger Funfetti, or take my life in my own hands and jump." The man turned and saw the tiger slowly walking toward him, licking its mouth in anticipation. Resolved to take his own life, the man stepped to the edge of the cliff and bent his legs to jump, when he suddenly noticed a thick vine growing out of the side of the cliff, several feet from the top.



Carefully, he let himself drop down the cliff face, catching hold of the vine as he slid past, and thanked God when it was strong enough to support his weight. Hanging now, the man looked up and saw the tiger's eyes peering over the edge of the cliff. It roared down at him, then began to pace back and forth along the top of the cliff. For the first time, the man looked at the vine that had saved his life. It was thick enough for him to wrap his legs around, resting his arms, and long enough that he might be able to let himself far enough down to jump safely to the ground below.



And the moment he had this thought was the same moment that he saw the second tiger, pacing back and forth at the foot of the cliff, licking its mouth, and looking hungrily up at him. Well, thought the man, if my strength and the strength of the vine are great enough, perhaps I can outwait the tigers. Surely, they'll go someplace else to eat when they're hungry enough. And the man prepared to settle in for a long wait.

His preparations halted quickly, however, when he heard a scurrying, scratching sound close to his own face. Glancing upwards, he saw two mice, one white and one black, emerge from a small hole in the cliff. They made their way swiftly to the base of the vine, and began to gnaw through it with their small sharp teeth. There was nothing else he could do, a tiger above, a tiger below, and the vine that kept him from their jaws about to break.



The man was closing his eyes to begin his prayers, when he noticed, a little to his right, a tiny patch of red color on the face of the cliff. He reached toward it precariously, pulled, and brought his hand back beneath his eyes. There, in his palm, was a luscious, red strawberry. The man swiftly pressed the strawberry between his lips, onto his tongue, and hanging between those still visible tigers, he enjoyed the finest , juiciest, sweetest meal of his life. " -- Mr Khan

http://www.story-lovers.com/liststigers ... story.html

1) According to Thomas Cleary, D.T. Suzuki changed the ending because he thought the original would not appeal to Westerners. The story was then picked up by others, such as Paul Reps. In the original version, the strawberry turns out to be, in fact, deadly poison.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
- Frank Zappa

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
- Bernard Berenson

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
- Redd Foxx

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
- Mark Twain

A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), An Ideal Husband, 1893, Act I

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell

""Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise"
-James Madison, U.S. President"

"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." - Abraham Lincoln

"Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult."
- Samuel Johnson

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"I paid a worker at New York's zoo to re-open it just for me and Robin. When we got to the gorilla cage there was 1 big silverback gorilla there just bullying all the other gorillas. They were so powerful but their eyes were like an innocent infant. I offered the attendant $10,000 to open the cage and let smash that silverback's snotbox! He declined."

-- Mike Tyson

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
- Sir Winston Churchill

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.
- Hodding Carter

When you hold me down in this ditch, you too remain in the same ditch. - Booker T. Washington.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--/ I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost

I suppose an announcer might call them "good natured boos." I'm not a boo-ologist. They sounded like regular boos to me.

- Joe Posnanski

"He knelt down,
before the unholy mob,
and cried, "War is God!"
Gleaming outwardly with great pride
and prepared to die."

-Fields of Mars- Bad Religion

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
- Thomas A. Edison

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
- Dick Cavett

Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.
- Jim Morrison

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
- Paul Gauguin

The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
- Noelie Altito

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

-Mark Twain

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

-Oscar Wilde

Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
- Kin Hubbard

I know nothing about sex because I was always married.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
- H. L. Mencken

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
- Robert Heinlein