#clever

A lot of the tabloid stories are written so well, they're very clever and very funny. But you have to focus on what's really important and not read them - don't dive into it and don't get caught up in it. ↗

— Calista Flockhart

#clever #dive #focus #funny #get

It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to. ↗

— Fannie Hurst

#clever man #cynic #enough #man #takes

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought. ↗

— John Keegan

#always #battle #better #chinese #classics

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists. ↗

— A. N. Wilson

#clever people #journalists #lawyers #now #people

Lord Birkenhead is very clever but sometimes his brains go to his head. ↗

— Margot Asquith

#clever #go #head #his #lord

Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#cleverness #myths #people #primitive #humor

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#any #cleverness #decadence #except #incapable

Too clever is dumb. ↗

— Ogden Nash

#dumb #too

What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits. ↗

— Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

#clever man #commit #crime #ever #half-wits

If home is where the heart is, Jason has lived in his throat for a long time. ↗