Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant is an author and syndicated cartoonist born in London, UK, and living in Santa Barbara, California. He is best known for his Pot-Shots, single-panel illustrations with one-line humorous remarks, which began syndication in the United States of America in 1975. Brilliant became a naturalized American citizen in 1969.
Brilliant attended Hendon School London, in the 1940s–50s. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a PhD in history and taught on a “Floating University”, an educational cruise ship that traveled around the world in the mid-60s. He later taught at a community college in Bend, Oregon.
During the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco in 1967, Brilliant gave daily lectures near the Haight Street entrance of Golden Gate Park. He released a live album recorded in Golden Gate Park in 1967 on a small Hollywood, California record label, Dorash Enterprises. The album, Ashleigh Brilliant in the Haight-Ashbury, is quite rare today. The material uses familiar public domain tunes and melodies and incorporates clever poetic lyrics about marijuana, the Diggers, San Francisco neighborhoods, and his personal experiences, all the while displaying a banter which ebbs and flows with his audience, who respond warmly to the performance and also participate in the songs. He states in the recording that he had been performing in this setting for approximately two hours each day the prior four weeks. He laughs throughout his performance, while the audience joins him in singing along and banging on percussive items. The album ends with a “Haight-Ashbury Farewell”. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look at a few of his great quotes:
On Love:
The difference between friendship and love is how much you can hurt each other.
On Life:
Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.
My life has a superb cast but I can’t figure out the plot.
Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.
The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
On Humor:
Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.
I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I’m right.
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story.
Please don’t ask me what the score is. I’m not even sure what the game is.
Words are a wonderful form of communication, but they will never replace kisses and punches.
Other Quotes:
I don’t have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
All I want is a little more than I’ll ever get.
I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.
I don’t understand you. You don’t understand me. What else do we have in common?