Dave Barry Quotes (185 Quotes)

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.

Harvard University, according to the directory of the American Society of Colleges and Universities, is a type of weevil.

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our CONFIG.SYS settings.

My problem with chess was that all my pieces wanted to end the game as soon as possible.

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.

I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up

In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that men know how to fix thi

I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

The function of RAM is to give us guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest, most tumescent MEMORY. This is important, because with todays complex software, the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages. So the bottom line is, if youre a guy, you cannot have enough RAM.

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.

The term SAT is a set of initials, or autonym, standing for Scholastic Attitude Treaty Organization.

In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean Eel with big abscess.

Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

I've gained a few pounds around the middle. The only lower-body garments I own that still fit me comfortably are towels.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

The world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example.

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.

What, exactly, is the internet Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a 'modem', can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo

Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent?

Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro.

I've noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse.

The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes.

Without computers, the government would be unable to function at the level of effectiveness and efficiency that we have come to expect.... Todays government uses computers which are capable of cranking out millions of documents per day without any regard whatsoever for their content, thereby freeing government employees for more important responsibilities, such as not answering their phones.

Because of the level of my chess game, I was able - even against a weak opponent, such as my younger brothers or the dog - to get myself checkmated in under three minutes. I challenge any computer to do it faster.

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, 'people without lives.' We dont care. We have each other.... While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our 'CONFIG. SYS.'

What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially if he has had between four and seven beers.

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

One popular new plastic surgery technique is called lip grafting, or fat recycling wherein fat cells are removed from one part of your body that is too large, such as your buttocks, and injected into your lips people will then be literally kissing ass.

It is a well-known fact that although the public is fine when taken individually, when it forms itself into large groups, it tends to act as though it has one partially consumed Pez tablet for a brain.

We've actually gotten better musically over the years, ... But we've come to realize that we will never be good.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

I care about our young people, and I wish them great success, because they are our Hope for the Future, and some day, when my generation retires, they will have to pay us trillions of dollars in social security

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it

Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.

Your basic guy is into a straight-ahead, bottom-line kind of thought process that does not work nearly as well with the infinitely subtle complexities of human relationships as it does with calculating how much gravel is needed to cover a given driveway.

Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. In fact, for the past five years most of the manuals shipped with software products have actually been copies of Stephen King's The Stand with ne

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

I have always dressed according to certain Basic Guy Fashion Rules, including Both of your socks should always be the same color, Or they should at least both be fairly dark.