Items with the red CP logo are available in our Cafepress.com store. Click on the logo to view all products (hats, t-shirts, mugs, and other gift items) for that author or quote.

Quotes by Dave Barry

US columnist & humorist (1947 - )

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

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.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?"

Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money.

The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes...

And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople Get Ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report.

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

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.

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.

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

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

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.

I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.

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.

The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays: fear.

As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there is a man on base.

CP I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

CP Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.