This page contains a small sampling of the many, many amusing things people say! I’ll add more as I remember past sayings or new ones happen…


“Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.”

- Calvin & Hobbes


“The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

- Douglas Adams


“[The World Wide Web is] the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.”

- Douglas Adams


“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”

- Douglas Adams, on the complexity of life


“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”

- Douglas Adams


“Now suppose you have a goat. Goats don’t like water. This has nothing to do with calculus…”

- Dr. Michael Laskowski, MATH141 professor


“Wow, someone around here must REALLY like turtles!”

- My mother, referring to the display case of turtles outside the Maryland band office


“The only time you get any good offense is when your teammates are whackin’ it all around you.”

- ESPN Football Commentators


“People come to Delaware for three things: the beaches, “The Loop,” and shox-fee tapping.”

- Fitz, meaning to say “tax-free shopping,” and referring to a group of bars in Wilmington known as “The Loop” (which we had not visited yet!)


Me: “This job posting says you must relocate to Japan, so why is its location listed as Hanover, MD?”

Amit: “Maybe there’s a Japan, MD.”


Me: “Oh great, more things we need to buy with money we don’t have…”

Squeak: “Hey, I don’t have more money than you don’t have!”


“Oh, [helicopters] are in the air. But they shouldn’t be. They beat the air into submission and threaten to do the same to anybody who questions it!”

-Me


“Your subject says ‘yes’, but your body says ‘no’.”

-Pete, in response to a contradictory e-mail


“I’ll make my own Ivy League school! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the Ivy League!”

-Pete, referring to the founding of Duke University and in homage to Futurama


Pete: “It looks like [name omitted] has last place all locked up.”

Me: “I dunno, it’s still mathematically possible for someone to steal that title from him.”

Pete: “Well he certainly has a commanding lead.”

Me: “Isn’t it more like a commanding deficit?”


“What does Karl Marx put on his pasta? Communist Manipesto!”

- Stephen Colbert


“Knock knock!”

[audience] “Who’s there?”

“Communist Manipesto!”

- Stephen Colbert


“Poor grammar makes me [sic].”


“The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they are genuine.”

- Abraham Lincoln