Andy Borowitz Quotes

There is a fine line between social networking and wasting your fucking life.

Think about it... The Republicans have gone from Abraham Lincoln to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump. No wonder they don't believe in evolution.

What happens when you combine ignorance with performing talent? A president who tells the country to inject bleach.

Being dumb’s just about the worst thing there is when it comes to holding high office. —HARRY S. TRUMAN The worst thing a man can do is go bald. —DONALD J. TRUMP

There is a fine line between social networking and wasting your f**king life.

I want the president of the United States to be intellectually curious for a simple reason: I think the person running the country should be smarter than I am. We’ve just lived through the alternative, and it was only good for the liquor industry.

Quayle was George Bush 2.0, sharing not just the original model’s privileged upbringing but also his hapless steel-cage match with the English language

Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?

Over the past fifty years, what some of our most prominent politicians didn’t know could fill a book. This is that book.

A surgeon is like a car mechanic — you only know how good he is after the job is done.

Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he’s not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.

Nine months earlier, when Olivia and I were exchanging wedding vows, we made absolutely no mention of shoving enemas up each other's asses. And yet here we are. This is what it means to love and be loved.

An elementary school student in South Carolina stumped him with a gotcha question even more challenging than Hiller’s about the president of Chechnya: What was his favorite book as a child? “I can’t remember any specific books,” he said. Later, responding to a similar query in a written questionnaire, he summoned an answer: The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Though that book might have been his favorite, it was published a year after he graduated from Yale.

Scientists have already proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the tremendous powers of psychic energy.

(Even on this topic, though, there was some disagreement, as Tea Partiers split over whether the president was a communist, a Nazi, or both.)

The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.” And, continuing with the water imagery, a California legislator said, “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet.

now, every morning when I wake up, I do two things: I look out the window at the city, the beautiful city, the sun rising over it. And then I look at my beautiful wife sleeping next to me. And I realize at that moment that I've got today, and I have everything.

Imagine a hypothetical job applicant. He can't spell the simplest words, such as "heal" and "tap". Confused by geography, he thinks there's an African country called "Nambia". As for American history, he's under the impression that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive. Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he's not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.

The success of professional wrestling, like most of the entertainment that envelops our culture, lies not in fooling us that these stories are real,” he writes. “Rather, it succeeds because we ask to be fooled. We happily pay for the chance to suspend reality. The wrestlers, like all celebrities, become our vicarious selves. They do what we cannot.

artisanal way — I'm given a hospital room,

(Since he also asked, famously, “Is our children learning?” one expected that his first official act as president would be to cancel the agreement between subjects and verbs.)

His most glorious gaffes were mind-bending adventures that challenged the linear nature of time: “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”; “The future will be better tomorrow”; “The real question for 1988 is whether we’re going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the… to the back”; and “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” Quayle’s verbal contortions would have killed a lesser man, but he remained unbowed. “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made,” he declared.

People sometimes call our nation “the American experiment.” Recently, though, we’ve been lab rats in another, perverse American experiment, seemingly designed to answer this question: Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?

Given the press's reluctance to fact-check Reagan, it's no surprise that the public gradually stopped caring whether anything he said was, well, factual.

He didn’t know the difference between England and Great Britain. He didn’t know that the Republic of Ireland wasn’t part of the UK. As for non-geographical facts about the country whose airports we seized in the 1700s, he didn’t know that Britain possessed nuclear weapons, nor did his White House know how to spell the first name of Prime Minister Theresa May. Trump staffers misspelled it “Teresa” three times before someone must have checked Wikipedia. Trump thought Colorado bordered Mexico. He thought Finland was a part of Russia, and that Belgium is a city. He pronounced Namibia “Nambia” and called Thailand “Thighland,” as if it were a strip club. He thought Nepal and Bhutan were parts of India, and called them “Nipple” and “Button.

As hateful as Trump’s rhetoric was, it was part of a grand American tradition. As we saw earlier, anti-immigrant fervor was the engine that drove Millard Fillmore’s 1856 presidential campaign as the Know-Nothing nominee. A century and a half before Trump trained his xenophobia on Mexicans, the Know-Nothings had vilified Germans, Irish, and Catholics. They also undermined the validity of elections, suppressed voting, and started riots. Trump’s ideology wasn’t just toxic—it was derivative.

The beer quiz has been a staple of stupid campaign coverage ever since, underscoring the condescending assumption that voters want a president who, in the pollsters’ parlance, is just like them. I don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time. Lincoln may have been our greatest president, but he wouldn’t be in my top hundred potential drinking buddies. He could get kind of dark.

One year later, W. was adrift, a thirty-one-year-old dude with an MBA and a DUI. Hampered by a slim résumé and meager skills, he did what any young man with few prospects would do: he ran for Congress.

During his 1980 White House run, his campaign wisely blocked their release. Here he is in 1978: “There were two Vietnams, north and south. They had been separate nations for centuries.” (More like since 1954.) Also in 1978: “Swarms of locusts and grasshoppers; a plague of crickets, cutworms, and ants; and swarms of mosquitoes are making life miserable and even impossible in some parts of the world… Some experts are treating this as an unexplainable mystery. Actually, there is no mystery about it… The most effective pesticide, DDT, was outlawed… on the theoretical grounds that it might, under some circumstances, some day, harm some one or some thing.

Palin believed that the British armed forces were under the command of the Queen. She didn’t know the difference between England and the United Kingdom, and had never heard of Margaret Thatcher.X She was also shaky when it came to a former British colony, the United States of America. Answering a question about the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, Palin opined, “If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.” We’ll never know whether it was good enough for the Founding Fathers because the Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t written until 1892; the reference to God was inserted in 1954.

If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bull.” This approach would