“
A barber lathers a man before he shaves him.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
“
In a way the philosopher and the barber are of the same guild; the barber cuts hair and the philosopher splits hairs.
”
”
José Ortega y Gasset (Man and People (Norton Library (Paperback)))
“
Alright! You sir, you sir, how about a shave?
Come and visit your good friend Sweeney.
You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave.
I will have vengenance.
I will have salvation.
Who sir, you sir?
No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on!
Sweeney's. waiting. I want you bleeders.
You sir! Anybody!
Gentlemen now don't be shy!
Not one man, no, nor ten men.
Nor a hundred can assuage me.
I will have you!
And I will get him back even as he gloats
In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats.
And my Lucy lies in ashes
And I'll never see my girl again.
But the work waits!
I'm alive at last!
And I'm full of joy!
”
”
Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
“
When that man left her, and then the barber ran off with all the money and the few valuables she had saved up over the years, she didn’t swallow caustic soda. She shook herself down as if nothing had happened
”
”
Magda Szabó (The Door)
“
The man behind the keel apparently used the same barber as Hunding. His beard was so big it had its own zip code.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Sword of Summer (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, #1))
“
A man who visits a barber to be shaved, or who orders a suit from a tailor, is not a disciple, but a customer. So one who comes to the Savior only to be saved is the Savior’s customer, not His disciple. A disciple is one who says to Christ, ‘How I long to do work like Yours! To go from place to place taking away fear; bringing instead joy, truth, comfort, and life eternal!
”
”
Richard Wurmbrand (In God's Underground)
“
There was a barber and his wife
and she was beautiful...
a foolish barber and his wife.
She was his reason for his life...
and she was beautiful, and she was virtuous.
And he was naive.
There was another man who saw
that she was beautiful...
A biased vulture of the law
who, with a gesture of his claw
removed the barber from his plate!
And there was nothing but to wait!
And she would fall!
So soft!
So young!
So lost and oh so beautiful!
Antony (spoken)
The lady, sir...did she succumb?
Sweeney Todd (sung)
Ah, that was many years ago...
I doubt if anyone would know.
(spoken)
Now leave me, Antony.
There is somewhere I must go,
something i must find out.
Now, and alone.
Antony (spoken)
But surely we will meet again before I am off to Plymouth?
Sweeney Todd (spoken)
If you want you may well find me around Fleet Street. I wouldn't wander.
(sung)
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and it's filled with people who are filled with shit!
And the vermin of the world inhabit it!
”
”
Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
“
Gilan,” she said, “you’re looking well.” And apart from those wrinkles, he was.
He smiled at her. “And you grow more beautiful every day, Pauline,” he replied.
“What about me?” Halt said, with mock severity. “Do I grow more handsome every day? More impressive, perhaps?”
Gilan eyed him critically, his head to one side. Then he announced his verdict.
“Scruffier,” he said.
Halt raised his eyebrows. “’Scruffier’?” he demanded.
Gilan nodded. I’m not sure if you’re aware of recent advances in technology, Halt,” he said. “But there a wonderful new invention called scissors. People use them for trimming beards and hair.”
“Why?”
Gilan appealed to Pauline. “Still using his saxe knife to do his barbering, is he?”
Pauline nodded, slipping her hand inside her husband’s arm. “Unless I can catch him at it,” she admitted. Halt regarded them both with a withering look. They both refused to wither, so he abandoned the expression.
“You show a fine lack of respect for your former mentor,” he told Gilan.
The younger man shrugged. “It goes with my exalted position as your commander.”
“Not mine,” Halt said. “I’ve retired.”
“So I can expect little in the way of deference from you?” Gilan grinned.
“No. I’ll show proper deference….the day you train your horse to fly back around the castle’s turrets.
”
”
John Flanagan (The Royal Ranger (Ranger's Apprentice #12 Ranger's Apprentice: The Royal Ranger #1))
“
Time is like a barber, it shears you first and then shows you your own face in the mirror. (Marrying Nusrat)
”
”
Manjul Bajaj (Another Man's Wife and Other Stories)
“
You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced the pleasures of a great shave at a barber. It’s a relaxing, luxurious experience
”
”
Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man)
“
My mama wore pajamas to the grocery store. She smashed a bunch of eggs on the grocery floor. One dozen, two dozen, four dozen, six. She dumped a bunch of jelly jars into the mix. Grape jelly, apricot, don’t forget cherry. Orange marmalade and wild strawberry. A man walked by and fell in the glop. He slid next door to the barber shop. His icky-sticky body got covered in hair. He tore a hole in his under—
”
”
Louis Sachar (The Wayside School 4-Book Collection: Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Wayside School Is Falling Down, Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom)
“
What a lot of hairy-faced men there are around nowadays. When a man grows hair all over his face it is impossible to tell what he really looks like. Perhaps that’s why he does it. He’d rather you didn’t know. Then there’s the problem of washing. When the very hairy ones wash their faces, it must be as big a job as when you and I wash the hair on our heads. So what I want to know is this. How often do all these hairy-faced men wash their faces? Is it only once a week, like us, on Sunday nights? And do they shampoo it? Do they use a hairdryer? Do they rub hair-tonic in to stop their faces from going bald? Do they go to a barber to have their hairy faces cut and trimmed or do they do it themselves in front of the bathroom mirror with nail-scissors? I don’t know. But next time you see a man with a hairy face (which will probably be as soon as you step out on to the street) maybe you will look at him more closely and start wondering about some of these things.
”
”
Roald Dahl (The Twits)
“
Again, do you call those men leisured who spend many hours at the barber’s simply to cut whatever grew overnight, to have a serious debate about every separate hair, to tidy up disarranged locks or to train thinning ones from the sides to lie over the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a bit careless – as if he were trimming a real man!
”
”
Seneca (On the Shortness of Life)
“
One of the hardest things for a man to find is a good wife and a good barber
”
”
Sotero M Lopez II
“
Years ago there was an old man I knew that told me he didn't trust me, because people with beards were hiding from something. I told him, "That's true, I'm hiding from the barber!!
”
”
Neil Leckman
“
Ninja beats pirate. Pirate beats ghost.
Ghost beats zombie. Zombie beats most.
Werewolf beats vampire. Vamp beats Imp.
Imp beats fiend. Fiend beats wimp.
Wizard beats cyrborg. Cyborg surely beats troll.
Troll beats goblin. Goblin eats a hermit’s soul.
Hermit beats child. Child beats wagon.
Wagon beats moon snake. Moon snake beats dragon.
Dragon beats hydra. Hydra beats sailor.
Sailor beats teacher. Teacher beats tailor.
Tailor beats sun worm. Sun worm beats clown.
Clown beats robo-squid. Robo-squid beats town.
Town fights jackals. Town will win.
Town fights mummies. Town won’t fight again.
Zookeeper beats hell hound. Hell hound beats giant.
Giant beats accountant. Accountant beats client.
Client beats frog. Frog beats himself.
Knight beats Big Foot. Big Foot beats elf.
Elf beats pixie. Pixie beats specter.
Specter beats sea hag. Sea hag beats Hector.
Hector beats serpent. Serpent beats rat.
Rat beats Grandma. Grandma beats cat.
Lava beats demon. Demon beats warlock.
Warlock beats dinosaur. Dino beats Spock.
Spock beats Lando. Lando beats Qui-Gon.
Qui-Gon beats Jar-Jar. Jar-Jar beats none.
Rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper.
Paper beats insect. Insect beats vapor.
Wood Woman beats Tree Man. Tree Man beats the dark.
The dark kills spider-fish. Spider-fish beats shark.
You beat me. I beat a dentist.
The dentist beats the barber. The barber is menaced.
These are the rules, and never forget.
Now hand over your money and place your bet.
”
”
Dan Bergstein
“
Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barber tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his barber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has not seen?
”
”
G.K. Chesterton
“
Colonel Crawley’s defective capital. I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawlers way?— how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house — and that one or other owes six or seven millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in the vastness of his ruin. But who pities a poor barber who can’t get his money for powdering the footmen’s heads; or a poor carpenter who has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady’s dejeuner; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes, and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak? When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.
”
”
William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #27])
“
My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him.
We stood- the dead child and the living- on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forver. To please us both was an impossibility.
...
'Please don't let Daddy die, Susie,' he whispered. 'I need him.'
When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced.
I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles adn miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky to turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw something walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so deperately?
'Susie,' the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me.
'Remember?' he said.
I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.
'Granddaddy,' I said.
And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.
'Granddaddy,' I said.
And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry.
'Do you remember?' he asked.
'Barber!'
'Adagio for Strings,' he said.
But as we danced and spun- none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth- what I remembered was how I'd found him crying to this music and asked him why.
'Sometimes you cry,' Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.' He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather's huge backyard.
We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather's chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco.
When the music stopped, it cold have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfateher took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back.
'I'm going,' he said.
'Where?' I asked.
'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.'
He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.
”
”
Alice Sebold
“
Barbers, on the other hand, are interesting guys with fascinating stories to tell. And I in turn feel at ease to say what’s on my mind. We converse about politics, cars, sports and family. Guys who are waiting read the newspaper and comment on current events. And everyone is involved: the barbers, the customers getting their haircut and the customers waiting to get their haircut.
”
”
Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man)
“
Todd:I had him!
His throat was there beneath my hand.
No, I had him!
His throat was there and now he'll never come again.
Mrs. Lovett: Easy now, hush love hush
I keep telling you, Whats your rush?
Todd: When? Why did I wait?
You told me to wait -
Now he'll never come again.
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it's filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it.
But not for long...
They all deserve to die.
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.
Because in all of the whole human race
Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two
There's the one staying put in his proper place
And the one with his foot in the other one's face
Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you.
No, we all deserve to die
Even you, Mrs Lovett, even I!
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death will be a relief
We all deserve to die.
And I'll never see Johanna
No I'll never hug my girl to me - finished!
Alright! You sir, how about a shave?
Come and visit your good friend Sweeney.
You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave.
I will have vengenance.
I will have salvation.
Who sir, you sir?
No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on!
Sweeney's. waiting. I want you bleeders.
You sir! Anybody!
Gentlemen now don't be shy!
Not one man, no, nor ten men.
Nor a hundred can assuage me.
I will have you!
And I will get him back even as he gloats
In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats.
And my Lucy lies in ashes
And I'll never see my girl again.
But the work waits!
I'm alive at last!
And I'm full of joy!
ps. love the movie the performance that Johnny Depp did was amazing and he sang amazing.
”
”
Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
“
(H)ow many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums, and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house - that one or other owe six or seven millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim of the vastness of his ruin. But who pities a poor barber who can't get his money for powdering the footman's heads; or a poor carpenter who has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady's déjeuner; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes, and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honor to bespeak? - When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.
”
”
William Makepeace Thackeray
“
as we turned the corner and began to walk down the rutted track that led to Staples Inn Gardens. The moment we appeared, the hurdy-gurdy man stopped playing and I recalled that he had behaved in exactly the same way the last time we had come here. It would have been natural for Jones to make straight for the barber’s shop – was that not
”
”
Anthony Horowitz (Moriarty (Horowitz’s Holmes, #2))
“
481
I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been.
After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.
Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.
The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.
”
”
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition)
“
FIGARO. The way I see it, sir, a man can only choose between being stupid or mad.
”
”
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / The Guilty Mother)
“
These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife's voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Fresh bread with too much butter. My children's hands when they cup my face in their hands. Toys. Exuberance. Mowing the lawn. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart. Sleep in every form from doze to bone-weary. Pay stubs. Trains. The shivering ache of a saxophone and the yearning of a soprano. Folding laundry hot from the dryer. A spotless kitchen floor. The sound of bagpipes. The way horses smell in spring. Red wines. Furnaces. Stone walls. Sweat. Postcards on which the sender has written so much that he or she can barely squeeze in the signature. Opera on the radio. Bathrobes, back rubs. Potatoes. Mink oil on boots. The bands at wedding receptions. Box-elder bugs. The postman's grin. Linen table napkins. Tent flaps. The green sifting powdery snow of cedar pollen on my porch every year. Raccoons. The way a heron labors through the sky with such a vast elderly dignity. The cheerful ears of dogs. Smoked fish and the smokehouses where fish are smoked. The way barbers sweep up circles of hair after a haircut. Handkerchiefs. Poems read aloud by poets. Cigar-scissors. Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer. People who keep dead languages alive. Fresh-mown lawns. First-basemen's mitts. Dish-racks. My wife's breasts. Lumber. Newspapers folded under arms. Hats. The way my children smelled after their baths when they were little. Sneakers. The way my father's face shone right after he shaved. Pants that fit. Soap half gone. Weeds forcing their way through sidewalks. Worms. The sound of ice shaken in drinks. Nutcrackers. Boxing matches. Diapers. Rain in every form from mist to sluice. The sound of my daughters typing their papers for school. My wife's eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. Her eyes. Her.
”
”
Brian Doyle (Mink River)
“
Every sun creates a shadow and not all are blest to stand in the light. We have returned, he tells himself. Minim looks down at his slender fingers, the nails still neatly filed and short. He glances down at his feet, and lays a hand on the beard he learned to trim as well as any royal barber. Every day, he will grow back into himself until he can be who he is: a man who was once everything to everyone, then was reborn again to be nothing.
”
”
Maaza Mengiste (The Shadow King)
“
George Bernard Shaw made the point best: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him … The unreasonable man adapts the surrounding conditions to himself … All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
”
”
Michael Barber (How to Run A Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy)
“
At this point Frisella, the barber, came out of his shop to join in the fun. Behind him was the Maresciallo, pompous and important, rubbing his smooth red face. He was the only man in Montelepre who had himself shaved every day.
”
”
Mario Puzo (The Sicilian (The Godfather, #2))
“
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well.
The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
“
Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument.
”
”
Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Illustrated))
“
Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument. With
”
”
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
“
FIGARO. What he says isn’t always the same as what he means. Watch out for words that slip out when he’s talking, those tiny gestures, the way he moves: it’s the key to a man’s character. There’s something wicked afoot. It’s obvious he believes nothing can stop him, because to me he seems… craftier, wilier, more smug—in fact he’s like these imbeciles here in France who start cheering before the battle’s been won! You must try and be as devious as he is: butter him up, tell him what he’d like to hear, and whatever he wants, don’t say no.
”
”
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / The Guilty Mother)
“
Again, do you call those men leisured who spend many hours at the barber’s simply to cut whatever grew overnight, to have a serious debate about every separate hair, to tidy up disarranged locks or to train thinning ones from the sides to lie over the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a bit careless – as if he were trimming a real man! How they flare up if any of their mane is wrongly cut off, if any of it is badly arranged, or if it doesn't fall into the right ringlets! Which of them would not rather have his country ruffled than his hair?
”
”
Seneca (On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas))
“
I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee?
The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops!
Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?
”
”
Yoné Noguchi (The Story Of Yone Noguchi: Told By Himself)
“
I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s the combination of the smell of hair tonics and the all-man atmosphere. But more so, it’s the awareness of the tradition of barbershops. Barbershops are places of continuity; they don’t change with the shifts in culture. The places and barbers look the same as they did when your dad got his hair cut. It’s a straightforward experience with none of the foo-foo accoutrements of the modern age. There are no waxings, facials, highlights or appointments. Just great haircuts and great conversation. When you walk out of the barbershop with a sharp haircut, you can’t help but feel a little manly swagger creep into your step.
”
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Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man)
“
Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers,
”
”
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin's Autobiography)
“
The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.
”
”
Simon Sebag Montefiore (The Romanovs: 1613-1918)
“
Philby now went in for the kill. Elliott had tipped him off that he would be cleared by Macmillan, but mere exoneration was not enough: he needed Lipton to retract his allegations, publicly, humiliatingly, and quickly. After a telephone consultation with Elliott, he instructed his mother to inform all callers that he would be holding a press conference in Dora’s Drayton Gardens flat the next morning. When Philby opened the door a few minutes before 11:00 a.m. on November 8, he was greeted with gratifying proof of his new celebrity. The stairwell was packed with journalists from the world’s press. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “Do come in.” Philby had prepared carefully. Freshly shaved and neatly barbered, he wore a well-cut pinstriped suit, a sober and authoritative tie, and his most charming smile. The journalists trooped into his mother’s sitting room, where they packed themselves around the walls. Camera flashes popped. In a conspicuous (and calculated) act of old-world gallantry, Philby asked a journalist sitting in an armchair if he would mind giving up his seat to a lady journalist forced to stand in the doorway. The man leaped to his feet. The television cameras rolled. What followed was a dramatic tour de force, a display of cool public dishonesty that few politicians or lawyers could match. There was no trace of a stammer, no hint of nerves or embarrassment. Philby looked the world in the eye with a steady gaze and lied his head off. Footage of Philby’s famous press conference is still used as a training tool by MI6, a master class in mendacity.
”
”
Ben Macintyre (A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal)
“
FIGARO. Such a fantastic chain of events! How did it all happen to me? Why those things and not others? Who pointed them in my direction? Having no choice but to travel a road I was not aware I was following, and which I will get off without wanting to, I have strewn it with as many flowers as my good humour has permitted. But when I say my good humour, how can I know if it is any more mine than all the other bits of me, nor what this ‘me’ is that I keep trying to understand: first, an unformed bundle of indefinable parts, then a puny, weak-brained runt, a dainty frisking animal, a young man with a taste for pleasure and appetites to match, turning his hand to all trades to survive—sometimes master, sometimes servant as chance dictated, ambitious from pride, hard-working from necessity, but always happy to be idle! An orator when it was safe to speak out, a poet in my leisure hours, a musician as the situation required, in love in crazy fits and bursts. I’ve seen it all, done it all, had it all. Then the bubble burst and I was too disillusioned… Disillusioned!
”
”
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / The Guilty Mother)
“
Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. “I’m not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven,” Gustav argues, “but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur.” “So?” is Säure’s customary answer to that one. “Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!” It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Säure had to shout his head off. “The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber’s in the crockery, the magpie’s stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together.
”
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Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)
“
CAST: Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Bernard Fitz of the Vincent County District Court. Bill Green as Sheriff McGrath, “Vincent County’s own little Hitler,” a frequent antagonist of the kind-hearted judge. Barbara Fuller as Susan, the judge’s lovely young niece. Leo Cleary as the bailiff. Dawn Bender as little Mary Margaret McAllister. WRITER-PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Carlton E. Morse. ANNOUNCER: Frank Martin. ORCHESTRA: Opie Cates. This show bore many of the trademarks that writer Carlton E. Morse had established on One Man’s Family: stories containing-the breath of life, realistic conflicts, and a character who, as Time put it, was “surefire for cornfed philosophizing.” Before his election to the bench, Judge Fitz had been the barber of a small (pop. 3,543) community in the county. At times, when his legal career tried his patience, he longed again for that simpler life. He was staunchly Irish (what else, with Barry Fitzgerald in the lead?) and could be painfully sentimental. One reviewer noted that “he criticizes the law as much as he enforces it, and slyly finds a loophole when he thinks a culprit needs a helping of simple kindness.” The sheriff, on the other hand, had a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality.
”
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
And there, until 1884, it was possible to gaze on the remains of a generally neglected monument, so-called Dagobert’s Tower, which included a ninth-century staircase set into the masonry, of which the thirty-foot handrail was fashioned out of the trunk of a gigantic oak tree. Here, according to tradition, lived a barber and a pastry-cook, who in the year 1335 plied their trade next door to each other. The reputation of the pastry-cook, whose products were among the most delicious that could be found, grew day by day. Members of the high-ranking clergy in particular were very fond of the extraordinary meat pies that, on the grounds of keeping to himself the secret of how the meats were seasoned, our man made all on his own, with the sole assistance of an apprentice who was responsible for the pastry.
His neighbor the barber had won favor with the public through his honesty, his skilled hairdressing and shaving, and the steam baths he offered. Now, thanks to a dog that insistently scratched at the ground in a certain place, the ghastly origins of the meat used by the pastry-cook became known, for the animal unearthed some human bones! It was established that every Saturday before shutting up shop the barber would offer to shave a foreign student for free. He would put the unsuspecting young man in a tip-back seat and then cut his throat. The victim was immediately rushed down to the cellar, where the pastry-cook took delivery of him, cut him up, and added the requisite seasoning. For which the pies were famed, ‘especially as human flesh is more delicate because of the diet,’ old Dubreuil comments facetiously.
The two wretched fellows were burned with their pies, the house was ordered to be demolished, and in its place was built a kind of expiatory pyramid, with the figure of the dog on one of its faces. The pyramid was there until 1861.
But this is where the story takes another turn and joins the very best of black comedy. For the considerable number of ecclesiastics who had unwittingly consumed human flesh were not only guilty before God of the very venial sin of greed; they were automatically excommunicated! A grand council was held under the aegis of several bishops and it was decided to send to Avignon, where Pope Clement VI resided, a delegation of prelates with a view to securing the rescindment if not of the Christian interdiction against cannibalism then at least of the torments of hell that faced the inadvertent cannibals. The delegation set off, with a tidy sum of money, bare-footed, bearing candles and singing psalms. But the roads of that time were not very safe and doubtless strewn with temptation. Anyway, the fact is that Clement VI never saw any sign of the penitents, and with good reason.
”
”
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
“
So...what are you working on now?"
“Right now, an essay about Don Quixote.”
“One of my favorite books.”
“Mine too.”
“What’s the gist?”
“It has to do with the authorship of the books.”
“Is there any question?”
“I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing.”
“Ah.”
“Cervantes claims he is not the author, that the original text was in Arabic.”
“Right. It’s an attack on make-believe, so he must claim it was real.”
“Precisely. Therefore, the story has to be written by an eyewitness yet Cid Hamete Benengeli, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. So who is he? Sancho Panza is of course the witness – illiterate, but with a gift for language. He dictated the story to the barber and the priest, Don Quixote’s friends. They had the manuscript translated into Arabic. Cervantes found the translation and had it rendered back into Spanish. The idea was to hold up a mirror to Don Quixote’s madness so that when he finally read the book himself, he would see the error of his ways. But Don Quixote, in my view, was no mad. He only pretended to be. He engineered the collaboration, and the translation from Arabic back into Spanish. I like to imagine Cervantes hiring Don Quixote in disguise to decipher the story of Don Quixote.”
“But why did Quixote go to such lengths?”
“He wanted to test the gullibility of man. To what extent would people tolerate blasphemies, lies, and nonsense if they gave them amusement? The answer: to any extent. For the book is still amusing us today. That’s finally all anyone wants out of a book. To be amused.
”
”
David Mazzucchelli (City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1))
“
In God’s own name, Sir Knight of the Sorry Face, I just can’t stand some of these things you come out with, making me think that everything you tell me about chivalries, and winning kingdoms and empires, and giving islands away and doing other favours and great deeds, as knight errants do, must all be empty lies, and a fraction or a friction or whatever it is you call it. Because anyone who hears you saying that a barber’s basin is Mambrino’s helmet, and sticking to your story for days on end – what’s he going to think except that the man who says things like that must be queer in the head? Yes, I’ve got the basin in my saddle-bag, well dented, and the reason I’ve got it there is to take it home and mend it for trimming my beard, if God’s good enough to let me see my wife and children again some day.
”
”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
“
The Egyptian chronicler of the Napoleonic invasion, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754-1826), was impressed with the scientific interests of the French but described their mores in scandalous terms: Their women do not cover themselves and have no modesty; they do not care whether they uncover their private parts. Whenever a Frenchman has to perform an act of nature he does so wherever he happens to be, even in full view of people, and he goes away as he is, without washing his private parts after defecation. If he is a man of taste and refinement he wipes himself with whatever he finds, even with a paper with writing on it, otherwise he remains as he is. They have intercourse with any woman who pleases them and vice versa. Sometimes one of their women goes into a barber’s shop, and invites him to shave her pubic hair. If he wishes he can take his fee in kind.7
”
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Joseph A. Massad (Desiring Arabs)
“
Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument. With these sentiments I have hazarded the few preceding pages, hoping they may afford hints which some time or other may be useful to a city I love, having lived many years in it very happily, and perhaps to some of our towns in America.
”
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Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
She was a new world - a place of endless mysteries and unexpected delights, an enchanting mixture of woman and child. She supervised the domestic routine with deceptive lack of fuss. With her there, suddenly his clothes were clean and had their full complement of buttons; the stew of boots and books and unwashed socks in his wagon vanished. There were fresh bread and fruit preserves on the table; Kandhla's eternal grilled steaks gave way to a variety of dishes. Each day she showed a new accomplishment. She could ride astride, though Sean had to turn his back when she mounted and dismounted. She cut Sean's hair and made as good a job of it as his barber in Johannesburg. She had a medicine chest in her wagon from which she produced remedies for every ailing man or beast in the company. She handled a rifle like a man and could strip and clean Sean's Mannlicher. She helped him load cartridges, measuring the charges with a practised eye. She could discuss birth and procreation with a clinical objectivity and a minute later blush when she looked at him that way. She was as stubborn as a mule, haughty when it suited her, serene and inscrutable at times and at others a little girl. She would push a handful of grass down the back of his shirt and run for him to chase her, giggle for minutes at a secret thought, play long imaginative games in which the dogs were her children and she talked to them and answered for them. Sometimes she was so naive that Sean thought she was joking until he remembered how young she was. She could drive him from happiness to spitting anger and back again within the space of an hour. But, once he had won her confidence and she knew that he would play to the rules, she responded to his caresses with a violence that startled them both. Sean was completely absorbed in her. She was the most wonderful thing he had ever found and, best of all, he could talk to her.
”
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Wilbur Smith (When the Lion Feeds (Courtney publication, #1; Courtney chronological, #10))
“
You might consider a full shave," he suggested. "You certainly have the chin for it."
Keir shook his head. "I must keep the beard."
Looking sympathetic, the barber asked, "Pockmarks? Scars?"
"No' exactly." Since the man seemed to explain an explanation, Keir continued uncomfortably, "It's... well... my friends and I, we're a rough lot, you ken. 'Tis our way to chaff and trade insults. Whenever I shave off the beard, they start mocking and jeering. Blowing kisses, calling me a fancy lad, and all that. They never tire of it. And the village lasses start flirting and mooning about my distillery, and interfering with work. 'Tis a vexation."
The barber stared at him in bemusement. "So the flaw you're trying to hide is... you're too handsome?"
A balding middle-aged man seated in the waiting area reacted with a derisive snort. "Balderdash," he exclaimed. "Enjoy it while you can, is my advice. A handsome shoe will someday be an ugly slipper."
"What did he say, nephew?" asked the elderly man beside him, lifting a metal horn to his ear.
The middle-aged man spoke into the horn. "Young fellow says he's too handsome."
"Too handsome?" the old codger repeated, adjusting his spectacles and squinting at Keir. "Who does the cheeky bugger think he is, the Duke of Kingston?"
Amused, the barber proceeded to explain the reference to Keir. "His Grace the Duke of Kingston is generally considered one of the finest-looking men who's ever lived."
"I know-" Keir began.
"He caused many a scandal in his day," the barber continued. "They still make jokes about it in Punch. Cartoons with fainting women, and so forth."
"Handsome as Othello, they say," said a man who was sweeping up hair clippings.
"Apollo," the barber corrected dryly. He used a dry brush to whisk away the hair from Keir's neck. "I suspect by now Kingston's probably lost most of those famed golden locks."
Keir was tempted to contradict him, since he'd met the duke earlier that very day and seen for himself the man still had a full head of hair. However, he thought better of it and held his tongue.
”
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Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels, #7))
“
Standing on the pavement was a big fat man whom Dixon recognized as his barber. Dixon felt a deep respect for this man because of his impressive exterior, his rumbling bass voice, and his unsurpassable stock of information about the Royal Family. At that moment two rather pretty girls stopped at a pillar-box a few yards away. The barber, his hands clasped behind his back, turned and stared at them. An unmistakable expression of furtive lust came over his face; then, like a courtly shyopwalker, he moved slowly towards the two girls. Welch now accelerated again and Dixon, a good deal shaken hurriedly switched his attention to the other side of the road, where a cricket match was being played and the bowler was just running up to bowl. The batsman, another big fat man, swiped at the ball, missed it, and was violently hit by it in the stomach. Dixon had time to see him double up and the wicket-keeper begin to run forward before a tall hedge hid the scene.
Uncertain whether this pair of vignettes was designed to illustrate the swiftness of divine retribution or its tendency to mistake its target, Dixon was quite sure that he felt in some way overwhelmed...
”
”
Kingsley Amis
“
Would you say that that man is at leisure who arranges with finical care his Corinthian bronzes, that the mania of a few makes costly, and spends the greater part of each day upon rusty bits of copper? Who sits in a public wrestling-place (for, to our shame I we labour with vices that are not even Roman) watching the wrangling of lads? Who sorts out the herds of his pack-mules into pairs of the same age and colour? Who feeds all the newest athletes? Tell me, would you say that those men are at leisure who pass many hours at the barber’s while they are being stripped of whatever grew out the night before? while a solemn debate is held over each separate hair? while either disarranged locks are restored to their place or thinning ones drawn from this side and that toward the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a bit too careless, just as if he were shearing a real man! How they flare up if any of their mane is lopped off, if any of it lies out of order, if it does not all fall into its proper ringlets! Who of these would not rather have the state disordered than his hair? Who is not more concerned to have his head trim rather than safe? Who would not rather be well barbered than upright? Would you say that these are at leisure who are occupied with the comb and the mirror? And what of those who are engaged in composing, hearing, and learning songs, while they twist the voice, whose best and simplest movement Nature designed to be straightforward, into the meanderings of some indolent tune, who are always snapping their fingers as they beat time to some song they have in their head, who are overheard humming a tune when they have been summoned to serious, often even melancholy, matters? These have not leisure, but idle occupation. And their banquets, Heaven knows! I cannot reckon among their unoccupied hours, since I see how anxiously they set out their silver plate, how diligently they tie up the tunics of their pretty slave-boys, how breathlessly they watch to see in what style the wild boar issues from the hands of the cook, with what speed at a given signal smooth-faced boys hurry to perform their duties, with what skill the birds are carved into portions all according to rule, how carefully unhappy little lads wipe up the spittle of drunkards. By such means they seek the reputation for elegance and good taste, and to such an extent do their evils follow them into all the privacies of life that they can neither eat nor drink without ostentation. And
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Seneca (On The Shortness of Life)
“
Knock, knock. Who's there? A: Lettuce Q: Lettuce who? A: Lettuce in, it's freezing out here.. . 2. Q: What do elves learn in school? A: The elf-abet . 3. Q: Why was 6 afraid of 7? A: Because: 7 8 9 . . 4. Q. how do you make seven an even number? A. Take out the s! . 5. Q: Which dog can jump higher than a building? A: Anydog – Buildings can’t jump! . 6. Q: Why do bananas have to put on sunscreen before they go to the beach? A: Because they might peel! . 7. Q. How do you make a tissue dance? A. You put a little boogie in it. . 8. Q: Which flower talks the most? A: Tulips, of course, 'cause they have two lips! . 9. Q: Where do pencils go for vacation? A: Pencil-vania . 10. Q: What did the mushroom say to the fungus? A: You're a fun guy [fungi]. . 11. Q: Why did the girl smear peanut butter on the road? A: To go with the traffic jam! . 11. Q: What do you call cheese that’s not yours? A: Nacho cheese! . 12. Q: Why are ghosts bad liars? A: Because you can see right through them. . 13. Q: Why did the boy bring a ladder to school? A: He wanted to go to high school. . 14. Q: How do you catch a unique animal? A: You neak up on it. Q: How do you catch a tame one? A: Tame way. . 15. Q: Why is the math book always mad? A: Because it has so many problems. . 16. Q. What animal would you not want to pay cards with? A. Cheetah . 17. Q: What was the broom late for school? A: Because it over swept. . 18. Q: What music do balloons hate? A: Pop music. . 19. Q: Why did the baseball player take his bat to the library? A: Because his teacher told him to hit the books. . 20. Q: What did the judge say when the skunk walked in the court room? A: Odor in the court! . 21. Q: Why are fish so smart? A: Because they live in schools. . 22. Q: What happened when the lion ate the comedian? A: He felt funny! . 23. Q: What animal has more lives than a cat? A: Frogs, they croak every night! . 24. Q: What do you get when you cross a snake and a pie? A: A pie-thon! . 25. Q: Why is a fish easy to weigh? A: Because it has its own scales! . 26. Q: Why aren’t elephants allowed on beaches? A:They can’t keep their trunks up! . 27. Q: How did the barber win the race? A: He knew a shortcut! . 28. Q: Why was the man running around his bed? A: He wanted to catch up on his sleep. . 29. Q: Why is 6 afraid of 7? A: Because 7 8 9! . 30. Q: What is a butterfly's favorite subject at school? A: Mothematics. Jokes by Categories 20 Mixed Animal Jokes Animal jokes are some of the funniest jokes around. Here are a few jokes about different animals. Specific groups will have a fun fact that be shared before going into the jokes. 1. Q: What do you call a sleeping bull? A: A bull-dozer. . 2. Q: What to polar bears eat for lunch? A: Ice berg-ers! . 3. Q: What do you get from a pampered cow? A: Spoiled milk.
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Peter MacDonald (Best Joke Book for Kids: Best Funny Jokes and Knock Knock Jokes (200+ Jokes) : Over 200 Good Clean Jokes For Kids)
“
RUDYARD KIPLING If If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
”
”
Laura Barber (Penguin's Poems for Life)
“
COUNT. What’s to stop you taking her with you to London?
FIGARO. A man who was married and had to be away so much? I’d never hear the end of it.
COUNT. But with your qualities and brains you could climb the ladder and end up with an important government post one of these days.
FIGARO. Brains? Climb the ladder? Your Lordship must think I’m stupid. Second-rate and grovelling, that’s the thing to be, and then the world’s your oyster.
COUNT. All you’d have to do is take a few lessons in politics from me.
FIGARO. I know what politics is.
COUNT. Like you know the key to the English language?
FIGARO. Not that it’s anything to boast about. It means pretending you don’t know what you do know and knowing what you don’t, listening to what you don’t understand and not hearing what you do, and especially, claiming you can do more than you have the ability to deliver. More often that not, it means making a great secret of the fact that there are no secrets; locking yourself in your inner sanctum where you sharpen pens and give the impression of being profound and wise, whereas you are, as they say, hollow and shallow; playing a role well or badly; sending spies everywhere and rewarding the traitors; tampering with seals, intercepting letters, and trying to dignify your sordid means by stressing your glorious ends. That’s all there is to politics, and you can have me shot if it’s not.
COUNT. But what you’ve defined is intrigue.
FIGARO. Call it politics, intrigue, whatever you want. But since to me the two things are as alike as peas in a pod, I say good luck to whoever has anything to do with either. ‘Truly, I love my sweetheart more’, as old King Henry’s song goes.
”
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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / The Guilty Mother)
“
And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey too, and the priest told Messua’s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village gates.
”
”
Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book)
“
I’ll always have genuine affection for my dear friends Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin, Ashley Olsen, and Mary-Kate Olsen for being such important, genuine friends in my life. And the incredibly sweet Andrea Barber, who played Kimmy Gibbler,
”
”
Bob Saget (Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian)
“
In sum, until April 12, Governor Barber, apparently assumed that his friends were faring well, and took no action whatsoever. Governor Barber’s friends, however, were not faring well at all. From the beginning of the siege, the weather had been bad. A cold rain began to fall shortly after men from Buffalo first arrived at the T. A., about midnight the evening of April 10, and during that night the rain turned to snow, meaning that the invaders in the cramped quarters of their fort “suffered intensely.”34 The peril of the invaders was obvious, and knowing that the telegraph lines were probably still down, they wanted to get a message to the governor in Cheyenne “stating their predicament and asking for immediate help.”35 A young man named Dowling stepped forward and offered to try to get through the lines around the ranch to Buffalo. His offer was immediately accepted, and H. E. Teschemacher wrote a telegram to Governor Barber, which was signed by Major Wolcott. It was an especially dark evening, and Dowling had a harrowing adventure, wading through the icy creek and then briefly falling in with some of the besieging men. In the darkness nobody identified him, however, and he managed to split off from them. He was then able to “commandeer a horse” and ride to Buffalo.
”
”
John W. Davis (Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County)
“
… This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCaslin, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, had seen it and the boy himself had inherited it as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge: that dark corrupt and bloody time while three separate people had tried to adjust not only to one another but to the new land which they had created and inherited too and must live in for the reason that those who had lost it were no less free to quit it than those who had gained it were: – those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet because they had been so long in bondage and then so suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always misused freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffiring necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license; those who had fought for four years and lost to preserve a condition under which that franchisement was anomaly and paradox, for the old reasons for which man (not the generals and politicians but man) has always fought and died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a better future one to endure for his children; and lastly, as if that were not enough for bitterness and hatred and fear, that third race even more alien to the people whom they resembled in pigment and in whom even the same blood ran, than to the people whom they did not, – that race threefold in one and alien even among themselves save for a single fierce aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and transport mules, who followed the battles they themselves had not fought and inherited the conquest they themselves had not helped to gain, sanctioned and protected even if not blessed, and left their bones and in another generation would be engaged in a fierce economic competition of small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed and the white descendants of fathers who had owned no slaves anyway whom they were supposed to have disinherited and in the third generation would be back once more in the little lost country seats as barbers and garage mechanics and deputy sheriffs and mill- and gin-hands and power-plant firemen, leading, first in mufti then later in an actual formalized regalia of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery Christian symbols, lynching mobs against the race their ancestors had come to save: and of all that other nameless horde of speculators in human misery, manipulators of money and politics and land, who follow catastrophe and are their own protection as grasshoppers are and need no blessing and sweat no plow or axe-helve and batten and vanish and leave no bones, just as they derived apparently from no ancestry, no mortal flesh, no act even of passion or even of lust: and the Jew who came without protection too since after two thousand years he had got out of the habit of being or needing it, and solitary, without even the solidarity of the locusts and in this a sort of courage since he had come thinking not in terms of simple pillage but in terms of his great-grand-children, seeking yet some place to establish them to endure even though forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it. …
”
”
William Faulkner (Go Down Moses)
“
If a man believed he was Hitler, did you send him to the barber for a short back and sides? – 'Teething Problems
”
”
Kris Ashton (Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Issue 63)
“
sum, Philippians 2 affirms that Jesus was a divine person who became man.
”
”
Michael Barber (Salvation: What Every Catholic Should Know)
“
The best thing to do," said one of the malingerers, "is to sham madness. In the next room there are two other men from the school where I teach and one of them keeps shouting day and night : 'Giordano Bruno's stake is still smoldering ; renew Galileo's trial !'”
“I meant at first to act the fool too and be a religious maniac and preach about the infallibility of the Pope, but finally I managed to get some cancer of the stomach for fifteen crowns from a barber down the road."
"That's nothing," said another man. "Down our way there's a midwife who for twenty crowns can dislocate your foot so nicely that you're crippled for the rest of your life.”
“My illness has run me into more than two hundred crowns already," announced his neighbor, a man as thin as a rake. "I bet there's no poison you can mention that I haven't taken. I'm simply bung full of poisons. I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk vitriol mixed with phosphorus. I've ruined my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart—in fact, all my insides. Nobody knows what disease it is I've got."
"The best thing to do," explained someone near the door, "is to squirt paraffin oil under the skin on your arms. My cousin had a slice of good luck that way. They cut off his arm below the elbow and now the army'll never worry him any more.”
“Well," said Schweik, "When I was in the army years ago, it used to be much worse. If a man went sick, they just trussed him up, shoved him into a cell to make him get fitter. There wasn't any beds and mattresses and spittoons like what there is here. Just a bare bench for them to lie on. Once there was a chap who had typhus, fair and square, and the one next to him had smallpox. Well, they trussed them both up and the M. O. kicked them in the ribs and said they were shamming. When the pair of them kicked the bucket, there was a dust-up in Parliament and it got into the papers. Like a shot they stopped us from reading the papers and all our boxes was inspected to see if we'd got any hidden there. And it was just my luck that in the whole blessed regiment there was nobody but me whose newspaper was spotted. So our colonel starts yelling at me to stand to attention and tell him who'd written that stuff to the paper or he'd smash my jaw from ear to ear and keep me in clink till all was blue. Then the M.O. comes up and he shakes his fist right under my nose and shouts: 'You misbegotten whelp ; you scabby ape ; you wretched blob of scum ; you skunk of a Socialist, you !' Well, I stood keeping my mouth shut and with one hand at the salute and the other along the seam of my trousers. There they was, running round and yelping at me. “We'll knock the newspaper nonsense out of your head, you ruffian,' says the colonel, and gives me 21 days solitary confinement. Well, while I was serving my time, there was some rum goings-on in the barracks. Our colonel stopped the troops from reading at all, and in the canteen they wasn't allowed even to wrap up sausages or cheese in newspapers. That made the soldiers start reading and our regiment had all the rest beat when it came to showing how much they'd learned.
”
”
Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Schweik)
“
the doctors say is vital to his pulling through. But he is going to be a long time recovering.” “I heard he can’t walk.” Grant had forgotten Wally Benson was driving the buckboard that picked up Trouble at the river. “I don’t think anybody can say for sure. In his shape, I don’t think any man would be walking.” “I mean he got shot in the back, and it tore his backbone to pieces. You fished him out of the river and was there with him. You doctored him some, so I figure you should know.” “I staunched the bleeding of the wounds. He took a backshot, but I wouldn’t know how much damage there was. I didn’t see any sign of a shattered backbone. I think the gossips might be exaggerating some.” “You ain’t going to tell me nothing more, are you?” “Enos, I don’t know more than I have told you. I really don’t. I’m sure you will be informed when the doctors know something.” “Humph. Do you know you’re being followed?” Grant turned his head and looked down Main Street. “I don’t see anybody.” “You don’t think the feller would stand in the middle of the street waving at you, do you? He took cover between the barber shop and the bootmaker’s place once he seen where you was headed. Likely, he’s got a horse hitched someplace
”
”
Ron Schwab (Trouble (Lockwood Book 3))
“
We did eight hundred push-ups every goddamned day, some days over two hundred chins, and they ran us. Christ, we ran ten miles every morning and another five at night, and sometimes even more than that. We weren’t big guys, like badass football linemen or any of that, you know, Rambo with all those pansy protein-shake muscles bulging. We were skinny kids, mostly, all stripped down and hungry, but, hell, we could carry hundred-pound packs, four hundred rounds, and a poodle-popper uphill at a run all goddamned day. You know what we were? We were wolves. Lean and mean, and you definitely did not want us on your ass. We were fuckin’ dangerous, man. That’s what they wanted. Recon. That’s what we wanted, too.” —excerpt from Young Men at War: A Case by Case Study of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Patricia Barber, Ph.D. M.F.C.C. Duke University Press, 1986
”
”
Robert Crais (L.A. Requiem (Elvis Cole, #8))
“
You can’t seriously expect me to trust my mane to a woman?”
Sexism, alive and well in Arik’s world, the fault of the females in his pride who’d raised him. No coddling for Arik. They didn’t believe in letting him play with dolls or caving to others. His mother and aunts, not to mention his numerous female cousins, had taught him to be tough. They didn’t allow softness in his world, not when they groomed him as the future leader of their pride. He was all male, all the time, and dammit, a man used a barber, not a hairdresser.
Even if she was cute.
“Suit yourself. I’ve got more than enough men to take care of—”
Was that his cat growling?
“— without adding a pompous one to the list.”
“Pompous?” Even if she’d pegged him right, it didn’t stop his indignant glare.
A glare she chose to ignore.
She crossed her arms over her chest, plumping her cleavage— ooh, pretty, shadowy cleft.
His curious nature drew his eyes to the mysterious and beckoning vee until she cleared her throat.
“My eyes are up here, big guy.”
Caught.
Good thing he was a cat. His kind had no shame, nor did they apologize.
He shot her his most engaging, boyish grin. “My name is Arik. Arik Castiglione.”
She didn’t react to his smile or titles, so he elaborated, “The CEO for Castiglione Enterprises.”
He stretched his lips wide enough to engage his deadly dimple.
And still failed to impress.
She raised a brow. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
Surely she jested. Within his mind, his poor lion lay down in a traumatized heap and crossed its paws over its eyes.
“We are the largest importer of meat in the world.”
Her shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I don’t check the label to see who brings me my steak. I just eat it.”
“What about our chain of restaurants? A Lion’s Pride Steakhouses.”
“Those I’ve heard of. Decent, I hear, but overpriced. I can get a bigger plate of food at LongHorn. And according to my girlfriends, the male waiters are cuter too.
”
”
Eve Langlais (When an Alpha Purrs (A Lion's Pride, #1))
“
He’s by the fence over there,” Stephen pointed to a legless man a few feet away by the gate to the inn’s yard. Harry had undone himself from his board and was sitting with his leg stumps splayed out, whittling on a small piece of wood. Already its end resembled the figure of a man tugging a noose about his neck. Harry was only a few years older than Stephen, hardly thirty, but with a ratty beard that hung down to his chest, wild hair and crazy blue eyes, he seemed far older. He had been a free farmer once, but then a cart had rolled over his legs. Gangrene had set in and a barber surgeon amputated both legs above the knee. Most men would have died, but Harry had held on. He was a beggar now.
”
”
Jason Vail (The Wayward Apprentice (Stephen Attebrook Mysteries #1))
“
Here is the lesson,” Barber said. “It is just as easy to bring death to man, and I’ve done so. It’s harder to keep hold of life, harder still to maintain a grasp on health. Those are the tasks to which we must keep our minds.
”
”
Noah Gordon (The Physician (The Cole Trilogy, 1))
“
HENRY CLIMBED INTO my truck and buckled his seatbelt with the grimmest expression I had ever seen. His hair stood out in every direction, and his hands shook.
“You okay, buddy?” I asked, trying to be gentle.
“Do you want to go see Robin instead? She’d be glad to cut it, Henry.” Millie had followed him out, tapping her way down the sidewalk with a concerned frown between her dark brows. She now stood holding onto the passenger side door. I could tell she wanted to ride along, but Henry didn’t seem to want her to.
“It’s a man date, right Henry? Men go to the barber. Not the salon.”
Henry tapped his fingertips together nervously and wouldn’t look right or left.
“Kite flying is an official sport in Thailand!” Henry blurted.
Amelie bit her lip but stepped back from the passenger door.
“Bye, Millie. I’ll bring him back. Don’t worry,” I called.
She nodded and tried to smile, and I pulled away from the curb. Henry’s tapping became a cadence. Clack clack. Click click. It sounded like the rhythm Millie made with her stick when she walked.
“Henry?”
No response. Just clicking, all the way to the barbershop.
I pulled up to Leroy’s shop and put my truck in park. I jumped out and came around to Henry’s door. Henry made no move to disembark.
“Henry? Do you want to do this?”
Henry looked pointedly at my shaggy locks and clicked his fingers.
“I need a haircut, Henry. So do you. We’re men. We can do this.”
“Ben Askren, Roger Federer, Shaun White, Troy Polamalu, David Beckham, Triple H.”
“Triple H?” I started to laugh. Henry was listing athletes with long hair. “You’re getting desperate, Henry.”
“Larry Fitzgerald? Tim Lincecum?”
“Tim Lincecum, huh? He plays for the Giants, doesn’t he? Your favorite team, right?”
Henry didn’t respond.
“Ah, shit. What the hell. I didn’t want to cut my hair anyway. I kind of think your sister likes it.”
The clicking slowed.
“You wanna go buy a kite? I hear it’s an official sport in Thailand,” I said.
Henry smiled the smallest ghost of a smile and nodded once.
”
”
Amy Harmon (The Song of David (The Law of Moses, #2))
“
could give a better haircut, challenging each other through barber school and beyond. But now that we were a little older and had watched each other cut hair day in and day out, he had finally taken his silver medal like a man. Still,
”
”
Alexandra Warren (In Spite of it All (The Spite Series, #2))
“
This was the part of war they didn’t tell you about—that your man might return scarred and broken, haunted by what he’d seen and been asked to do.
”
”
Pete Barber (When A Warrior Comes Home)
“
The Confidence-Man is actually anaphoric in its narrative structure, insofar as its entire plot consists of a series of exchanges involving one term which remains constant while the elements co-assembled to it rotate and change: CM and crowd CM and merchant CM and young scholar CM and clergyman CM and miser CM and sick man CM and soldier of fortune CM and cripple CM and Missourian CM and barber CM and the stranger CM and the stranger’s disciple CM and old man, etc.
”
”
Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings)
“
The rats that had once fouled their food became their food. But soon the rats were gone. After two more days of hunger, the barber and the cook broke down the captain’s body. All of them ate, though no man looked at the others as he did so. But Edmund, unwilling to let things lie, knew that with a split hull and no sails, any voyage to land would be a long one. A full belly made his mind sharp, and he saw that there was plenty of meat to be taken if a man had the will. The barber was discovered in the hold, razor in his hand and throat open. A mortal sin, all agreed. This time there was no delay in eating, though still the men did not look at one another. Persephone drifted, at the mercy of current and Christ.
”
”
Marcus Sakey (Afterlife)
“
Anger is a futile emotion. The man who is angry loses more energy than his victim. So if you are angry you put yourself at a disadvantage.
”
”
Noel Barber (A Farewell to France)
“
The village barber shaves those and only those men who live in the village and do not shave themselves. The village barber is a man and he lives in the village. Consider the question “Who shaves the barber?
”
”
Richard J. Trudeau (Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics))
“
When the man went down, Marlow put another round in the back of his head. Marlow then leveled his Luger toward the male barber, who threw his hands up in a desperate gesture to calm the shooter. "Don't shoot. For God’s sake, don't shoot. Let's talk about this. What is it that you want?”
“No witnesses,” said Marlow.
”
”
Ernie Adams (President's Eyes Only)
“
So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn't; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy's red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn who called himself the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater or the black who carried a rose and noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who'd collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.
”
”
Patricia Bosworth (Diane Arbus: A Biography)
“
Four-eyed Beatty was one of my typesetters, still a juniper in the news, not yet knee-high to a lamb, skinny as a barber’s cat, with his clergyman’s collar buttoned to the top and his suspenders pulling his pants too short. The young man was plum stuck between hay and grass. He’d never jump the broom and find a piece of calico shorter than him. But I didn’t hire him for his stature. The young man wrote better than a hickory above a persimmon, but talked as though he were translating Latin.
”
”
Heather Miller (Yellow Bird's Song)
“
he knocked him over. The slave picked himself up without any sign of resentment, and resumed. The same hand which had knocked over the slave closed on an enormous fee, and the barber took his exit with the same insolence and elegance as before. This was the type for whom race prejudice was more important than even the possession of slaves, of which they held few. The distinction between a white man and a man of colour was for them fundamental. It was their all. In defence of it they would bring down the whole of their world.
”
”
C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution)
“
It's one thing for me to decide a barber's racist, go to a different one, and tell my friends about it. It's another if I don't even need a haircut, I hear about a racist barber in another city, and I drive over to stand outside his shop with a bullhorn yelling at everyone not to go in. You can choose your barber based on whether you like his views on race, or whether you like his wallpaper, but consumers start to cross a moral line when they move beyond making their own decisions and start making everyone else's. When I stand outside the barber shop with a bullhorn, yelling about his racism, I'm not making my own decision about where to get my hair cut, I'm trying to starve the barber.
Wealth is a bullhorn, that's one of the biggest problems about woke consumerism. Playing politics through consumer boycotts is a rich man's game. The more money you have, the more impact your boycott has. In capitalism, each dollar is like a vote. It's perfectly fine for dollars vote for which goods and services rise to the top. [...] But the market place of ideas is supposed to follow one person one vote, that's how we aggregate votes in a democracy. When we normalize using dollars to win battles over ideas, we're just handing the wealthy control over society's values.
”
”
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
“
Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument.
”
”
Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
It is also worth noting that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the district of St James’s in particular was what Percy Colson called, ‘a whole quarter . . . devoted entirely to man and his various needs at their most expensive’.8 The area boasted such innovations as men’s hatters (one of which, Lock & Co, has existed since 1676, and has been at its present St James’s Street location since 1765), tailors, barbers and cobblers. Therefore, when we think of a particular type of ‘London’ Clubland which has been so influential on other clubs worldwide, we tend to think of a business that emerged from this particularly masculine corner of London. This cottage industry in St James’s masculinity fed into wider ideas of ‘gentlemanliness’, and the aspirations which arose around that.
”
”
Seth Alexander Thevoz (Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs)
“
Rochester became a magnet for African Americans in the twentieth century, one of many northern industrial cities that blacks flocked to during their six-decade-long Great Migration from the rural South. From 1950 to 1960, Rochester's total population had declined slightly, from about 332,000 to 319,000. But its black population had risen appreciably over the same period, tripling to nearly 24,000. Those who'd come to Smugtown were hungry for a better life. What they encountered upon their arrival, however, was mainly disappointment. Mirroring trends found across the country, many blacks in Rochester were forced to live in substandard housing as whites fled the urban core. The city's power structure remained almost exclusively white. And many blacks struggled to find decent jobs. Even though the unemployment rate in Rochester had fallen to about 2 percent in the summer of 1964, 14 percent of blacks were counted as without work. The big Kodak dollar and the lawn sprinklers of the suburbs have seemed both tantalizingly near and hopelessly far to the inner-city man," said an African American barber.
”
”
Rick Wartzman (The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America)
“
I have no idea what these are,” Buster said, looking at the sign that held words like brush cut, burr, high and tight, D.A., dipped mushroom, teddy boy, and flattop boogie. “Tell me what you want,” the barber said, “and I’ll make that happen to your head.” “Short, I guess,” he replied. “Not too short though.” “Son,” the barber, nearly seventy years old, replied, “everything is short, that’s all I do. What kind of short?” “Not too short,” Buster said, the smell of bay rum making him dizzy. “Okay, tell me who you want to look like,” the barber then said. “He wants to look like an intelligent man of considerable wealth,” his sister, sitting in the waiting area, offered.
”
”
Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang)
“
Stop. Pay attention. Hear a dead man speak.
”
”
Ros Barber (The Marlowe Papers)
“
A young Jewish man escapes the Holocaust and makes his way to England, where he manages, through sheer entrepreneurial genius, to make a fortune. His old widower father remains behind in the Warsaw ghetto and the young man is able to pay for an incredible, daring, and expensive airlift to rescue him. Once his father is safe in England, the young man tells him he must think of himself as an Englishman. “That is what I am now, Papa,” he explains to the old man. “This land has given me refuge and a haven and I have succeeded here. I am, by God, an Englishman and you must think of yourself as one from now on, too.” He takes his father to Bond Street and has him fitted for and dressed in a brand-new expensive suit in a haberdashery there. Then he takes him to a fancy tonsorial place where the old man is put in the barber chair and the hair cutter begins cutting the old man’s payos, the locks of hair worn by religious Hasidim. The father is suddenly sobbing convulsively and his son, with deep compassion as he watches his father’s hair locks tumble to the floor, sympathetically asks: “What, Papa? Are you crying because you feel you are losing your Jewish identity?” The old man shakes his head, sniffs, and, with another convulsive sob, says: “No, son. I’m crying because we lost India.
”
”
Michael Krasny (Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means)
“
It's just hair."
Margaret moved to his side. "True. But your outward appearance can at times shout to the world what it is you've got going on inside. And right now, I see a man who doesn't care." She scrunched up her nose. "Or perhaps you do but don't want anyone to know it. Is that what you want us all the think - that you're a man past caring?"
He didn't know how to respond, so he didn't. Instead, he focused on the mound of potatoes on his plate. The hills and valleys mimicked the mountain ranges he'd hoped to put between himself and his past.
She bent near him and added another scoop. "You ought to care. Not because of how everyone sees you but because you're here and you owe it to yourself. You're young yet. It's too soon for you to give up on this life. It's too soon for any of us. Even me and I'm much older than you." She nudged his shoulder. "You need more days of barn building under your belt."
"You act like you know my story. But you don't." He set down the fork he'd been holding and turned toward her. "I've got burdens I'm going to be carrying my whole life. And you think something like my hair matters or that a few more days of hammering nails will fix it? All that hammering did was cover my hands with blisters. You don't know a thing." Hurt and anger boiled through his veins. His pain was so real that it tore at him.
"You're right. I don't. I can tell you where a barber is and to get down for dinner. I can introduce you to fine folks and point the way to the church. I can beg you to let go of your troubles and reach out to someone. But I can't fix it all." Margaret's voice was just above a whisper. She spoke for his ears only. "But locking yourself up in your room day after day, that's what cowards do. Living in a cave pretending none of this exists won't get you anywhere. Going for a ten-minute walk once a day is not living. That's just dying slowly.
”
”
Rachel Fordham (Yours Truly, Thomas)
“
No doubt, Charles abetted the two adulterous affairs of his Emma, whom he loved, in an implausible, suspect way. Well then, his considerateness showed his stupidity, as we have been assured, and more than once. But love sets a limit to stupidity. No one in his right mind—and the country doctor certainly was, or else he would never have reached the modest status of glorified barber-surgeon—behaves like the cocu, the cuckold of bad jokes the men in the Café du
”
”
Jean Améry (Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man (New York Review Books Classics))
“
In 1968, George Wallace ran for president again, this time not merely against civil rights, but against the antiwar movement as well. He appealed to the “average man in the street, this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this barber, this beautician, the policeman on the beat.” And he delighted his blue-collar crowds by taunting the student left. “If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car when I’m President,” he vowed, “that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of.
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Peter Beinart (The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again)
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Daily Bread by Stewart Stafford
Butcher short-changed me again,
There’s sawdust in the sausages,
Grocer’s growing grosser and then,
A proposition with my messages.
The driving instructor’s pissed on bends,
I went and told his mother,
The barman’s watering down pints for friends
Like he’s feeding his baby brother.
The barber’s still one hair off,
One side doesn’t match the other,
Bookie won’t take my bets and lends,
The landlord another sucker.
Tossed out in the street to fend for myself,
With all the other refuse,
Garbage man fills his truck with me,
At least I still have one use.
© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.
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Stewart Stafford
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that the haut bourgeois should detest the petit, and the cultivated the lowbrow; for the barber-surgeon from Yonville, the famous doctor’s son could summon arrogant pity, but not sympathetic compassion.
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Jean Améry (Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man (New York Review Books Classics))