Unbelievable Quotes (How'd They Do That?) "After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal, the school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of David Steele to the post." - Philip Streifer, Superintendent of Schools, Barrington Rhode Island "All I was doing was appealing for an endorsement, not suggesting you endorse it." - George Bush "All you have to do is go down to the bottom of your swimming pool and hold your breath." - David Miller, US DOE spokesperson, on protecting yourself from nuclear radiation "Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours." - Yogi Berra, baseball catcher, manager "And now the sequence of events in no particular order." - Dan Rather, CBS television news anchor "And now, will y'all stand and be recognized?" - Gib Lewis, Texas Speaker of the House, to a group of people in wheelchairs on Disability Day "And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to ha ve weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." - Bill Clinton on MTV's 'Enough is Enough,' 3-22-94 "Any time Detroit scores more than 100 points and holds the other team below 100 points they almost always win." - Doug Collins, basketball commentator "Are you any relation to your brother Marv?" - Leon Wood, New Jersey Nets guard, to Steve Albert, Nets TV commentator "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." - Former French President Charles De Gaulle "Continuous coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf will resume in a moment." - Tom Brokaw, NBC News "Everybody sets out to do something and everybody does something. But no one does what he sets out to do." - Bill Clinton "Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything." - Ivana Trump, upon finishing her first novel "First of all, I didn't know about it. To the best of my recollection I didn't know anything about his having that job until I read about it in the press. And I can't imagine who could have ever arranged to do something improper like that and no one around here know about it. It was just not--we did not know anything about it, and I can tell you categorically that that did not happen. I knew nothing about it, none of us did before it happened. And I personally didn't know anything about it, 'til I read about it in the press." - Bill Clinton, News Conference 01/29/97 "Hawaii is a unique state. It is a small state. It is a state that is by itself. It is a --it is different from the other 49 states. Well, all states are different, but it's got a particularly unique situation." - Dan Quayle, US VP "He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech." - Richard Darman, director of OMB, explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands "Here lies Jan Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, marble Cutter. This monument was erected by her husband as a tribute to her memory and a specimen of his work. Monuments of this same style are two hundred and fifty dollars." - Gravestone Inscription "I believe this country's policies should be heavily biased in favor of non-discrimination." - Bill Clinton "I didn't accept it. I received it." - Richard Allen, National Security Advisor to President Reagan, explaining the $1000 in cash and two watches he was given by two Japanese journalists after he helped arrange a private interview for them with First Lady Nan cy Reagan. "I don't believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I had changed government policy solely because of a contribution." - Bill Clinton "I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves." - John Wayne "I have nothing to say, and I'll only say it once." - Floyd Smith, NHL Hockey coach "I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions --but I don't always agree with them." - George Bush "I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law." - David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering accusations that he failed to pay his taxes. "I support efforts to limit the terms of members of Congress, especially members of the House and members of the Senate." - Vice-President Dan Quayle "I think the ethical standards established in this White House have been the highest in the history of the White House." - Al Gore, US Vice President, October 1998 "I want to thank each and every one of you for having extinguished yourselves this session." - Gib Lewis, Texas Speaker of the House "I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version." - Colonel Oliver North, from his Iran-Contra testimony "I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes." - President Richard Nixon "If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record." - Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman "I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president." - Hillary Clinton, commenting on the release of subpoenaed documents in the book by James B. Stewart - Blood Sport "I'm the consul for information, but I don't have any information." - Ofra Ben Yaacoe, Israeli Consulate, Chicago "In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent..." - John Connally, Secretary of Treasury under Richard Nixon, in an early seventies speech, as reported in a contemporary "American Scholar" "It depends on your definition of asleep. They were not stretched out. They had their eyes closed. They were seated at their desks with their heads in a nodding position." - John Hogan, Commonwealth Edison Supervisor of News Information, responding to a charge by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector that two Dresden Nuclear Plant operators were sleeping on the job. "It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody." - Richard M. Nixon "It is wrong to raise money on the promise of guaranteeing specific kinds of access. That is wrong and we have stopped that." - Bill Clinton, August 4, 1995 "It was not my class of people. There was not a producer, a press agent, a director, an actor." - Zsa Zsa Gabor, on the jury used in her assault trial "It's no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another." - George Bush "I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted." - Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explaining why we should export toxic wastes to Third World countries "I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body." - Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward "Ordinary rape and murder just doesn't make it anymore. It's much better to have ultra-violence, chainsaw massacres, X-rated Draculas, and continents sinking into the sea with the entire population lost, at the very least." - Jon Davidson, advertising executive at New World Pictures, on what makes a good movie "I've read about foreign policy and studied -- I know the number of continents." - George Wallace, 1968 presidential campaign "Life is very important to Americans." - Bob Dole, US Senator from Kansas "Mobile launchers are more difficult to detect because they move around, unlike fixed launchers." - Katie Coucik, NBC News "Most of my cliches aren't original." - Chuck Knox, NFL football coach "I wanted all my ducks in a row so if we did get into a posture we could pretty much slam-dunk this thing and put it to bed." - Lee Cooke, mayor of Austin, TX, abusing cliches "No one wants to say the sky is falling, but in this instance I am afraid the emperor has no clothes. Despite Herculean efforts by the Council and Council staff, we are still only dealing with the tip of the iceberg." - Charles Millard, NYC councilman, in a press release "Not only is he ambidextrous, but he can throw with either hand." - Duffy Daugherty, football coach and sports analyst "Our strength is that we don't have any weaknesses. Our weakness is that we don't have any real strengths." - Frank Broyles, college football coach "Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." - Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C. "Passive activity income does not include the following: Income for an activity that is not a passive activity." - IRS form 8583, Passive Activity Loss Limitation "President Union will address the nation on the state of the Bush." - Hampton Pearson, news reporter, WBZ TV "Rotarians, be patriotic! Learn to shoot yourself." - Chicago Rotary Club journal, "Gyrator" "Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life." - Brooke Shields, at a federal anti-smoking campaign spokes person interview "So long as any amount shall remain unpaid under this note, the Borrower covenants and promises to that Bank that the borrower will not permit or suffer to exist any of the following conditions: death of the borrower." - American Security Bank loan agreement "Sometimes they write what I say and not what I mean." - Pedro Guerrero, baseball player, on reporters "Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite." - Dan Quayle, Vice President, head of the Space Council "Sure the body count in this movie bothers me, but what are you gonna do? It's what everybody likes. At least its not an awful body count--it's a fun body count." - Bonnie Bedelia, actress, regarding the movie Die Harder "Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway." - Othal Brand, member of a Texas pesticide review board, on chlordane "Tensions in Latvia...are tense..." - WBZ Radio, Boston, 21 Jan 91, news "That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I'm just the one to do it." - A congressional candidate in Texas "The crime bill passed by the Senate would reinstate the Federal death penalty for certain violent crimes: assassinating the President; hijackiing an airliner; and murdering a government poultry inspector." - Knight Ridder News Service dispatch "The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing." - Dizzy Dean explaining how he felt after being hit on the head by a ball in the 1934 World Series "The first lady will not invoke executive privledge." - Mike McCurry, referring to Hillary Clinton "The government is not doing enough about cleaning up the environment. This is a good planet." - Mr. New Jersey contestant when asked what he would do with a million dollars. "The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history... this century's history.... We all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century." - Dan Quayle, then Indiana senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate during a news conference in which he was asked his opinion of the Holocaust "The Lybian army is capable of destroying America and breaking its nose." - Muammar Qaddafi "The Minutemen are not tall in terms of height." - Dan Bonner, CBS sportscaster, during a UMass basketball game "The people don't take baths and they don't speak English. No golf courses, no room service. Who needs it?" - Jim McMahon, NFL football quarterback, on Europe "The President continues to surprise people, so I am not surprised to be surprised." - US Secy of Defense Dick Cheney "The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep." - George Stephanopolous (referring to Bill Clinton) 'Larry King Live' 2/16/96 "The private enterprise system indicates that some people have higher incomes than others." - Gerry Brown, California governor "The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe." - Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia "The team has come along slow but fast." - Casey Stengel, baseball player, Mets manager "There comes a time in every man's life and I've had many of them." - Casey Stengel, baseball player, Mets manager "There's nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don't respond with encores." - Bill Clinton "These people haven't seen the last of my face. If I go down, I'm going down standing up." - Chuck Person, NBA Basketball player "They gave me a book of checks. They didn't ask for any deposits." - Congressman Joe Early (D-Mass) at a press conference to answer questions about the House Bank scandal. "They're multipurpose. Not only do they put the clips on, but they take them off." - Pratt & Whitney spokesperson explaining why the company charged the Air Force nearly $1000 for an ordinary pair of pliers. "Things are more like they are now than they ever were before." - Dwight D. Eisenhower "This door must not be opened under any circumstances." - Sign outside a fire exit in a hotel "This is unparalyzed in the state's history." - Gib Lewis, Texas Speaker of the House "To forcibly remove a politician from office, one has to meet a much higher standard of dishonesty." - Michael Cooney, Santa Barbara attorney "We apologize for the error in last week's paper in which we stated that Mr. Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr. Dogbody is a detective in the police farce." - Correction Notice in the Ely Standard, a British newspaper "Traffic is very heavy at the moment, so if you are thinking of leaving now, you'd better set off a few minutes earlier." - Traffic Report "Truth is that which cannot be proved false." - Dick Morris "We all get heavier as we get older because there's a lot more information in our heads." - Vlade Divac, NBA basketball player "We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally." - Nguyen Co Thatch, Vietnamese foreign minister "We are present at the future." - Bill Clinton in a speech on Aug 16,1997 "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ..." - Bill Clinton, USA TODAY, 11 March 1993, page 2A "We don't necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people." - Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instructor "We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement." - Richard J. Daley, mayor of Chicago, IL "Don't pay any attention to the critics--don't even ignore them." - Samuel Goldwyn "Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't go see it. -- Samuel Goldwyn "I don't think anyone should write his autobiography until after he's dead." - Samuel Goldwyn "If you don't dissagree with me, how will I know I'm right?" - Samuel Goldwyn "Keep a stiff upper chin." - Samuel Goldwyn "This book has too much plot and not enough story." - Samuel Goldwyn "You've got to take the sour with the bitter." - Samuel Goldwyn "We're overpaying him but he's worth it." - Samuel Goldwyn "Secretaries for openings in college administrative areas. Good typing, word processing helpful. Able to interfere with faculty, staff, and students." - Irondequoit, NY want-ad "We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees." - Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks "We've been working on the basics because, basically, we've been having trouble with the basics." - Bob Ojeda, baseball pitcher "We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?" - Lee Iacocca "Where's the goddamn f***ing flag? I want the goddamn f***ing flag up every f***ing morning at f***ing sunrise." - Hillary Rodham Clinton, quoted in "Partners in Power" by R. Morris (p. 461) "Why can't the Jews and Arabs just sit down and settle this like good Christians?" - Arthur Balfour, British Government, on Mideast crisis "You don't tell us how to stage the news, and we don't tell you how to report it." - Larry Speakes, press secretary for US President George Bush, addressing the media "You will find it a distinct help if you know and look as if you know what you are doing." - IRS Training Manual for tax auditors "Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances." - Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." - MGM summary of a screen test by some guy named Fred Astaire