“You sit in the park and you watch the grass die... /You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio/ Well I spent a week there one day/ They’ve got entertainment to dazzle your eyes/ Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise”
John Denver “Toledo” quoted on the Wall St. Journal’s “OpinionJournal” Jan. 15, 2003
“The situation is not as bad as it seems – it’s worse.”
A Greek Olympic official quoted in Maclean’s July 7, 2000
“paring knives that were duller than a throne speech…”
Bruce Ward in Ottawa Citizen December 27, 2002
“He was not only a bore, he bored for England.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted by Ian Hunter in National Post August 11, 2003 (it was during the Suez Crisis and, Hunter adds, “This article pretty much finished Eden’s political career. Earlier, he had similarly dispatched U.S. Foreign Secretary John Foster Dulles: ‘Dull. Duller. Dulles.’”)
“he seems as unprepossessing as an unshelled peanut.”
Peter C. Newman on Joe Clark in National Post Feb. 19, 2000
“Deja moo: The feeling that you’ve heard this bull before.”
“Gilbert Magazine’s Top 15 Yet More Internet Taglines” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6 (and yes, it bends my rule against vulgarity but I find it sufficiently funny)
“A classic vacuous nemesis of the Fifties was the young, progressive Dean of women who was brought in to replace the septuagenarian, traditional dean of women… who had all the give-and-take of Torquemada…”
Florence King in National Review July 12, 1999
“Since life’s a series of disasters, you’d better choose disasters worth having, ones you’ll enjoy & learn from.”
Richard J. Needham according to an email from a friend and colleague May 25, 2001 (I wasn’t able to verify it independently but if Needham didn’t say it he missed a splendid opportunity, to crib from J.M. Barrie’s comment on the theory that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare)