Quote

A man may take care of a furnace for twenty-five years and still forget to duck his head when he starts going down the cellar stairs.

Robert Benchley

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Robert Benchley
Age: 56 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 15
Died: 1945
Died: November 21
Actor
Humorist
Journalist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Years
Five
Duck
Men
Forget
Ducks
Stills
Stairs
Care
Starts
Still
Twenty
Furnace
May
Twenties
Cellar
Take
Fun
Furnaces
Going
Head
Cellars

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We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.
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In Milwaukee last month a man died laughing over one of his own jokes. That's what makes it so tough for us outsiders. We have to fight home competition.
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All laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved by involuntary twitching.
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If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.
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She sleeps alone at last.
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It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.
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Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
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Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony.
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There seems to be a common strain of miserliness in the American people when it comes to throwing away toothpaste tubes which havea little left in the bottom.
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I have often wondered how they manage to get return envelopes which miss, by one-quarter of an inch, fitting the blank you are supposed to return. They say, Please fill out and return the enclosed envelope, and the enclosed envelope is always one-quarter of an inch too small.
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The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
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Sheer madness is, of course, the highest possible brow in humor.
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This congestion in the post offices is due to what are technically known as regulations but what are really a series of acrostics and anagrams devised by some officials who got around a table one night and tried to be funny.
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Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.
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The art of cursing people seems to have lost its tang since the old days when a good malediction took four deep breaths to deliverand sent the outfielders scurrying toward the fence to field.
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It was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.
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But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.
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