125 Sarcastic Quotes
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Sarcasm can be cruel and is always harmful to relationships when used instead of polite, direct, and specific communication, especially during arguments. However, as a form of humor—particularly as social commentary—it can be wickedly funny! Oscar Wilde, famous for his own use of it, called it “the lowest form of wit”—obviously making fun of himself as much as anyone else.
Sarcastic humor, when done right, is like a fun-to-watch scary movie: Everything is moving along just fine, when, all of a sudden, there’s an unexpected twist; but, it’s funny, or at least thought-provoking, instead of scary. You do a mental double-take. If you enjoy verbal zingers, you might like these witty, sometimes caustic, quotes.
125 SARCASTIC QUOTES
1. If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a terrible warning.
- Catherine Aird
2. I kept putting my wife under a pedestal.
- Woody Allen
3. The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
- Muhammad Ali
4. You have delighted us long enough.
- Jane Austen
5. People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
- Russell Baker
6. You marry the man of your dreams and fifteen years later you’re married to a reclining chair that burps.
- Roseanne Barr
7. You can only be young once. But, you can always be immature.
- Dave Barry
8. The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
- Dave Barry
9. The old system of having a baby was much better than the new system. The old system being characterized by the fact that the man didn’t have to watch.
- Dave Barry
10. What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.
- Dave Barry
11. It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
- Pierre Beaumarchais
12. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
- Ambrose Bierce
13. Belladonna: n. In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
- Ambrose Bierce
14. Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
– Ambrose Bierce
15. Women would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.
- Ambrose Bierce
16. I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.
- Stephen Bishop
17. He was happily married, but his wife wasn’t.
- Victor Borge
18. Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.
- Ashleigh Brilliant
19. If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.
- Gelett Burgess
20. “Automatic” simply means that you can’t repair it yourself.
- Frank Capra
21. A modest little person, with much to be modest about.
- Winston Churchill
22. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Winston Churchill
23. He is a self-made man and worships his creator.
- Irvin S. Cobb
24. I believe in luck: How else can you explain the success of those you don’t like?
- Jean Cocteau
25. The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.
- Jilly Cooper
26. I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
- Clarence Darrow
27. Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
– Isadora Duncan
28. An appeal is when you ask one court to show it’s contempt for another court.
- Finley Peter Dunne
29. History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
- Abba Eban
30. He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.
- Albert Einstein
31. Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.
- George Eliot
32. He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
33. You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.
- Carrie Fisher
34. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness—though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
- Gustave Flaubert
35. Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
- Redd Foxx
36. A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
37. Don’t you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked “brightness,” but it doesn’t work.
- Gallagher
38. When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
- Goethe
39. “Know thyself?” If I knew myself, I’d run away.
- Goethe
40. If your mind isn’t open, keep your mouth shut, too.
- Sue Grafton
41. If you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead yet?!
- Cynthia Heimel
42. Get a job, your husband hates you.
Get a great job, your husband leaves you.
Get a stupendous job, your husband leaves you for a teenager.
- Cynthia Heimel
43. Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
44. If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
- Katherine Hepburn
45. When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
- Eric Hoffer
46. A good listener is usually thinking about something else.
- Kin Hubbard
47. Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
- Henry Kissinger
48. An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
- Alfred A. Knopf
49. Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
- Stephen Leacock
50. Every time I look at you, I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
- Oscar Levant
51. What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our mouths.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
52. He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
- Abraham Lincoln
53. Easy is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.
– Nancy Linn-Desmond
54. If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.
- Judith Martin
55. I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.
- Groucho Marx
56. I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
- Groucho Marx
57. I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
- Groucho Marx
58. I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions—the curtain was up.
- Groucho Marx
59. Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.
- Golda Meir
60. Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in memory as the wish to forget it.
- Michel de Montaigne
61. Cab drivers are living proof that practice does not make perfect.
- Howard Ogden
62. Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
- Lester Pearson
63. Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.
- Laurence J. Peter
64. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.
- Ayn Rand
65. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
- Ayn Rand
66. There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
- Ayn Rand
67. When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
- Ayn Rand
68. Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
- Dan Rather
69. It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir
70. The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
- George Bernard Shaw
71. It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.
- H. W. Shaw
72. Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.
- Adlai Stevenson
73. He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.
- Forrest Tucker
74. I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.
- Mark Twain
75. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
- Mark Twain
76. The report of my death was an exaggeration.
- Mark Twain
77. I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
- Mark Twain
78. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain
79. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.
- Mark Twain
80. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
- Mark Twain
81. The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it.
- Mark Twain
82. It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
- Mark Twain
83. Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
- Mark Twain
84. It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
- Mark Twain
85. It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
- Mark Twain
86. Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them, the rest of us could not succeed.
- Mark Twain
87. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain
88. The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
- Mark Twain
89. Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
- Mark Twain
90. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
- Mark Twain
91. The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
- Mark Twain
92. Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.
- Mark Twain
93. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then, success is sure.
- Mark Twain
94. We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
- Mark Twain
95. When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
- Mark Twain
96. Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
- Mark Twain
97. Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
- Mark Twain
98. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
- Mark Twain
99. A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- Mark Twain
100. I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.
- Mark Twain
101. Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
- Mark Twain
102. Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
- Mark Twain
103. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain
104. In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
- Mark Twain
105. If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
- Mark Twain
106. Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.
- Liv Ullmann
107. A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
- John Updike
108. Now that women are jockeys, baseball umpires, atomic scientists, and business executives, maybe someday they can master parallel parking.
- Bill Vaughn
109. A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
- Gore Vidal
110. Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books; and, there is some evidence that they can’t read them, either.
- Gore Vidal
111. Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck.
- Eli Wallach
112. Actions lie louder than words.
- Carolyn Wells
113. Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet.
- Mae West
114. Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
- Charlotte Whitton
115. Oh! I know this truth, if I know no other,
That passionate Love is Pain’s own mother.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
116. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
- Oscar Wilde
117. He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
- Oscar Wilde
118. He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
- Billy Wilder
119. I think, therefore I’m single.
– Liz Winstead
120. I don’t know why we are here. But, I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
121. Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
122. A bachelor is a man who never makes the same mistake once.
- Ed Wynn
123. An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
- Evelle J. Younger
124. In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a “grand passion” than of a grand opera.
- Israel Zangwill
125. The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
- Frank Zappa
CONCLUSION
Sometimes the bitter pill of criticism is easier to swallow if it’s coated with a little humor, even if it’s sarcastic. Master the art of being funny at the right place and the right time, and doors will open for you. I still love the true story about the negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
At one point, when they got into a heated stalemate, one Soviet posed the question: “What is the difference between capitalism and communism?” No one answered. So, he said, “In capitalism, people exploit people.” Dead silence. Then, he added, “In communism, it’s the other way around.” That eased the tension!
[Note: More sarcastic quotes in the comments section below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]
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June 14th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I love sarcasm.
June 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Me, too! Thanks for your comment!
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
126. Fatalism is the lazy man’s way of accepting the inevitable.
- Natalie Clifford Barney
127. We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.
- Ethel Barrett
128. Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.
- Vicki Baum
129. The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
- Ambrose Bierce
130. Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
- Ambrose Bierce
131. The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.
- Josh Billings
132. When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.
- James H. Boren
133. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
- Alain de Botton
134. Even now, I can’t trust life. It did too many awful things to me as a kid.
- Clara Bow
135. If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
- Anton Chekhov
136. People drain me, even the closest of friends; and, I find loneliness to be the best state in the union to live in.
- Margaret Cho
137. Whenever there is a hard job to be done, I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.
- Walter Chrysler
138. The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.
- Joan Collins
139. Loneliness is the universal problem of rich people.
- Joan Collins
140. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
- Norman Cousins
141. We seldom call anybody lazy, but such as we reckon inferior to us, and of whom we expect some service.
- Bernard de Mandeville
142. The idle always have a mind to do something.
- Marquis de Vauvernagues
143. The lover says: “How beautiful you are, now that you love me!”
- Marlene Dietrich
144. Business, that’s easily defined—it’s other people’s money.
- Peter Drucker
145. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein
146. The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
147. Every hero becomes a bore at last.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
148. Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.
- Evan Esar
149. Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don’t lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won’t stand up either.
- Evan Esar
150. A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.
- William Feather
151. Ask five economists and you’ll get five different answers—six if one went to Harvard.
- Edgar R. Fielder
152. The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
- Edgar R. Fielder
153. If you have to forecast, forecast often.
- Edgar R. Fielder
154. Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
- Kinky Friedman
155. By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
- Robert Frost
156. If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
- J. Paul Getty
157. Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician.
- Lucille S. Harper
158. About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
- Herbert Hoover
159. When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.
- Jesse Jackson
160. If I only dated actresses, I’d be a very lonely man.
- Joshua Jackson
161. Inside every working anarchy, there’s an Old Boy Network.
- Mitchell Kapor
162. Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.
- Garrison Keillor
163. All of the biggest technological inventions created by man—the airplane, the automobile, the computer—says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.
- Mark Kennedy
164. I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?
- Jean Kerr
165. Loneliness—If you find yourself struggling with loneliness, you’re not alone. And, yet you are alone. So very alone.
- Larry Kersten
166. Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
- Stephen King
167. The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.
- Yves Saint Laurent
168. But, you know, my dad called me the laziest white kid he ever met. When I screamed back at him that he was putting down a race of people to call me lazy, his answer was that’s not what he was doing, and that I was also the dumbest white kid he ever met.
- Norman Lear
169. President Bush says he needs a month off to unwind. Unwind? When the hell does this guy wind?
- David Letterman
170. People will buy anything that is “one to a customer.”
- Sinclair Lewis
171. Some people read because they are too lazy to think.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
172. Don’t trust the heart, it wants your blood.
- Stanislaw Lec
173. Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a lazy man.
- Jimmy Lyons
174. When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?”
- Don Marquis
175. Fanatic is often the name given to people of action by people who are lazy.
- Bryant H. McGill
176. You can’t trust a promise someone makes while they’re drunk, in love, hungry, or running for office.
- Joe Moore
177. No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
- Christopher Morley
178. Office life taught me to be tolerant, lazy, and a good gossip.
- Bob Mortimer
179. To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled—because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
180. I’m complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable, and lonely. My personality is not split; it’s shredded.
- Jack Paar
181. Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
- Dorothy Parker
182. An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
- Laurence J. Peter
183. We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.
- Adam Clayton Powell
184. Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow’s too lazy to form an opinion.
- Will Rogers
185. An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.
- Will Rogers
186. There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.
- Helena Rubinstein
187. If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
188. Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
- George Bernard Shaw
189. If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.
- George Bernard Shaw
190. I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.
- George Bernard Shaw
191. How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
- Paul Sweeney
192. Too many young people itch for what they want without scratching for it.
- Thomas Taylor
193. What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.
- Bodie Thoene
194. Remember we’re all in this alone.
- Lily Tomlin
195. To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.
- Frederick Turner
196. Be good and you will be lonely.
- Mark Twain
197. I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.
- Mark Twain
198. I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate … and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But, they were dead.
- Mark Twain
199. Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
- Simone Weil
200. No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
- Oscar Wilde
February 27th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
I love people. I am never sarcastic.
“I understand that Scissors can beat Paper, and I get how Rock can beat Scissors, but there’s no effin way Paper can beat Rock. Paper is supposed to magically wrap around Rock leaving it immobile? Why the heck can’t paper do this to scissors? Screw scissors, why can’t paper do this to people? Why isn’t notebook paper constantly suffocating students while they take notes in class? I’ll tell you why: because paper can’t beat anybody; a rock would tear that stuff up in 2 seconds. When I play rock/paper/scissors, I always choose rock. Then when somebody claims to beat me with their paper I can punch them in the face with my already clenched fist and say, “Oh man, I’m sorry. I thought paper would protect you, you idiot!”
“I used to be indecisive but now i’m not too sure”
“I am LYSDEXIC”
“It’s easy to think outside of the box if you don’t know the box exists yet”
February 27th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Sarcasm:the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when their privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
May 13th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
this is the best=)