125 Sarcastic Quotes

Friday, June 13th 2008 by Shanel Yang        Email this article to a friend Email this article to a friend

Muttley
Photo by Mr Geoff


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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6 Responses to “125 Sarcastic Quotes”

  1. chris Says:

    I love sarcasm.

  2. Shanel Yang Says:

    Me, too! Thanks for your comment!

  3. Shanel Yang Says:

    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

  4. a apathetic, sarcastic jerk, sorry! Says:

    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”

  5. a apathetic, sarcastic jerk, sorry! Says:

    Sarcasm:the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when their privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  6. jared Says:

    this is the best=)

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