There is never good reason to inhale chicken, and so there is no purpose in asking you why you have inhaled chicken.

If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV’s infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive – for a laugh?

In the affair of love, which, out of strict conformity with the Stoic philosophy, we shall here treat as a disease, this proneness to relapse is no less conspicuous.

In a recent essay (1990), we develop this theme in connection with Anscombe & Aumann’s “horse lottery” theory, and show that it surfaces in Savage’s problem of “small worlds” (1954, pp. 82-91).

The basic selling strategy is summed up with a mnemonic device: Approach, Probe, Present, Listen, End.

American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions.

As truth distinguishes our writings from those idle romances which are filled with monsters, the productions, not of nature, but of distempered brains; and which have been therefore recommended by an eminent critic to the sole use of the pastry-cook; so, on the other hand, we would avoid any resemblance to that kind of history which a celebrated poet seems to think is no less calculated for the emolument of the brewer, as the reading it should be always attended with a tankard of good ale […] That our work, therefore, might be in no danger of being likened to the labours of these historians, we have taken every occasion of interspersing through the whole sundry similes, descriptions, and other kind of poetical embellishments. These are, indeed, designed to supply the place of the said ale, and to refresh the mind, whenever those slumbers, which in a long work are apt to invade the reader as well as the writer, shall begin to creep upon him.

-Henry Fielding explains that he uses similes so you don’t have to get drunk while reading his books, unlike other people’s books, which are too boring to read sober because they don’t have enough similes (Tom Jones, Book IV, Ch. 1)

“Then kiss my a–se” are the concluding words of a poem traditionally (though perhaps wrongly) attributed to Rochester, which asks “Have you seen” a series of things (a ship in a storm, a jealous bull, a dove, fairies, etc.).

I just don’t understand why you’d let someone be your boyfriend who you thought was a dentist.

During his studies, Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe aberrant behaviors in overcrowded population density situations and “beautiful ones” to describe passive individuals who withdrew from all social interaction.