Category: Wit

Excellent put-downs about famous men.

These are some of my favourites – you can get the full long list by going to Braincandy

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.
– – – Benjamin Disraeli (about William Gladstone)

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend – if you have one.
– – – George Bernard Shaw (to Winston Churchill)

Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend second – if there is one.
– – – Churchill’s reply

If I were married to you, I’d put poison in your coffee.

– – – Lady Astor (to Winston Churchill)

If you were my wife, I’d drink it.
– – – Winston Churchill, in reply

You will either die on the gallows or of a loathsome disease.
– – – John Montague (to John Wilkes)

That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.
– – – John Wilkes, in reply

He looked like a half-melted rubber bulldog.
– – – John Simon (about Walter Matthau)

Well at least he has finally found his true love … what a pity he can’t marry himself.
– – – Frank Sinatra (about Robert Redford)

His favorite exercise is climbing tall people.
– – – Phyllis Diller (about Mickey Rooney)

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts.
– – – Clive James

He has the vocal modulation of a railway-station announcer, the expressive power of a fence-post and the charisma of a week-old head of lettuce.
– – – Fintan O’Toole, film critic, (about Quentin Tarantino)

Boy George is all England needs – another queen who can’t dress.
– – – Joan Rivers

Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white woman.
– – – Molly Ivins

With his womanly voice, stark white skin and Medusa hair, his gash of red lipstick, heavy eyeliner, almost nonexistent nose and lopsided face, Jackson was making his TV appearance in order to scotch all rumors that he is not quite normal.
– – – Craig Brown (about Michael Jackson, The Times of London, 1993)

Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband’s penis. Which explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee.
– – – Conan O’Brien (about Tommy Lee)

He sang like a hinge.
Ethel Merman (about Cole Porter)

He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom.
– – – Britt Eklund (about Rod Stewart)

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
– – – Charles Baudelaire (about Richard Wagner)

Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays and vegetarian on Tuesdays. On Wednesday he was in favor of annexing Newfoundland, Thursday he wanted to sink Venice, and Friday he wanted to blow up the pope.
– – – Tony Palmer (about Richard Wagner)

History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford, and Nixon — See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil.
– – – Robert J. Dole, speech, 1983

If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on George Bush’s head.
– – – Jim Hightower, 1988

He is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.
– – – Aneurin Bevan (about Winston Churchill)

He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.
– – – Margot Asquith (about Winston Churchill)

I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises.
– – – Arthur Balfour (about Winston Churchill)

Winston has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.
– – – F. E. Smith (about Winston Churchill)

He’s a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.
– – – Lyndon Baines Johnson (about Gerald Ford)

Lyndon Baines Johnson

He turned out to be so many different characters he could have populated all of War and Peace and still had a few people left over.
– – – Herbert Mitgang (about Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1980)

Richard Nixon

Avoid all needle drugs – the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
– – – Abbie Hoffman (1971)

He bleeds people. He draws every drop of blood and then drops them from a cliff. He’ll blame any person he can put his foot on.
– – – Martha Mitchell (about Richard M. Nixon, 1973)

He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.
– – – James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

He is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar….He’s one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
– – – Harry S Truman (about Richard M. Nixon, 1978)

He was like a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack.
– – – Mary McGrory (about Richard M. Nixon, 1962)

Here is a guy who’s had a stake driven through his heart. I mean, really nailed to the bottom of the coffin with a wooden stake, and a silver bullet through the forehead for good measure — and yet he keeps coming back.
– – – Ted Koppel (about Richard M. Nixon, 1984)

I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.
– – – Lyndon B. Johnson (about a speech by Richard M. Nixon)

I worship the quicksand he walks in.
– – – Art Buchwald (about Richard Nixon)

Nixon’s motto was: If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three.
– – – Norman Cousins (about Richard M. Nixon)

Sir Richard-the-Chicken-Hearted.
– – – Hubert H. Humphrey (about Richard M. Nixon)

Dan Quayle is more stupid than Ronald Reagan put together.
– – – Matt Groening, 1993

If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
– – – John Cleese

A triumph of the embalmer’s art.
– – – Gore Vidal (about Ronald Reagan)

He doesn’t die his hair – he’s just prematurely orange.
– – – Gerald Ford (about Ronald Reagan)

I think Nancy does most of his talking; you’ll notice that she never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
– – – Robin Williams (about Ronald Reagan)

Washington could not tell a lie; Nixon could not tell the truth; Reagan cannot tell the difference.
– – – Mort Sahl

It has been the political career of this man to begin with hypocrisy, proceed with arrogance, and finish with contempt.
– – – Thomas Paine (about John Adams)

One could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole on the air.
– – – George Orwell (about Stanley Baldwin)

He has the lucidity which is the byproduct of a fundamentally sterile mind.
– – – Aneurin Bevan (about Neville Chamberlain)

Dangerous as an enemy, untrustworthy as a friend, but fatal as a colleague.
– – – Sir Hercules Robinson (about Joseph Chamberlain)

He looks as though he’s been weaned on a pickle.
– – – Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Calvin Coolidge)

How can they tell?
– – – Dorothy Parker (hearing of Calvin Coolidge’s death)

He’s the only man able to walk under a bed without hitting his head.
– – – Walter Winchell (about Thomas E. Dewey)

You really have to get to know him to dislike him.
– – – James T. Patterson (about Thomas E. Dewey)

He is just about the nastiest little man I’ve ever known. He struts sitting down.
– – – Lillian Dykstra (about Thomas E. Dewey)

The Wizard of Ooze.
– – – John F. Kennedy (about Everett Dirksen)

His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.
– – – William McAdoo (about Warren Harding)

His writing is rumble and bumble, flap and doodle, balder and dash.
– – – H. L. Mencken (about Warren Harding)

Such a little man could not have made so big a depression.
– – – Norman Thomas (about Herbert Hoover)

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.
– – – Winston Churchill (about Ramsay MacDonald)

He has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.
– – – Louise Lamprey (about President McKinley, 1897)

The right honorable and learned gentleman has twice crossed the floor of this House, each time leaving behind a trail of slime.
– – – David Lloyd George (about Sir John Simon)

Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.
– – – Irving Layton (about Pierre Trudeau)

To err is Truman.
– – – A popular joke in 1946

Truman Capote’s death was a good career move.
– – – Gore Vidal

I am reading Henry James…and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
– – – Virginia Woolf (about Henry James)

The only time he opens his mouth is to change feet.
– – – David Feherty (about Nick Faldo)

He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty.
– – – Sam Houston (about Thomas Jefferson Green)

He’s thin boys. He’s thin as piss on a hot rock.
– – – William F. Jenner (about Averell Harriman)

. . . a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth.
– – – Martin Luther (about Henry VIII)

The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England.
– – – Charles Dickens (about Henry VIII)

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it shall be behind me.
– – – Max Reger (letter to critic Rudolph Louis, 1906)

He has committed every crime that does not require courage.
– – – Benjamin Disraeli (about Daniel O’Connell)

If he were any dumber, he’d be a tree.
– – – Barry Goldwater (about William Scott)

A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska – sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.
– – – Joseph O’Connor (about C. P. Snow)

The only genius with an IQ of 60.
– – – Gore Vidal (about Andy Warhol)

The triumph of sugar over diabetes.
– – – George Nathan (about J. M. Barrie)

Get the full long list by going to Braincandy