BENNETT CERF

The Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you.

For me, a hearty 'belly laugh' is one of the beautiful sounds in the world.

A pat on the back, through only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, is miles ahead in results.

Fame - anyone who says he doesn't like it is crazy.

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

The person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.

Anybody at that time who had $15 to spend on such things as books also hated Franklin Roosevelt.

The times call for clear, lucid thinking rather than Clare Luceish thought.

Football season: The only time of the year when a man can walk down the street with a blond on one arm and a blanket on the other without encountering raised eyebrows.

They tell about a fifteen-year-old boy in an orphans' home who had an incurable stutter. One Sunday the minister was detained and the boy volunteered to say the prayer in his stead. He did it perfectly, too, without a single stutter. Later he explained, "I don't stutter when I talk to God. He loves me."

Everybody was being decent, and when people are decent, thing work out for everybody. That has been my theory all through life. If you're making money, let the other fellow make it too. If somebody's getting hurt, it's bad, but if you can work a thing out so that everybody profits that's the ideal business.

Do I believe in ghosts? Of course I do. So do you. Deep in the souls of the most sophisticated of us is lurking a fear of the supernatural which all the discoveries of scientists cannot eradicate.

I don't stutter when I talk to God. He loves me.

One of the troubles of the day, observes Mr. C.N. Peac, is that once we came upon the little red schoolhouse, whereas now we come upon the little-read school boy.

The fundamental difference between the mystery story and the ghost story is the fact that a mystery demands a solution for its effectiveness; a ghost story is necessarily unsolvable; the reader must be willing to accept the fact that nothing is proved.

There once was a student named Bessor Whose knowledge grew lessor and lessor. It at last grew so small He knew nothing at all, And today he's a college professor!

One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship.

Banquet: a plate of cold, hairy chicken and artificially coloured green peas completely surrounded by dreary speeches and appeals for donations.

I think the right to read, is one of our inherent rights, and I think that people in America today are intelligent enough to decide for themselves what they want to read. Without being told, by self-appointed people, you must not read this, or you cannot read this.

The fact that we don't read more books in America can be traced squarely to the fact that we have newspapers that are about a hundred times as big as the newspapers anywhere else.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.

Censor: A self-appointed snoophound who sticks his nose in other people's business.