Top 500 Dave Barry Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people.”

— Dave Barry

352. “I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.”

— Dave Barry

353. “Sign at a New England church: Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?”

— Dave Barry

354. “Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.”

— Dave Barry

355. “The places where trails do not exist are not well marked.”

— Dave Barry

356. “After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.”

— Dave Barry

357. “People – just weird people are attracted to Miami. And they come there not for serious reasons, usually.”

— Dave Barry

358. “You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever. Well, who gives a.”

— Dave Barry

359. “Passing the SAT: My personal theory is that it has to do with how much money you send them in the mail. I think the amounts they tell you to send are actually just suggested minimum donations – if you get my drift.”

— Dave Barry

360. “It would be hard to conceive of any activity more useless than stamp collecting.”

— Dave Barry

361. “Congress shall also create a tax code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox.”

— Dave Barry

362. “A short distance away is the Tidal Basin, ringed by cherry trees that every year produce flowers, an event to which Washingtonians react as though it were the Second Coming of Christ.”

— Dave Barry

363. “The average tax payer is not a big voluntary supporter of the arts. The only art that the average taxpayer buys voluntarily either has a picture of Bart Simpson on it or little suction cups on its feet so you can stick it onto a car window.”

— Dave Barry

364. “I do some of my best reading while seated in the bathroom.”

— Dave Barry

365. “Your job is to give people a reason to keep reading.”

— Dave Barry

366. “Today’s toys contain computer chips, so they can move and talk; this stimulates the mind of your child. Notice I say “your child.” MY child just wants to eat the toys.”

— Dave Barry

367. “This nation is so friendly that the leading cause of injury is getting passionately embraced by strangers.”

— Dave Barry

368. “Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development.”

— Dave Barry

369. “Japan has a low crime rate, unless you count the fact that approximately every fifteen minutes the entire Cabinet gets indicted for taking bribes.”

— Dave Barry

370. “When you say you don’t think we should have public schools, they can’t believe you mean that. You must mean that they should be smaller. But you can’t really mean no public schools.”

— Dave Barry

371. “Please try not to be such a wiener-head.”

— Dave Barry

372. “Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can’t see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.”

— Dave Barry

373. “As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight.”

— Dave Barry

374. “Rembrandt’s first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used it.”

— Dave Barry

375. “In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.”

— Dave Barry

376. “In my experience, if you go to a hospital for any reason whatsoever, including to read the gas meter, they give you a tetanus shot.”

— Dave Barry

377. “Do not put this product in a big vat and drop rats into it from a cat-walk.”

— Dave Barry

378. “I like golf because you can be really terrible at it, and still not look much dorkier than anybody else.”

— Dave Barry

379. “In the Bowling Alley of Tomorrow, there will even be machines that wear rental shoes and throw the ball for you. Your sole function will be to drink beer.”

— Dave Barry

380. “Here’s a man who was twice elected to the most powerful position on Earth despite needing a TelePrompTer to correctly identify what year it was.”

— Dave Barry

381. “The Spanish government, having run completely out of money, secretly sold the Pyrenees to China, and is now separated from France only by traffic cones.”

— Dave Barry

382. “No man had ever knocked little Richard down. But of course Ammm was not a man.”

— Dave Barry

383. “To people who make moving ads that block the view of websites: Not only will we not buy from you, but we want shrews to eat your liver.”

— Dave Barry

384. “Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.”

— Dave Barry

385. “We don’t shoot somebody soon, I’m gonna forget how.”

— Dave Barry

386. “I’m afraid that, in this chapter we must talk about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys.”

— Dave Barry

387. “Real cars were made here in America: Fords, Chevys, Plymouths. These were large chunks of Detroit iron – cars that had the size, weight, and handling characteristics of aircraft carriers but worse fuel efficiency.”

— Dave Barry

388. “The bad news was that the yard contained a dog. A very, very large dog, wide and hairy, like a cross between a rottweiler and a Goodyear blimp.”

— Dave Barry

389. “The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.”

— Dave Barry

390. “The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste?”

— Dave Barry

391. “You should never pick up a newspaper when you’re feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories.”

— Dave Barry

392. “My current computer, in addition to ‘DOS,’ has ‘Windows,’ which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS.”

— Dave Barry

393. “The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hotlines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly.”

— Dave Barry

394. “The Mollusks – generous hosts when they weren’t trying to kill you.”

— Dave Barry

395. “WARNING: This is assuming your spouse’s name is Margaret.”

— Dave Barry

396. “He could even think about how fast he was thinking about things.”

— Dave Barry

397. “The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.”

— Dave Barry

398. “I suspect that LaGuardia is an elaborate prank, and New York has a real airport nearby that only locals know about.”

— Dave Barry

399. “The porpoises said hello to Molly. She told them all her teeth were green.”

— Dave Barry

400. “Too many rocks in the mountains.”

— Dave Barry