Top 40 Russell Lynes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.”

— Russell Lynes

2. “I’m sorry, I’m a little busy. Can i ignore you later?”

— Russell Lynes

3. “I don’t know what makes you so dumb but it really works.”

— Russell Lynes

4. “Hi there, I’m a human being! What are you?”

— Russell Lynes

5. “A lady is a woman who makes a man behave like a gentleman.”

— Russell Lynes

6. “If you can’t ignore an insult, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh it off; and if you can’t laugh it off, it’s probably deserved.”

— Russell Lynes

7. “Your village just called. They’re missing an idiot.”

— Russell Lynes

8. “Don’t let you mind wander – it’s far too small to be let out on its own.”

— Russell Lynes

9. “Are you always this stupid or are you making a special effort today?”

— Russell Lynes

10. “The most effective comeback to an insult is silence.”

— Russell Lynes

11. “Calling you an idiot would be an insult to all the stupid people.”

— Russell Lynes

12. “Sure, I’ve seen people like you before – but I had to pay an admission.”

— Russell Lynes

13. “Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.”

— Russell Lynes

14. “The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.”

— Russell Lynes

15. “It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.”

— Russell Lynes

16. “If you took an IQ test, the results would be negative.”

— Russell Lynes

17. “Anybody who told you to be yourself simply couldn’t have given you worse advice...”

— Russell Lynes

18. “Brains aren’t everything. In fact in your case they’re nothing.”

— Russell Lynes

19. “Tennis is an addiction that once it has truly hooked a man will not let him go.”

— Russell Lynes

20. “Cynicism is the intellectual cripple’s substitute for intelligence. It is the dishonest businessman’s substitute for conscience. It is the communicator’s substitute, whether he is advertising man or editor or writer, for self-respect.”

— Russell Lynes

21. “There are times when you just get down, you feel like nobody likes you. We’re in high school forever. It’s just what we do with it.”

— Russell Lynes

22. “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.”

— Russell Lynes

23. “Friends never make assumptions about you. They never expect a reason to go out with you. In fact friends only expect you to be you.”

— Russell Lynes

24. “The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.”

— Russell Lynes

25. “Shouldn’t you have a license for being that ugly?”

— Russell Lynes

26. “For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.”

— Russell Lynes

27. “Camouflage is a game we all like to play.”

— Russell Lynes

28. “Any real New Yorker is a you-name-it-we-have-it-snob whose heart brims with sympathy for the millions of unfortunates who through misfortune, misguidedness or pure stupidity live anywhere else in the world.”

— Russell Lynes

29. “The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side.”

— Russell Lynes

30. “A truly appreciative child will break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death any really successful gift within a matter of minutes.”

— Russell Lynes

31. “I’d love to ask how old you are, but unfortunately I know you can’t count that high.”

— Russell Lynes

32. “Clutter is what happens to things when they become useless but friendly.”

— Russell Lynes

33. “In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.”

— Russell Lynes

34. “Wasting time is negative, but there is something positive about idleness.”

— Russell Lynes

35. “And I thought I had problems? Look at your face!”

— Russell Lynes

36. “What we are headed for is a sort of social structure in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.”

— Russell Lynes

37. “Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.”

— Russell Lynes

38. “A lady is nothing very specific. One man’s lady is another man’s woman; sometimes, one man’s lady is another man’s wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.”

— Russell Lynes

39. “Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.”

— Russell Lynes

40. “The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.”

— Russell Lynes