Related:

• The spectacle of astrology in the White House -- the governing center of the world's greatest scientific and military power -- is so appalling that it defies understanding and provides grounds for great fright.
  The easiest response is to laugh it off, and to indulge in wisecracks about Civil Service ratings for horoscope makers and palm readers and whether Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev for his sign....
• RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.
  It is said to be rich in both obtundite and lethargine, and is brewed in a midnight fog by a fat which of the Dismal Swamp....
• Entreprenuer, n: A high-rolling risk taker who would rather be a spectacular failure than a dismal success.
• Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
• The only happiness lies in reason; all the rest of the world is dismal.
  The highest reason, however, I see in the work of the artist, and he may experience it as such....
• Please don't fall back on your tired cliche of charging to the rescue just in the nick of time.
  I don't want to be rescued. My life as a human being has been a dismal failure....