Category: Best Line of the Day

Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.

Best punch line of the day

Michael Cooper, ex-husband of Elizabeth Gilbert — she of the gazillion-selling Eat, Pray, Love, about her post-divorce global journey — has sold his own book. Displaced will tell his side of the story, which, it turns out, is also global: …

Whatever happened to getting over a relationship by “searching for purpose” at the end of a bar with plenty of Otis Redding on the jukebox?

John Williams — The Second Pass

Most provocative paragraph of the day

There is a reason why nobody takes the Vatican seriously on the issues of poverty, pre-emptive war and the death penalty. It’s because the Vatican never puts any muscle behind its pronouncements on issues like that. The folks in and around the Chair of Peter take out the big hammer on only two general issues — their own power, and where people put their pee-pees and with whom, and what might issue from same. That’s why Catholic bankers can go on merrily charging interest on loans, even though both the Council of Nicaea and the Third Lateran Council — to say nothing of Popes Clement V and Sixtus X — condemned the practice as usury, which has been considered a serious sin for a lot longer than has, say, contraception.

Charles Pierce, excerpted from a slightly longer piece.

Best line of the day, so far

“JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: Thank you, Senator [Graham], for the opportunity to revisit that matter. I appreciate that the man who once said he’d drown himself if North Carolina went for Obama has a special contribution to make when it comes to the importance of thinking before you speak.”

Gail Collins in an amusing parody of this week’s dialogue.

What she said

There were lines of people waiting patiently to get into these hearings, even if just for a few moments, and what was striking about it is that so many of them were very young, so many were women, and so many were of different races and colors. America’s future was waiting in line to get a glimpse of a hearing at which the woman who will become this country’s first Hispanic justice was repeatedly called out as someone with a race problem.

Dahlia Lithwick

Two best lines for the price of one

[H]e has performed all sorts of experiments to test how much people will eat under varying circumstances. These have convinced him that people are—to put it politely—rather dim. They have no idea how much they want to eat or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do French-fry eaters.

From an interesting review of some of the literature on obesity by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Most surprising line of this or any other day

Excerpts from a Wall Street Journal editorial dated July 16, 2009:

We like profits as much as the next capitalist. But when those profits are supported by government guarantees or insured deposits, taxpayers have a special interest in how the companies conduct their business. Ideally we would shed those implicit guarantees altogether, along with the very notion of too big to fail. But that is all but impossible now and for the foreseeable future.

. . .

Another answer would be an FDIC-style bailout tax, perhaps tied to leverage ratios, for those in the too-big-to-fail camp.

Yes, THAT Wall Street Journal. The T-word.

Best redux line of the day

Jay Leno had this in his monologue the last time we had hearings for a Supreme Court nominee:

Have you watched any of these confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito? Senators are given thirty minutes to question the guy; thirty minutes exactly. Senator Joe Biden’s question took 23½ minutes. His question took 24 minutes. And Alito is smart. He’s brilliant. Do you know what he said? “I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?”