Category: Best Line of the Day

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

Potentially scariest line of the day, so far

While the number of risky borrowers who missed payments climbed to a four-year high, the number of foreclosures on all homes jumped to its highest level in nearly four decades, according to the survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Home buyers who relied on loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration also had record default rates.

The Washington Post

To repeat, highest foreclosure rate in nearly four decades.

Best line of the day, so far

The argument about the identity of the Jerusalem tomb focussed on a question of names and their frequency. The tombs were marked with the names Jesus, son of Joseph; Joseph (possibly a brother); Mary (conceivably a mother); Judah (perhaps a son); and Mariamene or Mariamne, who is alleged to be Mary Magdalene. Skeptics hold that these names occurred about as frequently in first-century Jerusalem as the names Emma, Jacob, and Dylan do on the Upper West Side today; believers insist that this spray of names would almost never show up by chance, particularly with the unusual form of “Mary” thrown in. “It’s like finding a John, a Paul, and a George, and you don’t leap to the obvious conclusion…unless you found a Ringo,” [producer James] Cameron remarked triumphantly.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Best line of the day by someone born on this date

“Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams was born on March 11, 1952. He died from a heart attack in 2001.

Best lyric of the day, so far

‘Twas Halloween and the ghosts were out,
And everywhere they’d go, they shout,
And though I covered my eyes I knew,
They’d go away.

But fear’s the only thing I saw,
And three days later ’twas clear to all,
That nothing is as scary as election day.

Norah Jones, “My Dear Country”

Best Pierce quote of the day, so far

Charles Pierce is also finding fault with our insipid press:

Two weeks of idiocy about a caesura in a remark made by Hillary Clinton in Iowa a flat year before anyone votes there. . . . Sorry, you pack of smug, insufferable bastards — a war’s gone bad and the country’s a mess, and you never were funny, anyway, not like Molly was. So go and take your little slambooks and wreck some other profession for a while. The grown-ups have work to do.

Because there’s never enough Molly

From 1998:

“If we had devoted this much time and this much space in the newspapers to the single most important problem in American politics today, which is the money that finances campaigns and the way the people that get elected respond to that money, we would have solved the problem by now. We would have the people of this country so outraged, they would be demanding campaign finance reform. What are we doing? We’re talking about the president’s dick. It’s ridiculous.”