The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can’t ignore it, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh at it; if you can’t laugh at it, it’s probably deserved.
—Russell Lynes
Topics: Insults
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
Topics: Insults
Cynicism is the intellectual cripple’s substitute for intelligence.
—Russell Lynes
Topics: Cynicism
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
Topics: Women
It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.
—Russell Lynes
Topics: Mistakes, Faults
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.
—Russell Lynes
Topics: Writing
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
Topics: Truth
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
Topics: Self-Discovery
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
—Russell Lynes
Topics: Authors & Writing
The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.
—Russell Lynes
Topics: Acceptance
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Bernard Berenson American Art Critic
- George Lois American Advertising Executive
- James Harvey Robinson American Historian
- John Ruskin English Art Critic
- David McCullough American Historian
- James Anthony Froude British Historian
- Daniel J. Boorstin American Historian
- James Truslow Adams American Historian
- Jacques Barzun American Cultural Historian
- Alfred Whitney Griswold American Historian
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