Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0) (4 page)

—Joe

Why are so many large, muscular men superstitious?
 
You’d think a strong man wouldn’t need to be.
 
Is it something about the muscles themselves that does it?
 
Some side effect of all that tugging at the base of the brain?

—Lady Sally

In a world like this, a freak is no bad thing to be.
 
They proved that back in the Sixties.

—Arethusa

There are few things on earth as dangerous as a liberal vigilante.

—Joe

It’s hard to strike a balance between keeping an open mind and being a sucker.
 
But you
have
to try…

—Joe

Darling,
all
men think about rape, at least once in their lives.
 
Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got
 
to have, more precious to us than heroin… and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings.
 
Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your
 
correct biological strategy.
 
But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons.
 
Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for is to get lucky.
 
We’re all descended from two millions years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it.
 
The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do.
 
I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.

—Mike to Lady Sally

Religions only look different if you get ’em from a retailer.
 
If you go to a wholesaler, you’ll find they all get it from the same distributor.

—
Stephen Gaskin

A fantasy is not even a
wish
, much less an act.
 
There is no such thing as a culpable or shameful fantasy.

—Lady Sally

If you’re raped, don’t charge the bastard with rape.
 
Charge him with indecent exposure.
 
It is much
 
easier to get a conviction for that charge than for rape.
 
The defense is not allowed to ask anything
 
about your sexual history or how you were dressed at the time.
 
Forensic evidence is unnecessary.
 
The total public embarrassment to you is cut more than in half.
 
What’s the guy going to do, leap up in court and say, "It’s a filthy lie, Your Honor: I raped that bitch!"?
 
In many states, a man convicted of indecent exposure will actually draw more prison time than a rapist.
 
And whereas rapists are sort of prison folk-heros, weenie-waggers do harder time than anybody but a short-eyes—in fact, the scheme sort of incorporates the Law of Talion...

—Mary

I like my flattery plausible.

—Arethusa

Everything in your body is connected to everything else.
 
If you doubt it, have ear surgery, and then wiggle your big toe.

—Doc Webster

Memories are the only real treasures a man has.

—Joe

"Straighten me, Nazz… ’cause I’m
ready
."

—Father Newman, quoting Dick Buckley

Every time I hear someone put the word "mere" in front of the word "semantics," I bite my tongue hard and remind myself that I too am greatly ignorant.

—Phillip
 

There aren’t many things a man can do as noble as passing up a chance to show how smart he is.

—Joe

Do not waste your fear on the mighty.
 
Cowards make the deadliest opponents—and pacifists never fight fair: they
can’t
 —and the worst thing about terrorists is how
weak
they are: so weak that they have to be monstrous to accomplish anything.

—Lady Sally

The distance between one and a hundred is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one.

—Joe

There’s nothing wrong with wanting wars to stop—but the moment a pacifist uses
any
weapon but calm speech, he’s a hypocrite.
 
If he’s willing to kill, he’s a psychotic.

—Lady Sally

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it’s lightning that does the work."

—Mark Twain to Nikola Tesla

The best nonprescription analgesic is laughter.
 

    
Maybe analgesic is the wrong word.
 
If you laugh hard when you’re post-op, you hurt like hell.
 
You just don’t give a damn.
 
Hard to understand how a painful experience can leave you feeling better, but there it is.
 

    
Sharing the laughter makes it even better...

—Josie

You can learn as much about someone from watching them belly-laugh as you can from making love with them.

—Joe

Wrinkles are your combat ribbons.
 
Wear them proudly!

—Shorty Steinitz

When something scares you shitless, you can go back up inside your head and hide.
 
But when the thing that scares you
comes from
inside your head, you… well, you go to a place that isn’t a place, erasing your footsteps behind you.
 
And somebody’s got to come in after you…
 

—Paul MacDonald

Short of accident or hypnosis, self abuse is logically impossible.

—Doc Webster, M.D.

The thing to do with a silly remark is to fail to hear it.

—Zebadiah J. Carter

Some delusions are necessary.
 
Or do you know of a rational reason for living?

    
(You say you do?
 
I won’t argue: your delusion is necessary.)

—Jake
 

Pessimism may be a realistic way of looking at life… but who can live with that much realism?

    
(You say
you
can?
 
Stand back away from me, please—and use your handkerchief.)

—Jake

The human race has few (if any) problems that couldn’t be solved by massive wealth.
 
And we’re literally
surrounded
by it, like a fly in amber.
 
Now if we only had brains…
 

—Ben Bova

The worst misunderstandings are the unspoken ones.

—Slippery Joe Maser

The expression "lowest common denominator," when spoken outside the context of mathematics, is usually being misused.
 
If used to connote contempt for something popular, it is
certainly
being misused.
 
The speaker is both ignorant and elitist.

    
The phrase does
not
imply that that the commonest
 
denominator is always the lowest.
 

    
Is it really true that fifty million Frenchmen can
never
be right?
 
If so, would you explain to me how millenia of evolution produced almost nothing but failures?

—Dr. Jacob Burroughs

Sneering at something is an admission of failure.
 
You are claiming superior talent or insight… but declining to use it.
 
The best way to sneer at something, if you must, is to improve or outdo it.

—Shorty

Never carry a grapefruit.

—Lazarus Long

Erections are certainly useful in pleasing a woman, but I’ve never understood why so many people seem to think they’re essential.
 
Sure, they’re flattering—but a man who
doesn’t
have an erection and still wants to make love to me: now, that’s
flattering
.
 

—Arethusa

Na mai kharundi, kai chi khal tut

(or, translated from the Romany:)

"Do not scratch where it does not itch."

—Gypsy proverb

To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can.

—Jake

Why do we build refrigerators that spill money on the floor?
 
And ovens that spill money on the ceiling?
 
And sit them side by side, a heat-maker and a heat-loser, unconnected?

—Jim/Paul MacDonald

The customer need not always come first.
 
Enjoy yourself: it’s contagious.

—standard advice of Lady Sally to apprentice artists at her brothel

I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

—Tom Waits

A classic vicious circle: you don’t love yourself enough, so you treat yourself so badly that it’s hard for you to love yourself...

    
Be good to yourself.
 
Maybe the idea will catch on...

—Les Glueham & Merry Moore

Triads have a very short shelf-life unless all three members are ambisexual.
 
For a heterosexual species with two sexes, odd numbers are unstable.
 
If a commodity is scarce, competition for it will ensue.

    
Triads
are
interesting as hell—while they last.
 
But so is a chimney fire…
 

—Lady Sally

Kindness beats honesty, every time.

    
But think it through—and make sure you’re being honest with yourself...

—Mike

You got it, buddy: the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away…
 

—Tom Waits

"Man alone cannot know himself.
 
The container cannot contain itself."

    
"I do not understand what you mean.
 
Do not all containers contain themselves?
 
If not, what does contain them?"

—exchange between Long-Drink and Mickey

Antiabortionists fail to carry their philosophy to its logical culmination: Stamp Out Menstruation!
 
End the slaughter of millions!
 
(And try to ensure that the ratio of females to males runs several trillion to one, so that every sperm can fulfill God’s Plan for it as well.)

—Mike

Among the most common thoughts that ever passed through a human brain:
 

      
"That doesn’t apply to
me
."

      
"It’s not fair."

      
"Not again."

      
"I wasn’t ready."

      
"I might have known."