Dining out in Tokyo- Quotations: A

If you drop something in this toilet, let it be something you have eaten.
Anonymous. Sign in the toilet of an Australian boat I was on years ago.

This book fills a much-needed gap.
Anonymous. Read it the other day somewhere. If you don't find it funny, read it again.

No Vietcong ever called me nigger.
Muhammad Ali in the wonderful documentary ""When We Were Kings", to explain why he refuses to go to Vietnam.

"How do you want to be remembered?" somebody asked Muhammad Ali.
As somebody who never looked down on people who looked up to him.

Destiny makes brothers, but choice makes friends.
America Indian proverb

Being bisexual automatically doubles your chances of having a date on Saturday night.
Woody Allen

About America
(I group these together because it would be a sin to separate them. Frank):

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
Edward, Duke of Windsor, British king (abdicated)

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
Arnold Toynbee, British historian

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan

In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
Oscar Wilde

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
Georges Clemenceau, French statesman

What the US does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist

Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the Americans, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.
H. G. Wells

One comes to the US - always no matter how often - to see the future. It's what life in one's own country will be like five, 10, 20 years from now.
Ehud Yonay, Israeli writer

Bitterness is like cancer: it eats upon the host. Jimmy was not bitter. What Jimmy was was angry. He was constantly angry. He was angry at injustice, at ignorance, at exploitation, at stupidity, at vulgarity. Yes, he was angry.
Maya Angelou about James Baldwin. From the wonderful documentary "James Baldwin. The price of the ticket".

We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up in teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and the wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
Petronius Arbiter, 66 C.E.
What's odd for me in this sentences is the modernity of the ideas they express. I didn't think the ancient Romans already knew so much about team work.

It is possible that intelligence is a self-limiting property. Perhaps as soon as a species develops a sufficiently high technology, it destroys itself - as we, with out mounting stores of nuclear weapons and our penchant for overpopulating and for destroying the environment, seem to be doing.
Isaac Asimov. The Indefatigable Good Doctor was indeed an excellent SF writer and he will probably be remembered as such, but his non-fiction is in my opinion is by far his highest achievement.

I always go when my fans invite me, because I think it's great to meet people who think it's great to meet me.
Isaac Asimov

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
Isaac Asimov