Top 94 Poundstone Quotes
#1. Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. - PAULA POUNDSTONE
Timothy Ferriss
#2. As a kid, I loved Paula Poundstone and Richard Pryor. But my mother was a huge influence on my comedy.
Tig Notaro
#3. President Obama could keep a big map with push pins on it to keep track of how many countries hate us, and when we get down to only half, let's have a ball. I'll blow up the balloons myself.
Paula Poundstone
#4. I don't need a holiday or a feast to feel grateful for my children, the sun, the moon, the roof over my head, music, and laughter, but I like to take this time to take the path of thanks less traveled.
Paula Poundstone
#5. I'm really more prolific than most stand-ups. My act changes. I do fold in new experiences, new observations, whatever you want to call it.
Paula Poundstone
#6. If only someone would do for cows what Bambi did for deer. Cows have been in films, but they haven't starred. I'm still willing to eat a species that is only a supporting player.
Paula Poundstone
#7. I love talking to the audience, and I must be the luckiest performer in the world. I always land something or somebody that just takes off.
Paula Poundstone
#8. I was court-ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous on television. Pretty much blows the hell out of the second A, wouldn't you say?
Paula Poundstone
#9. Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.
William Poundstone
#10. I have short-term memory loss, though I'd like to think of it as Persidential eligibility.
Paula Poundstone
#11. Bernoulli's real contribution was to coin a word. The word has been translated into English as "utility". It describes this subjective value people place on money.
William Poundstone
#12. I have a very silly sense of humor. I've never laughed harder in my entire life than seeing someone with toilet paper stuck on the bottom of their shoe.
Paula Poundstone
#13. I made mistakes and I broke the law and I'm more than willing to pay a price for that. But there's a price beyond that that my children have paid, and that's not what was supposed to happen.
Paula Poundstone
#14. The position of First Lady has no rules, just precedent, so its evolution has been at a virtual standstill for years. If Martha Washington didn't do it, then no one is sure it should be done.
Paula Poundstone
#16. When we live up to our Constitution, let's form a Conga line around the Capitol and bungee jump off the dome.
Paula Poundstone
#17. I'm thankful for the three ounce Ziploc bag, so that I have somewhere to put my savings.
Paula Poundstone
#18. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.
Paula Poundstone
#19. I was diagnosed a number of years ago with obsessive-compulsive disorder - which everyone has, to some degree - and I have this really annoying trait where in conversation, I always steer it back to something that happened to me.
Paula Poundstone
#20. Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.
William Poundstone
#21. Average" isn't so hot at the race track given those steep track takes. "Average" is pretty decent for stocks, something like 6 percent above the inflation rate. For a buy-and -hold investor, commissions and taxes are small.
William Poundstone
#22. The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.
William Poundstone
#23. I mean, I do love clever and witty, but I think that the 'Three Stooges' were geniuses. They'd have to be for their appeal to have lasted this long.
Paula Poundstone
#24. I got my dog three years ago because I was drunk in a pet store. We had nine cats at the time. The cats started hiding the alcohol after that.
Paula Poundstone
#25. I also like a great Caesar salad with anchovies, although I don't know why some places say 'with anchovies.' If you're making a proper Caesar salad, it's going to have anchovies.
Paula Poundstone
#26. I did auditions at a club called the Comedy Connection. They wanted nothing to do with me. But one night they were doing a night of all women comics, and they invited me to do that.
Paula Poundstone
#27. When every high school graduate can spell the word, 'inauguration,' let's put lampshades on our heads and listen to his speeches until Obama's voice gives out.
Paula Poundstone
#28. I have jokes I've told before and will tell again, but my favorite part of the night is talking to the crowd.
Paula Poundstone
#29. Remember when you were considered an environmentalist when you didn't throw junk out the car window? I sure do miss that simpler, happier time.
Paula Poundstone
#30. I was born in Alabama, but I only lived there for a month before I'd done everything there was to do.
Paula Poundstone
#31. The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they see a moth or an ax-murderer.
Paula Poundstone
#32. There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this simple rule: When faced with a choice of wagers or investments, choose the one with the highest geometric means of outcomes.
William Poundstone
#34. I'll probably never have children because I don't believe in touching people for any reason.
Paula Poundstone
#35. Once I was gone for a month and I was just miserable, so I flew back from Florida for two hours just to be home and see my cats.
Paula Poundstone
#36. The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails.
William Poundstone
#38. How do you come back? It's one step at a time. I'm optimistic because I don't know what else to be.
Paula Poundstone
#39. I get the first flight out from anywhere I am because I have to come home to my kids.
Paula Poundstone
#40. I'm thankful for Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid, which taught us that Alaska is not in a box off the coast of California.
Paula Poundstone
#41. There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon.
William Poundstone
#42. It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
Paula Poundstone
#43. It is the best part of the night. The classic interactive lines are 'Where are you from? What do you do for a living?' I almost always get something interesting.
Paula Poundstone
#44. I know a little bit about handicapping. If the horse has an IV, you want to stay - away from it.
Paula Poundstone
#45. I hate it when my hair is engaged in unauthorized activities.
Paula Poundstone
#46. My mom is one of those really angry moms who gets mad at absolutely everything. Once when I was a little kid, I accidentally knocked a Flintstones glass off the kitchen table. She said, 'Well, dammit, we can't have nice things.'
Paula Poundstone
#47. There are really only so many foods and so many ways you can prepare them.
Paula Poundstone
#48. I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.
Paula Poundstone
#49. I don't have a bank account because I don't know my mother's maiden name.
Paula Poundstone
#50. The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible.
William Poundstone
#52. The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its improbability.
William Poundstone
#53. The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.
William Poundstone
#54. The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.
William Poundstone
#55. Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.
William Poundstone
#56. Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.
William Poundstone
#57. Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science.
William Poundstone
#58. Your second ducat, like your second million, is never quite as sweet.
William Poundstone
#59. In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.
William Poundstone
#60. I love key lime pie, although it's never made the proper way.
Paula Poundstone
#61. What moron said that knowledge is power? Knowledge is power only if it doesn't depress you so much that it leaves you in an immobile heap at the end of your bed.
Paula Poundstone
#62. Gay Republicans, how exactly does that work? 'We disapprove of our own lifestyle. We beat ourselves up in parking lots.
Paula Poundstone
#63. Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.
William Poundstone
#64. At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.
William Poundstone
#65. The pleasure of the mulch pile is incomprehensible. I wouldn't care if they just hauled the mulch to the landfill somewhere. Obviously, grass clippings are biodegradable, but when they're bunched together at the landfill, they become badly influenced by other garbage.
Paula Poundstone
#66. I like to work on New Year's Eve. It has a nice spirit; a nice feel about it. If you are all about the 'year-end' thing at all, then laughing with fellow human beings is a great way to start the new year.
Paula Poundstone
#67. When we save the rain forest, the polar bear, and Al Gore, we should party so hard that Canada calls the cops on us for noise.
Paula Poundstone
#68. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#70. The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
Paula Poundstone
#71. Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.
William Poundstone
#72. I used to work at The International House of Pancakes. It was a dream, and I made it happen.
Paula Poundstone
#73. I've decided that perhaps I'm bulimic and just keep forgetting to purge.
Paula Poundstone
#74. Speaking of happy successes, after years of struggling to lose those few extra pounds every mother puts on during adoption, particularly when the doctor orders bed rest, in 2004 I sent my assistant to the Gap in dark glasses with a fake ID to purchase my first pair of Easy Fit jeans.
Paula Poundstone
#75. I was the youngest in my family. When the other kids went to school, my mother would make them breakfast and then she would go back to bed for an hour, so I was sort of babysat by television.
Paula Poundstone
#76. I'm the only person I know of who's ever been pulled over for attempted speeding.
Paula Poundstone
#78. I only do two things in my life, and that's take care of my kids and work. Fortunately, these are my favorite things to do, so it works out.
Paula Poundstone
#79. I can make things, but I don't cook them, exactly. Like salmon, I can stick that in a pan. Or the other day I made noodles, but they were hard. It never occurred to me to check them; I just stopped cooking them when I felt they were ready. Really, I'm too absentminded.
Paula Poundstone
#80. I have a horrible memory and I used to consider that a liability, but I've learned along the way that talking to people is really a beautiful thing.
Paula Poundstone
#81. I happen to be a devout atheist. I don't believe in God. I still go to church
I'm not a heathen. I go to an atheist church. We have crippled guys who stand up and testify that they were crippled, and they still are.
Paula Poundstone
#82. The mistakes that I made I made because I drank too much. I don't think that's going to happen any more. Am I going to make mistakes as a parent? Sadly, every day. I'm looking around for the perfect parent and I haven't seen one yet.
Paula Poundstone
#83. I confess that when I first read that smog is particularly hazardous to children, senior citizens, and physically active people, for a brief moment I thought, I'm in the clear for at least ten years.
Paula Poundstone
#84. I used to watch 'The Waltons' and sob because my family was nothing like that. We had a cruel sense of humor in my family.
Paula Poundstone
#85. Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up 'cause they're looking for ideas.
Paula Poundstone
#86. I don't believe for a second that weightlifting is a sport. They pick up a heavy thing and put it down again. To me, that's indecision.
Paula Poundstone
#87. I talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tendency to borrow instead of buy.
Paula Poundstone
#88. I think we need a 12-step group for non-stop talkers. We're going to call it On and On Anon.
Paula Poundstone
#89. I'm thankful that my memory is good because my vision is going.
Paula Poundstone
#91. The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.
William Poundstone
#92. My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'
Paula Poundstone
#93. My act is sort of improvisational. I have a skeleton in my head, but no fat or skin on it.
Paula Poundstone
#94. My parents got carried away with the letter P when they were naming the kids in our family. There's me, Paula, my sisters Peggy and Patty, and my brother Pjimmy, spelled with a silent P.
Paula Poundstone
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