The Cocktail Party Quotes

#1. A senator once confided to me that the greatest need in Washington was the elimination of the cocktail party. He said: It consumes so much of our time that we don't have time for matters of state.

Billy Graham

#2. I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.

Dorothy Parker

#3. Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.

Maureen Dowd

#4. There must be some good in the cocktail party to account for its immense vogue among otherwise sane people.

E.W. Howe

#5. If it's a cocktail party, I generally make five or six different things, and I try to choose recipes that feel like a meal: a chicken thing, a fish or shrimp thing, maybe two vegetable things, and I think it's fun to end the cocktail party with a sweet thing.

Ina Garten

#6. The cocktail party has a simple function in modern society. Its basic purpose is to pay off social debts.

Hal Boyle

#7. The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.

Lawrence Durrell

#8. The cocktail party is probably America's greatest contribution to the world of entertaining.

Martha Stewart

#9. The fact is, the cocktail party has much in its favor. Going to one is a good way of indicating that you're still alive and about, if such is the case, and that you're glad other people are, without having to spend an entire evening proving it.

Peg Bracken

#10. The cocktail party is easily the worst invention since castor oil

Elsa Maxwell

#11. The person talking to you never looks directly at you, but rather around the room, searching for the answer to the universal cocktail party question, 'Who's here tonight?

Letitia Baldrige

#12. Soup is cuisine's kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability, as the five o'clock cup of tea or the cocktail hour.

Louis Pullig De Gouy

#13. Finally ... You have accomplished your mission in going there tonight - you were 'seen,' and you furnished your host and hostess with the sincerest proof of your great love and friendship for them - you endured their cocktail party.

Letitia Baldrige

#14. The real cocktail party conversation would probably go something like this:
"Actually, I have a degree in geography."
"Geography? Wow, I'm terrible with maps. I bet YOU know all your state capitals, though!"
(Geographer's smile freezes, left eye starts to twitch uncontrollably.)

Ken Jennings

#15. Twitter is the perpetual cocktail party where everyone is talking at once but nobody is saying anything.

Teresa Medeiros

#16. We have embarked upon the world's largest and longest cocktail party, and every issue imaginable is up for grabs.

Geoffrey Moore

#17. On the off chance that you have children, don't clean up at all. As children, my brother and sister and I loved waking up early and playing cocktail party with the leftover debris

Amy Sedaris

#18. Hunt game? With pearl-handled revolvers?" I asked, incredulous. "Isn't that a bit ... I dunno ... fancy? Do I just run out into the forest with my pearl-handled revolvers, or do I invite some deer to a cocktail party and then gun them down?

Jeff VanderMeer

#19. I listen to a lot of podcasts, which are split down the middle between comedy and board game podcasts, and a couple of eclectic ones like 'The Dinner Party' from NPR, where they take an event that happened that week in history and give you a cocktail recipe inspired by it.

Rich Sommer

#20. Now whenever Franny or Jim spoke to someone who kept a car in Manhattan, they reacted with quiet horror, like people who'd been subjected to the rantings of a mentally ill person at a cocktail party.

Emma Straub

#21. The best way to describe the sonic environment at the '98 CES is:
Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party.

David Foster Wallace

#22. In England especially, I've found that if you bring up King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at a dinner party or a social gathering, it's like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room.

Madonna Ciccone

#23. Beer is not a good cocktail-party drink, especially in a home where you don't know where the bathroom is.

Billy Carter

#24. Always underdress. The goal is not to look as if you made an effort for the particular event. If you can dress for a different party (i.e., wear black tie to a cocktail party, or tennis clothes for lunch), so much the better. You give the impression of being much in demand.

Lisa Birnbach

#25. Our profession is very much like going to a cocktail party, you check out the guest list.

Robert Stack

#26. I moved to Los Angeles, and 'The Office' became successful, and the charity/cocktail party circuit is really not my scene. But I played golf, and I started getting invited to charity golf events, and I just fell in love with the game ten-fold, and at a lot of these events, there were athletes.

Brian Baumgartner

#27. Two people at a cocktail party. One turns to the other and says: "I'm writing a novel." The other replies, "Neither am I.

Private Eye

#28. Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

Fred Allen

#29. I love how I can see [on Twitter] some of the thoughts and ideas of my favorite cultural figures and still also chatter with my friends and family. It's a cocktail party with a fraction of the awkwardness of an actual cocktail party.

Roxane Gay

#30. I'm suspicious that what's behind the academic call for doing away with athletic scholarships is a nostalgia for the good old days, which leaves out everyone but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, ... world's biggest cocktail party.

Scott MacDonald

#31. I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

Zoe Heller

#32. When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

Joe Haldeman

#33. I don't run with anybody's herd. I don't like crowds. I don't like going to fancy places. I don't like the whole nightclub scene. Cocktail parties drive me mad. So I do my job and I stay away from the rest of it.

Johnny Carson

#34. So hire slowly. It's the only way to avoid winding up at a cocktail party of strangers.

Jason Fried

#35. Here is a dirty little secret: Stock-picking is wildly overrated. Sure, it makes for great cocktail party chatter, and what is more fun than delving into a company's new products? But the truth is that individual stocks are riskier than broad indices.

Barry Ritholtz

#36. Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.

Marvin Ammori

#37. There were times when I was broke, when I was down in Florida and I had to go to cocktail parties for 500 bucks - to see the guy that used to be in pictures. I'm not ashamed of that. I've never done anything that I was ashamed of. I've done a lot of things I didn't mean to do.

Mickey Rooney

#38. Our compulsive hunger always to know first, speak first and decide first has only been amplified by the fact that we can now all participate instantly in a virtual version of a national cocktail-party conversation on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

John Podhoretz

#39. Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met ... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.

Eric Weiner

#40. Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

T. S. Eliot

#41. We don't learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you.

Shauna Niequist

#42. But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.

Albert Camus

#43. Life's just a cocktail party - on the street.

Mick Jagger

#44. I, a woman, find wearing high heels agreeable only on the very rare occasion that (1) I will be ferried between destinations upon a palanquin or (2) I am going to a cocktail party and, at five feet two, don't want to spend the evening discussing the latest movies with somebody's nipples.

Lauren Collins