Rube Quotes

Girls About Town, another Paramount film, again directed by George Cukor, gave Kay the opportunity to work with her good friend, the irrepressible Lilyan Tashman, who'd previously appeared with Kay in The Marriage Playground. Kay and Lil got to run around in lingerie and play characters who could only be high-priced call girls. "Kay Francis shows off her figure in undies while explaining she's through with the gold-digger racket and intends going straight because she's found love with a rich rube. The undie pose and that bit about going straight all in one has its own satirical kick."43 Andy Lawler, who would become one of Kay's best pals, also appeared in the film as Kay's no-good husband. ~ Lynn Kear

And uh, I'm glad that I still have my hands and my eyes to work with. ~ Rube Goldberg

I didn't write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate. ~ Rube Goldberg

Dr. S didn't notice. "Do you remember the cartoons of Rube Goldberg? An inventor of the most ludicrous contraptions. You know: a lever is pulled, causing a boot to kick a dog, whose bark motivates a hamster to run on a wheel which winds a pulley that raises a gate that releases a bowling ball and so on? Until, at the end, finally, the machine does something incredibly mundane, like making a piece of toast. Yes? Well, as it turns out, that's the world. All these incredibly complex, inscrutably intertwined Rube Goldberg machines that can only be seen in retrospect when something happens. ~ Adam Felber

When we played the Dodgers in St. Louis, they had to come through our dugout, and our bat rack was right there where they had to walk. My bats kept disappearing, and I couldn't figure it out. Turns out, Pee Wee Reese was stealing my bats. I found that out later, after we got out of baseball. He and Rube Walker stole my bats. ~ Stan Musial

The automobile industry began a campaign to popularize the use of the word "jaywalking" (walking like a "jay," or rube), a term so derogatory that when it was used in 1915 by New York's police commissioner, The Times responded with an editorial criticizing the "truly shocking" and "highly opprobrious" slur. ~ Anonymous

If when you hear a song by OK Go you conjure up thoughts of a gigantic Rube Goldberg device or treadmills or drones or perfectly executed dance routines, then you know that this is a band that is masterful at coming up with amazingly creative music videos. ~ Rachel Martin

Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty. ~ Maria Popova

One good punch from Rube on me would send the sky into my head and the clouds into my lungs. I just always tried to stay up. ~ Markus Zusak

A Rube Goldberg machine is, in its essence, a trial-and-error thing. ~ Adam Sadowsky

When I did sports cartoons, I used to uh, go to fights. ~ Rube Goldberg

When (Rube) Waddell
had control and some sleep, he was unbeatable. ~ Branch Rickey

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself. ~ Stephen King

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better. ~ Richard Thomas

Thieves always count their change! ~ Jason P. Goodman

Theater owners dodged construction costs, cutting corners and employing nonunion labor. Shoddy methods caused the death of vaudeville comedian Rube Dickinson in Kansas City. Booked at a brand-new venue, Dickinson stepped outside to have a smoke and was standing underneath the large wooden marquee advertising him when it collapsed. As the marquee caved, so too did his head - killed under the weight of his own name. ~ Kliph Nesteroff

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed
for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable. ~ Primo Levi

There is only one reason people have children: they're programmed to. Whatever reasons they may have for it - selflessness, wanting to pass something on, having so much love to give - I don't believe they choose children any more than naked mole rats decide to start tunneling. Human beings are basically big complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions constructed by genes to copy themselves, and only as an unintended side effect build mosques, make screwball comedies, and launch interplanetary probes. ~ Meghan Daum

Yeah, yeah. I, I don't think I'm always right. But I don't think young people are always right, either. ~ Rube Goldberg

This deluded little rube who really thought the future would be any better. If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

And, uh, I did that, and there was nothing more ridiculous to me than finding the weight of the earth because I didn't care how much the earth weighed. ~ Rube Goldberg

It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I notice a deliberate change in my brother. He's harder. He has a switch, and once a fight comes near, he flicks it and he is no longer my brother Rube. He's a machine. ~ Markus Zusak

Be your own dentist! ~ Rube Goldberg

He was a rube, but he was no tourist. ~ Colson Whitehead

If you stand up for your rights you'll be criticized, put through the ringer, dragged into court, arrested, pepper sprayed, sucked into an overcomplicated, Rube Goldberg bureaucracy the mistakes of which become your mistakes and which will drive you insane with stress. Wouldn't you rather be providing service with a smile? ~ Carl-John X. Veraja

Naturally, I'm conservative; I'm a Republican. I always was. ~ Rube Goldberg

america...is the interplay of three hundred million rube goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T. ~ Russell Baker

I didn't have any real art training, but when I was about twelve nad thirteen, another boy and I went to a sign painter's house every Friday night and took lessons. ~ Rube Goldberg

There is one hour in his life when we see a flash of utter physical action on Christ's part, an hour when this most curious of men must have experienced the sheer joyous exuberance of a young mammal in full flight: when he lets himself go and flings over the first money changer's table in the Temple at Jerusalem, coins flying, doves thrashing into the air, oxen bellowing, sheep yowling, the money changer going head-over-teakettle, all heads turning, what the...? You don't think Christ got a shot of utter childlike physical glee at that moment? Too late to stop now, his rage rushing to his head, his veiny carpenter's-son wiry arms and hard feet milling as he whizzes through the Temple overturning tables, smashing birdcages, probably popping a furious money-changer here and there with a quick left jab or a well-placed Divine Right Elbow to the money-lending teeth, whipping his scourge of cords against the billboard-size flank of an ox, men scrambling to get out of the way, to grab some of the flying coins, to get a punch in on this nutty rube causing all the ruckus...

In all this holy rage and chaos, don't you think there was a little absolute boyish mindless physical jittery joy in the guy? ~ Brian Doyle

To lay down and let love die,
Just stay down and let love lie:
No, no, not I.
I'll stay 'round and let love fly,
Even though I have seen its darkest form, deceit.
Nothing else could taste this warm
Or feel this sweet. ~ Big Rube

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul. ~ Kevin Brockmeier

How'd it feel?" Rube asked himself. "I don't know exactly, but it made me want to howl. ~ Markus Zusak