Andy Rooney: 1919-2011

And in his own words:

• We’re all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don’t make any big ones.

• People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

• Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”, here’s an update for you. Nowadays 80%of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it’s not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!

• Don’t rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your head.

• The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.

• The best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.

• The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

• If dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.

•  Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.

• If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.

• The trouble with dictionaries is, they tell you more about words than you want to know without answering the question you have.

• Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.

• The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can’t eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as ‘progress’, doesn’t spread.

• We should change our attitude toward the United Nations. There has to be some power in the world superior to our own. We should not have attacked Iraq without the okay of the United Nations. Now we have to live with that mistake. We’re living with it, and too many of our guys are dying with it.

• The average bright young man who is drafted hates the whole business because an army always tries to eliminate the individual differences in men.

• Obscenities… I think a lot of dumb people do it because they can’t think of what they want to say and they’re frustrated. A lot of smart people do it to pretend they aren’t very smart – want to be just one of the boys.

• It’s not so much that I write well, I just don’t write badly very often, and that passes for good on television.

• When a politician mentions God half a dozen times in a speech, it’s to appropriate for his campaign the name “God.” He’s suggesting that God has endorsed the ticket and given permission to have His name used in promotional material in exchange for certain considerations, like school prayer. There are lots of cheap tricks used in political campaigns, and evoking God’s name is one of them.

• Nothing in fine print is ever good news.