About
Bruce Springsteen: "He plays four-and-a-half-hour sets. That's
torture. Does he hate his audience?" John Lydon. About Rod
Stewart: "He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom."
Britt Eklund . About Richard Wagner: "I love Wagner,
but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by its tail outside a window and
trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws." Charles
Baudelaire. "Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays
and vegetarian on Tuesdays. On Wednesday he was in favor of annexing
Newfoundland, Thursday he wanted to sink Venice, and Friday he wanted to blow
up the pope." Tony Palmer. "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye. "Listening to the Fifth Symphony of
Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes."
Aaron Copland. About President George W. Bush (Son): "He is
like a bad comic working the crowd. A moron, if you'll pardon the expression."
Martin Sheen. About President Jimmy Carter: "He is your
typical smiling, brilliant, back-stabbing, bullshitting southern nut-cutter."
Lane Kirkland. About President Johnson: "He
turned out to be so many different characters he could have populated all of
War and Peace and still had a few people left over." Herbert Mitgang.
About President Richard Nixon: "Avoid all needle drugs - the
only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon." Abbie Hoffman. "He
bleeds people. He draws every drop of blood and then drops them from a cliff.
He'll blame any person he can put his foot on." Martha Mitchell.
"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent
hard work, he overcame them." James Reston. "He is a shifty-eyed
goddamn liar....He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for
high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying
out of both sides." Harry S Truman . "He was like a kamikaze pilot who
keeps apologizing for the attack." Mary McGrory. "Here is a guy who's
had a stake driven through his heart. I mean, really nailed to the bottom of
the coffin with a wooden stake, and a silver bullet through the forehead for
good measure -- and yet he keeps coming back." Ted Koppel .
"I
may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad." Lyndon
Johnson. "I worship the quicksand he walks in." Art Buchwald.
"Nixon's motto was: If two wrongs don't make a right, try three." Norman
Cousins . "Sir Richard-the-Chicken-Hearted." Hubert H. Humphrey.
About President Ronald Reagan: "A triumph of the
embalmer's art." Gore Vidal. "Compared to the Clintons, Reagan is
living proof that a Republican with half a brain is better than a Democrat
with two." P.J. O'Rourke. "He doesn't die his hair - he's just
prematurely orange." Gerald Ford. "He doesn't die his hair, he
bleaches his face." Johnny Carson. "He has a chance to make
somebody move over on Mount Rushmore. He's working for his place on the coins
and the postage stamps." Henry Graff "I believe that Ronald Reagan will
someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness." Steve
Martin. "I think Nancy does most of his talking; you'll notice that she
never drinks water when Ronnie speaks." Robin Williams. "In the heat of
a political lifetime, he innocently squirrels away tidbits of misinformation
and then, sometimes years later, casually drops them into his public
discourse, like gum balls in a quiche." Lucy Howard. "People say satire
is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House. He makes a
Macy's Thanksgiving Day float look ridiculous. I think he's slowly but surely
regressing into movies again. In his mind he's looking at dailies, playing
dailies over and over." Robin Williams. "The youthful sparkle in his eyes is
caused by his contact lenses, which he keeps highly polished." Sheila
Graham. "Washington could not tell a lie; Nixon could not tell the
truth; Reagan cannot tell the difference." Mort Sahl.
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