1001 Insults, Put-downs, And Come-backs

＂The stupid person’s idea of a clever person.＂--Elizabeth Bowen on Aldous Huxley

＂That insolent little ruffian, that crapulous lout. When he quitted a sofa, he left behind him a smear.＂--Norman Cameron on Dylan Thomas

An insult can be bad-mannered, offensive, and infuriating, but every one of us has surely had one of those moments when we just wish we had thought of a good one. Unlike most of us, however, there are those who always seem to have the perfect comeback. 1001 Insults, Put-Downs, and Comebacks gathers together the very sharpest of these barbs from a wide variety of sources, with some of the wickedest put-downs from the literary, political, and entertainment worlds, along with many others, including:

-＂A large shaggy dog unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.＂--Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
-＂The triumph of sugar over diabetes.＂--George Nathan on J. M. Barrie
-＂He was another one that was a complete fizzle . . . Pierce didn’t know what was going on, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have known what to do about it.＂--Harry Truman on Franklin Pierce
-＂He is such an infernal liar.＂--Ulysses Grant on Andrew Johnson
-＂Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.＂--Mark Twain
-＂I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.＂--Groucho Marx
-＂Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.＂--Oscar Levant