“A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas. If a dog hunted for fleas on mathematical principles, basing his researches on statistics of area and population, he would never catch a flea except by accident.”

“339. Hee that lies with the dogs riseth with fleas.”

“You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?”

“You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”

“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can’t teach old fleas new dogs.”

“Actually, my solution generated considerable further work and the "dog-flea" model keeps cropping up from time to time in unexpected contexts.”

“Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.”

“The kid makes you sick. He looks the part, he walks the part, he is the part. He's six-foot something, fit as a flea, good-looking - he's got to have something wrong with him…. Hopefully he's hung like a hamster! That would make us all feel better!”

“Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, makes the monk much better skilled in riding and hunting, than in divinity. The same poit, afterwards, in the Ploughman's Tale, takes occasion to accuse the monks of pride, because they rode on coursers like knights, having their hawks and hounds with them. In the same tale he severely reproaches the priests for their dissolute manners, saying, that many of them thought more upon hunting with their dogs, and blowing the horn, than of the service they owed to God.”

“We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.”