
“I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.”
Broadcast from Buchenwald (1945)
“I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.”
“I went to the doctor and he said I had acute appendicitis, and I said "Compared to who?"”
One-liners
“I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to stop going to those places.”
Liggett on Armstrong: The whole investigation was a waste of money http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/liggett-on-armstrong-the-whole-investigation-was-a-waste-of-money (2 February 2015)
“I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places. He told me to keep out of those places.”
Variant: I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places. He told me to keep out of those places.
Source: It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect But Plenty of Sex and Drugs (2004), p. 8
Source: 2000s, A Personal Odyssey (2000), Ch. 5 : Halls of Ivy
Context: In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U. S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.
As quoted in Riccardo Orizio, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, (Walker and Company, 2003), p. 145