Quotes about plumber

A collection of quotes on the topic of plumber, doing, work, working.

Quotes about plumber

“I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

For Wife, Truth

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006) American writer

Business, Thinking, Reality, Sincerity

“Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Universe, Time

“Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,
Painter or plumber or never-do-well,
Do me a favor and shut your face -
Poets alone should kiss and tell.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Collected Dorothy Parker

Kiss

“Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.”

Woody Allen book Getting Even

Getting Even (1971), My Philosophy

God

“If I could do it all again, I'd be a plumber.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 5

Age, Family, Faith, Business

“My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of wilfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud, and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 12 (Introductory text to the portfolio Transfusion,1990.)

Pleasure, Art, History, Thinking

“In April 2002, Minneapolis City Council member Joe Biernat was indicted for accepting free plumbing work on his house in exchange for lucrative city contracts. The day after the indictment was made public, City Council President Paul Ostrow was a guest in the Twins' broadcast booth, explaining a plan for a new Twins stadium. At the end of the interview, Blyleven asked Ostrow "So do you know any good plumbers?"”

Bert Blyleven (1951) Major League Baseball player and broadcaster

After an uncomfortable pause, Ostrow replied "I'm not going there."

Housing

“Ah jist shrugged, -- Well, as one anarchist plumber sais tae the other: smash the cistern.”

Irvine Welsh book The Acid House

A conversation between plumbers.
"A Blockage in the System".
The Acid House (1994)

“Most effects in psychology are relatively unimportant. That is, most variables, considered in isolation, have relatively little impact on behavior. This doesn't mean… that we should all abandon psychology and become plumbers instead. The small magnitude of most effects in psychology is itself a discovery of psychology. One might argue, in fact, that it is one of the great metadiscoveries of the field. Most variables have little impact, and thus most of the phenomena studied by psychologists are products of a multiplicity of variables.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 251

Behavior, Study

“The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 50

“It was from him I learned that the stage is too coarse a medium for the works of the supreme poet; Shakespeare's depths can only be plumbed in the solitude of the study. So I used to shut myself up and plumb away for hours, and I acquired such aptitude that for a time there was a belief that I might pipe Shakespeare into young minds of the rest of my days, as a full-fledged academic plumber.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Shakespeare over the Port (1960)

Solitude, Study, Learning, Time

“The oldest girl [his daughter Maro, four and a half years old] did this. She paints like a little bird. And this, the young one [Natasha, two and a half] did. See, she paints on both sides of the canvas. She is more like a passionate plumber. I wish I could paint as freely as they do. There is a gravity of playfulness in their work. If they could only keep it – but they will lose it as they grow older.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Girl, Bird, Passion, Painting

“Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Quoted in U.S. military helps fund Calgary hacker, Akin, David, 2004-04-06, 2007-01-10, Globe and Mail, http://web.archive.org/web/20040815134728/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd, 2004-08-15 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd,

Understanding

“If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to the editor of The Reporter about the situation of scientists in America (13 October 1954)
1950s

Hope, Teachers

“One of my grandfathers was a blacksmith, and all the plumbers and carpenters and electricians, people who did things with their hands, thought of themselves as artists because they were good at doing things. They were proud of their making things.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 9
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

People

“The plumber plodded along in silence, like a man who has learned to be polite to lunatics through dealing with civil engineers.”

Lindsey Davis book Shadows in Bronze

Shadows in Bronze

Silence, Learning

“The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite — women and men — will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Women, Men, Nature

“They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit
Mr. Richard Mutt [= Duchamp himself; an inscription written by Duchamp] sent in a fountain. Without discussion this article disappeared and never was exhibited.
What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt fountain:
1. Some contented it was immoral, vulgar.
2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.
Now, Mr. Mutt fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bit tube is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumber’s show windows.
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made this fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that's its useful significance disappeared under the new title ['The Richard Mutt Case'] and point of view – created a new thought for that object.
As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

quote, 1917
Quote in: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, – a source-book of Artist's writings, ed. Kristine Stiles / Peter Selz, University of California Press, London, England, 1996, p. 817
Duchamp's core quote / his own written comment on his artwork 'Fountain (Duchamp)': The Richard Mutt Case, Marcel Duchamp, ‘Blind Man’, New York, 1917: 5
1915 - 1925

Life, Art, Quotes

“You know, I remember Career Day in high school. I remember plumbers and lawyers... I don't remember a booth where you could sign up to learn how to shoot chickens out of a cannon at the windshield of an airplane, 'cause there would have been a line at my school to do that!”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Have Your Loved Ones Spayed and Neutered (2004)

School, Learning

“Needless to deny that the normal London plumber is a dishonest man. We do not even allow ourselves to think so. That question, as to the dishonesty of mankind generally, is one that disturbs us greatly; — whether a man in all grades of life will by degrees train his honesty to suit his own book, so that the course of life which he shall bring himself to regard as soundly honest shall, if known to his neighbours, subject him to their reproof. We own to a doubt whether the honesty of a bishop would shine bright as the morning star to the submissive ladies who now worship him, if the theory of life upon which he lives were understood by them in all its bearings.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

The Plumber (1880)

Life, Books, Star, Question