. . . there was a part of me that wanted to be liked, and despite all my years of reporting, I never quite adjusted to the role of skunk at the garden party.
Organizations are about putting ideas through one or more types of gating procedures. In this way, ideas go from being a whim to becoming a project, from being a "skunk works" effort to becoming an official, mainstream effort, from being an unfounded program to a funded process, and so on.
I will not get into a pissing contest with that skunk [Joseph McCarthy].
Sometimes when you get in a fight with a skunk, you can't tell who started it.
The only difference between a dead skunk lying in the road and a dead lawyer lying in the road is that there are skid marks around the skunk.
A skunk by any other name still stinks.
Said a skunk to a tube-rose, "See how swiftly I run, while you cannot walk nor even creep. " Said the tube-rose to the skunk, "Oh, most noble swift runner, please run swiftly!"
A bulldog can whip a skunk, but sometimes it's not worth it.
A skunk is better company than a person who prides himself on being 'frank'.
That’s the tricky thing about love. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck. But after you sleep with it a month or so, or get dumped at the altar by it, it starts smelling more like a skunk.
If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.
What did John Ashcroft say about moderates, he said, quote, there are two things you find in the middle of the road, a moderate and a dead skunk and I don't want to be either.
There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time.
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.