This was compiled by Will Swaim; see if you can spot the actual quotes (answer at the bottom):
Jan: It's always Marcia, Marcia, Marcia…
The Family Friend: It's not personal, Jan. It's just that you're ugly and nobody likes you. Nobody. Not even me. I'm not saying it's not right, but it is what it is. Everyone knows something you evidently don't get or refuse to accept: You get into life with the face you've got, not with the face you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Jan: But yesterday you said I was pretty.
The Family Friend: I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it's what I said.
Jan [accusing]: Oh, you definitely said I was pretty. “Prettier than Marcia,” you said—didn't you?!
The Family Friend: If I said yes, that would then suggest that that might be the only place where it might be done which would not be accurate, necessarily accurate. It might also not be inaccurate, but I'm disinclined to mislead anyone.
Jan: And the President? Mr. Bush definitely said I was pretty. Was he misleading me? Just to, you know . . . ?
The Family Friend: To. . . . ?
Jan [building anger]: [. . .]
The Family Friend: Needless to say, the President is correct. Whatever it was he said.
Jan: What do you mean, “Whatever he said”? That's a pretty crappy thing to say to a 13-year-old girl with self-image problems.
The Family Friend: Well, um, you know, something's neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so, I suppose, as Shakespeare said.
Jan: That's the best you can do to defend a President who tells every girl in America she's pretty?
The Family Friend: I don't know what the facts are but somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know.
Jan: So you really don't know whether the president told the truth about me being pretty?
The Family Friend: I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty.
Jan: Concepty?
The Family Friend: If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly.
Jan [now finally spitting mad: […]
The Family Friend: Now, settle down, settle down. Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning and I'm gathering my thoughts here.
Jan: You're such an asshole.
The Family Friend: Don't begin to think you're the President. You're not. The Constitution provides for only one.
Jan: You're worse than the President. Much worse. He's stupid. So he might not be lying, he might just be confused. But you're too smart to be confused about the question of my physical beauty. You're worse than the President.
The Family Friend: Worse” is a relative term. So is “Best Secretary of Defense the United States has ever had.
—Donald Rumseld as himself in episode 7 season 3 of The Brady Bunch. Rumsfeld has since acknowledged that he stole most of the quips for which he is so famous from that show.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.