Addison Mizner

Addison Mizner was an American architect, adventurer, and entrepreneur. He was best known for his role in the Florida Land Boom, and for being the "father of Boca Raton". He was affiliated with his brother, Wilson Mizner, in a series of scams and picaresque misadventures that inspired Stephen Sondheim's Bounce!.

The Cynic's Calendar

quoted by Alva Johnston, The Legendary Mizners, 1953, Farrar Straus and Young, New York

• Where there's a will, there's a law suit.

• Many are called, but few get up.

• The wages of gin is breath.

• Be held truthful that your lies may count.

• Misery loves company but company does not reciprocate.

• People who love in glass houses should pull down the blinds.

From his sketchbook

quoted by Alva Johnston, The Legendary Mizners, 1953, Farrar Straus and Young, New York

• ...Louis Fourteenth Street furniture...

• ...teeth set out by a landscape gardener...

• Two ideas in his head at once would constitute an unlawful assembly.

• A cow couldn't find its calf in this room.

• He has no manners—he just has customs.

• ...talking as though the Standard Oil Company was the smallest thing he owned.

Private remarks

• The son-of-a-bitch would shoot me just to make book on which way I'd fall!
  • Of his brother Wilson.
    • Quoted by Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, Viking Press, New York, 1974, ISBN 0-670-41374-7.