An eclectic collection that made us pause for thought.
| 31 January 2012 | "You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much!"
Anon |
| 22 January 2012 | "He roamed while his fiddle burned."
Anon. This was said of a musician (Vaughan Williams?) who was known to have had a number of affairs. |
| 15 January 2012 | "Marriage isn't a thing to be romantic about it lasts too long"
John Hankin, from his play The Charity that Began at Home |
| 8 January 2012 | "Man is born fee, and everywhere he is in chains."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.
2012 is the tercentenary of his birth. |
| 1 January 2012 | "Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."
Vaclav Havel |
| 21 December 2011 | "Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens, who died last week, of whom Graydon Perry, editor of Vanity Fair, said: "There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar. |
| 11 December 2011 | "Some say we need a miracle to save the Eurozone and the banks. We need a far bigger one to save the planet."
Peter Wilby, The Guardian |
| 4 December 2011 | Definition of a Jury:
"12 persons summoned at random to decide which party has the better lawyer."
Hilaire Belloc (with thanks to Leo Robson, FT.) |
| 27 November 2011 | What does the Canadian girl say when you ask her if she'd like sex?
"Only if you're having some yourself."
Margaret Atwood in the Guardian |
| 20 November 2011 | "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men."
Pier Ferdinando Casini (on the demise of Silvio Berlusconi) |
| 13 November 2011 | "Dates are the pegs on which to hang your history."
Alan H. Long |
| 6 November 2011 | "The Beginning is Nigh"
Sign at the Occupy London Stock Exchange encampment outside St. Paul's cathedral |
| 30 October 2011 | "I'd rather cry in a Rolls than be happy on a bicycle."
Patrizia Reggiani, widow of Gucci heir Maurizio Gucci, who is in prison in Italy for ordering the murder of her husband. |
| 23 October 2011 | "Quantitative Easing is like filling a car with petrol when the tank has been disconnected from the engine."
Simon Jenkins in The Guardian |
| 16 October 2011 | "If you don't have anything nice to say, let's hear it!"
With thanks to Peter Brookes, on Radio 4. |
| 9 October 2011 | "If a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning.
(With thanks to Patric Judge's letter in FT) |
| 2 October 2011 | "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
Steve Jobs |
| 25 September 2011 | "I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light."
Christopher Hitchens |
| 18 September 2011 | "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what is for lunch. "
Orson Welles |
| 11 September 2011 | "All ideologies are essentially bovine."
Martin Amis. |
| 4 September 2011 | Overheard after a moving service at a crematorium:
"That was a funeral to die for." |
| 28 August 2011 | When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
Michel de Montaigne |
| 18 August 2011 |
"I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people... Most wouldnt mind being told to pay more in taxes, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering."
Warren Buffett |
| 31 July 2011 | "Twitter is not just a phoney form of conversation, it is a deceptive medium for discussion."
Harry Eyres, Financial Times |
| 24 July 2011 | "The making of laws is like the making of sausagesthe less you know about the process the more you respect the result."
Atributed to Otto von Bismark |
| 17 July 2011 | "Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem"
Woody Allen |
| 10 July 2011 | "When you find anyone agreeing with you, change your mind. "
John Maynard Keynes |
| 3 July 2011 | "It is one of the pervasive features of philosophy that nothing in it is ever entirely satisfactory."
Jim Hankinson, Bluff your way in Philosophy. |
| 23 June 2011 | "I tell you what, you do the fighting and I'll do the talking"
Prime Minister David Cameron at a meeting with defence chiefs.
(With thanks to Sue Cameron, FT) |
| 12 June 2011 | "You don't create a tiger by inflating a cat"
From a talk on law firm mergers by Nick Jarrett-Kerr. |
| 5 June 2011 | "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
Mario Cuomo
|
| 29 May 2011 | "When a person's vanity exceeds their ability, no matter how great that ability, then they become a liability."
John Lock (Letter in FT) |
| 15 May 2011 | "Swearing is a weakness - a sign that the brain isn't working fast enough to construct a decent sentence and get your point across."
The Secret Footballer, The Guardian |
| 8 May 2011 | "A gentleman is never unintentionally rude"
Oscar Wilde |
| 1 May 2011 | "Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in."
Anon |
| 24 April 2011 | "The trouble with free election is that you never know who is going to win."
Leonid Brezhnev |
| 14 April 2011 | "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
B.F.Skinner (with thanks to Peter Hibbert, JCT) |
| 3 April 2011 | "I'm mostly content being a writer, but I sometimes think it would be cool to have a job."
Tim Dowling, Guardian Weekend |
| 27 March 2011 | "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
John Kenneth Galbraith |
| 20 March 2011 | "I am not interested in having a career.... I think a career is something your father brings home in a briefcase every night, looking kind of tired."
Sean Parker, founder of Napster, interviewed in the FT. |
| 13 March 2011 | "When your painting first sells for over a million, that's when they start calling you Mr. Tuymans."
Belgian Artist Luc Tuymans, interviewed by Jackie Wullschlager in the FT. |
| 6 March 2011 | "What you know now helps you in what you do in the future. It can't help you with what's been done in the past."
Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview with the FT |
| 27 February 2011 | "Human rights law tends to be applied to rather unattractive and unpleasant people."
Ken Clarke, Justice Secretary, in an interview with the BBC |
| 20 February 2011 | "A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but chooses not to."
Neil Shillito
in a letter to the FT |
| 13 February 2011 | "Reform delayed is revolution begun."
George Dawson
(with thanks to Ian Hislop) |
| 6 February 2011 | Judge to accused:
"Do you plead guilty or not guilty?"
Accused replies:
"I couldn't say, your Honour. I haven't heard the evidence yet."
With thanks to Patrick Hughes, author of More on Oxymoron. |
| 30 January 2011 | "A trim 54 year-old in a suit that despite its demure grey tones looks as if it had been woven from liquidised banknotes."
Jan Dalley of the FT's description of John Studzinski as he arrived for a lunchtime interview. |
| 23 January 2011 | "The privacy of historical figures is important."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey, commenting on a tv programme about Suleiman the Magnificent. |
| 16 January 2011 | "The UK has got a bit silly architecturally and the architectural profession and Cabe have produced an awful lot of excessive buildings."
Graham Cash,interviewed in Building. |
| 9 January 2011 | "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
George Orwell |
| 2 January 2011 | "The main problem with banks is incompetence: In the good times they lend money to people who can't afford to repay it. Now they refuse to lend to those who can."
Anon |
| 26 December 2010 | "Almost everyone in Sweden has more than the average number of legs!"
Prof. Hans Rosling in a talk on statistics, BBC 4
[The average in Sweden is 1.999] |
| 19 December 2010 | "Nowadays it seems that almost any noun can be verbed."
Anon |
| 12 December 2010 | "Latin has no place in the teaching of modern English, per se."
Martin Clunes on Have I Got News for You |
| 5 December 2010 | "Even I don't look like Cindy Crawford in the morning."
Cindy Crawford |
| 28 November 2010 | "I would say that part of the very definition of "good design" is that it produces value, and that design that celebrates little apart from itself is bad design."
Paul Morrell, Chief Construction Adviser to the UK Government. |
| 21 November 2010 | "I felt like the captain of a sinking ship."
George W. Bush on the credit crunch, from his autobiography 'Decision Points'. |
| 14 November 2010 | "All too often today's hot potato becomes tomorrow's organic compost."
Jonathan Allum. equity strategist with Mizuho.
(With thanks to Merryn Somerset Webb. Financial Times) |
| 7 November 2010 | "Bankers are exceptionally greedy with over-inflated opinions of their talents pegged to an exaggerated sense of their importance in the economic scheme of things"
Will Hutton in his new book Them Them and Us: Changing Britain Why We Need a Fair Society.
(With thanks to Open Democracy) |
| 1 November 2010 | "Whenever I hear the word security I reach for my gun."
Angela Dixon. |
| 22 October 2010 | "Television has now become the enemy of creativity...They have reduced it to a grotesque reality game."
Ken Loach at the London Film Festival |
| 15 October 2010 | "I was with the devil and touched the hand of God"
Mario Sepulveda, one of the rescued Chilean miners |
| 10 October 2010 | "Judgments of the Supreme Court are not final because they are right; they are right because they are final."
With thanks to Joshua Rozenberg, Law Society Gazette |
| 3 October 2010 | "Is life worth living? It depends upon the liver. "
Anon |
| 26 September 2010 | "Crime against humanity is a bourgeois notion."
One of the Farc Guards who held Ingrid Betancourt captive in the Colombian jungle for six years.
From her book Even Silence has an End (and with thanks to the Guardian). |
| 19 September 2010 | Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.
John Henry Newman, who was beatified by the Pope on 19th September |
| 10 September 2010 | "Les Anglais - ils parlent beaucoup"
A French guide with his party of English walkers in the Pyrenees. |
| 3 September 2010 | "God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed."
Luis Bunuel |
| 27 August 2010 | "I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."
Oscar Wilde |
| 20 August 2010 | "The main essentials of a prime minister are sleep and a sense of history"
Harold Wilson
(With thanks to Robert Rogers in his book Order! Order!) |
| 13 August 2010 | "Age is a high price to pay for maturity."
Tom Stoppard |
| 30 July 2010 | "Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal."
T.S. Eliot |
| 23 July 2010 | "When I want to read a novel, I write one."
Benjamin Disraeli.
(With thanks to the London Library.) |
| 16 July 2010 | "Language is the skin on my thought."
Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice |
| 9 July 2010 | "The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive and die only when you're dead."
Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice |
| 2 July 2010 | "To be a good writer you first have to love words,then you'll find you have something to say. If you start out with something to say you end up with journalism or propaganda."
Peter Porter, the poet, who died in April 2010 in a 2003 interview with Duncan Fallowell published in Prospect, June 2010. |
| 25 June 2010 | "Money doesn't grow on trees - unless you are an olive farmer."
Cypriot proverb? |
| 18 June 2010 | "A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers."
Plato |
| 10 June 2010 | "Culture - of course there is culture in Dubai - we had Tom Jones here a couple of weeks ago."
An expat wife interviewed by the BBC for a programme on life in Dubai. |
| 1 June 2010 | "I've never seen so many dead people smoking."
Ronnie Scott to his (not very enthusiastic) expatriate audience in Abu Dhabi some years ago. |
| 21 May 2010 | "Wrinkles are hereditary: parents get them from their children."
Doris Day |
| 14 May 2010 | "All political careers end in failure."
Enoch Powell |
| 4 May 2010 | Definitions
"A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. Not necessarily the objective truth but the truth about what he or she actually thinks."
Michael Kinsley.
(With thanks to Alexander Chancellor) |
| 30 April 2010 | "More people would live to a ripe old age if they weren't too busy providing for it."
Anon |
| 23 April 2010 | "The United States does not have a security system: it has a system for bothering people."
Schlomo Dror, Israeli air security expert.
(With thanks to Michael Lind and the Financial Times)
|
| 16 April 2010 | 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
The most terrifying words in the English language, according to Ronald Reagan. |
| 9 April 2010 | "It is very difficult not to live up to your income."
Angela Dixon |
| 2 April 2010 | "The customer is always right."
H.G.Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges store in London
"The customer's usually wrong."
Michael O'Leary, chief of Ryanair
(With thanks to Michael Skapinker, Financial Times) |
| 26 March 2010 | "I like to run just often enough to make me feel smug."
Jack Dee, on the News Quiz, BBC Radio |
| 19 March 2010 | "A husband is not like a table cloth. You don't want to change him every fortnight."
Shazia Mirza's mother. With acknowledgements to Shazia Mirza and the Guardian |
| 12 March 2010 | "Always be sure to go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours"
Yogi Berra |
| 4 March 2010 | "Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power
Michael Foot, who died on 3rd March aged 96 |
| 5 February 2010 | "The mediocrity of his thinking is concealed by the majesty of his language."
Aneurin Bevan on a speech by Churchill.*
With thanks to 'Order! Order!' by Robert Rogers
*Sadly mediocrity rules in both the language and thinking of today's politicians. |
| 29 January 2010 | "At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst."
Aristotle |
| 22 January 2010 | "The government, which proclaims a target of 50 per cent of young people going to university, and at the same time ensures that forty per cent are uneducated when they leave secondary school, lives in a fantasy world."
PD James - from a character in her latest novel, The Private Patient. |
| 15 January 2010 | "The country is going down the drain and they are squabbling about the size of the plughole."
Jeremy Thorpe - one time leader of the Liberal Party. |
| 3 January 2010 | "If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems like it."
Clement Freud |
| 27 December 2009 | "The duty of a Christian is not to succeed, but to fail cheerfully."
Robert Louis Stevenson |
| 20 December 2009 | "Hypochondria is the one disease I have not got."
Graffiti - from Patrick Hughes' brilliant book, More on Oxymoron |
| 13 December 2009 | "Too much of reality television puts inflated egos in empty spaces and pumps them up further to see who explodes first."
John Lloyd, Financial Times |
