An eclectic collection that made us pause for thought.
It is amazing what you can achieve when you don’t care who gets the credit.
“Besides, its very simple: if I didn’t have servants I couldn’t knit any more for the poor” said that excellent lady at that excellent luncheon.
When told by his host that it was a great honour to have accepted his invitation to lunch on his 90th birthday, Sir John Gielgud replied: “Oh, I’m delighted to have been asked. All my real friends are dead, you know.”
Definition of an economist:
“An economist is a fellow who knows 101 ways of making love and doesn’t have a girl.”
A good book is a guilty pleasure to be enjoyed in secret.
There are three sides to every argument: my side, your side and the truth.
I want America to know that I’m, like, ready to lead.
I like working on holiday because it makes me feel important.
Extremely ugly blocks..arranged with most unpicturesque taste.
The gestation period for an elephant is about the same as a Financial Services Authority consultation.
Where the wind of the argument goes, there we must follow.
Better a genius without faith than a believer without talent.
If you get arrogant, you lose your way and start making mistakes.
As profits grow incrementally, do losses accumulate excrementally?
For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is coming to an end.
A Churchillian comment on the financial crisis:
“Never has so much been owed by so few to so many!”
This is worse than a divorce.
I’ve lost half my net worth and I still have a wife.
An example of ambiguous drafting or mis-spelling? –
“The management does not except responsibility for loss of contents or damage to vehicles whilst left in this car park. Vehicles are left entirely at the owners risk.
Yes we can.
Why did nobody notice?
I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.
Some silver linings will come out of this cloud.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
If you sweep Mother Nature out of the door with a broom, she will come back through the window with a pitchfork.
Christmas is when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when governments tell adults what they want, and their kids pay for it.
When presented with a miniature jar of honey at a guest house where he was staying, Jimmy Shand asked the landlady:
“Do you keep a bee?”
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
The art of cross-examination is not to examine crossly.
Energy saving at the Treasury:
It is rumoured that Treasury officals are considering a new scheme: until further notice the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off.
I am convinced it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally, not unilaterally, when using force around the world. By this, I don’t mean that…. the UN Security Council should have a veto on our actions. Nor do I mean that we round up the United Kingdom and Togo and then do as we please.
High finance is just a game of noughts and crosses. The market adds a lot of noughts to your fortune, then it comes back and crosses them off!
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
I am called Spiderman, not because I am lithe and active, but because I find it difficult to get out of the bath!
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
The financial world is stumbling blindly through a cognitive fog.
It was far better than being psycho-analysed. It gave me a completely new idea of myself.
Stores don’t like customers, they like credit cards!
My fear is we are substituting public debt for private debt.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Does anyone ever know what he needs to know until he has the opportunity to know it?
I take full responsibility. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately …
There are two ways of doing everything, and the wrong one always comes first.
If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.
Defintion of Derivatives:
“Financial weapons of mass destruction”
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its fits of morality.
A superintelligent machine could be the last invention humans ever make.
It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.
It would be a great reform in politics if wisdom could be made to spread as easily and as rapidly as folly.
Felix qui potuit cognoscere causas rerum. (For those who do not know Latin, it means Happy is the man who could know the causes of things.)
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken Nature’s social union.