An eclectic collection that made us pause for thought.
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
Les Anglais – ils parlent beaucoup.
Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.
Crime against humanity is a bourgeois notion.
Is life worth living? It depends upon the liver.
Judgments of the Supreme Court are not final because they are right; they are right because they are final.
I was with the devil and touched the hand of God.
Television has now become the enemy of creativity…They have reduced it to a grotesque reality game.
Whenever I hear the word security I reach for my gun.
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.
All too often today’s hot potato becomes tomorrow’s organic compost.
I felt like the captain of a sinking ship.
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.
Even I don’t look like Cindy Crawford in the morning.
Latin has no place in the teaching of modern English, per se.
Nowadays it seems that almost any noun can be verbed.
Almost everyone in Sweden has more than the average number of legs!
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.
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.
The UK has got a bit silly architecturally and the architectural profession and Cabe have produced an awful lot of excessive buildings.
The privacy of historical figures is important.
A trim 54 year-old in a suit that despite its demure grey tones looks as if it had been woven from liquidised banknotes.
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.”
Reform delayed is revolution begun.
A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but chooses not to.
Human rights law tends to be applied to rather unattractive and unpleasant people.
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.
When your painting first sells for over a million, that’s when they start calling you Mr. Tuymans.
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.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
I’m mostly content being a writer, but I sometimes think it would be cool to have a job.
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
The trouble with free election is that you never know who is going to win.
Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in.
A gentleman is never unintentionally rude.
Swearing is a weakness – a sign that the brain isn’t working fast enough to construct a decent sentence and get your point across.
When a person’s vanity exceeds their ability, no matter how great that ability, then they become a liability.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
You don’t create a tiger by inflating a cat.
I tell you what, you do the fighting and I’ll do the talking.
It is one of the pervasive features of philosophy that nothing in it is ever entirely satisfactory.
When you find anyone agreeing with you, change your mind.
Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.
The making of laws is like the making of sausages—the less you know about the process the more you respect the result.
Twitter is not just a phoney form of conversation, it is a deceptive medium for discussion.
I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people… Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
Overheard after a moving service at a crematorium:
“That was a funeral to die for.”
All ideologies are essentially bovine.