Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
The point of living and of being an optimist is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
If you're going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it's well furnished.
The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
Generals are fascinating cases of arrested development - after all, at five all of us wanted to be generals.
Acting on television is like being asked by the captain to entertain the passengers while the ship goes down.
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.
I'm Rally of Unionist Separist Extremes, sometimes known as the R.U.S.E. … It's the party at present in power.
As I grow older I find that though I think I'm saying the same things as I always did, people listen to me more.
I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.
Because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures.
Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.
I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
I don't know why I have these dreams. I've never wanted to be Pope. In fact, I have a greater affinity to Martin Luther.
At my age, I'm often asked if I'm frightened of death and my reply is always, I can't remember being frightened of birth.
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.
Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn't know! It was just... his... turn!
When I was small, I would refuse to drink when I ate fish because I thought the fish would reconstitute itself in my stomach
The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticient, while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.
And here is the lesson I learned in the army. If you want to do a thing badly, you have to work at it as though you want to do it well.
I am an international citizen conceived in Russia, born in England, working in Hollywood, living in Switzerland, and touring the World.
In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.
Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?
Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them.
British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive it. If you can't there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps.
Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.
Basically I'm a very serious person, but I think the form it takes with me is comedy. I see the amusing side of all potentially pompous situations.
There are experts in little things but there are no experts in big things. There are experts in this fact and that fact but there are no moral experts.
We used to have lots of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven't thought up questions.
Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.
Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head.
People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it's very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights.
The young need old men. They need men who are not ashamed of age, not pathetic imitations of themselves. ... Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.
Love is an act of endless forgiveness. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.
Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity.
Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only one day, of modern warfare.
I hate being moved. I hate that man who came in. So self-righteous, so cruel. He made fun of me, that's why I cried. You never did that. You led me into temptation by your - politeness.
I am convinced that it is of primordial importance to learn more every year than the year before. After all, what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn.
The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation.
I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.
The stupidity of a stupid man is exercised in a restricted field; the stupidity of an intelligent man has a much wider diffusion, and a far greater effect, aided as it is by the element of surprise.
American democracy is the inalienable right to sit on your front porch, in your pyjamas, drinking a can of beer and shouting out 'Where else is this possible?' Which doesn't seem to me to be freedom, really.
I had started by imitating a parrot, which is unusual, in that a parrot is supposed to imitate you. By taking the initiative you allow the parrot no alternative but to be itself, which proves again that attack is often the best defence.
Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I'll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks.
Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision.