Lifestyle/Sayings and Quotes

A cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education – Mark Twain

A country fit for heroes to live in – David Lloyd George

A day like today is not a day for, sort of, soundbites, really – we can leave those at home – but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders, I really do – Tony Blair, at Hillsborough Castle in 1985

A desperate disease demands a dangerous remedy – Guy Fawkes

A little learning is a dangerous thing – Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Criticism

A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do – Alan Ladd, in Shane

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic – Josef Stalin

A thing of beauty is a joy forever – Keats

A (truly good) person is a rare bird – Juvenal, in Satires

A verbal contract ain’t worth the paper it’s written on – Sam Goldwyn

A woman can never be too rich or too slim – Wallis Simpson

An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind – Gandhi

Adversity makes a strange bedfellow

All roads lead to Rome

Always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse – Hilaire Belloc

Am I my brother’s keeper? – Cain

And so to bed – Samuel Pepys

Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad – WC Fields

Art is the lie that enables us to realise the truth – Picasso

Barking dogs seldom bite

Better late than never – Livy

Bob's your uncle – is thought to have derived from Robert Cecil's appointment of his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as Minister for Ireland

Brevity is the soul of wit

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker – Ogden Nash

Carthage must be destroyed – Cato the Elder

Cogito ergo sum – Descartes. ‘I think therefore I am’

Come up and see my sometime – WC Fields to Mae West in My Little Chickadee

Corridors of power – term coined by CP Snow

Crisis, what crisis? – James Callaghan, in 1979, referring to the winter of discontent

Curses come home to roost like chickens

Diligence is the mother of good luck

Don’t swap horses in midstream – Abraham Lincoln

Dreams are the royal road to consciousness – Sigmund Freud

Drink is doing us more damage than all the German submarines put together – Lloyd George

Drink to thee only with thine eyes – Ben Johnson

Elementary my dear Watson – used by PG Wodehouse, not Conan Doyle

England and America are two countries separated by a common language – GB Shaw

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes – Oscar Wilde, in Lady Windermere's Fan

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest

Fine words butter no parsnips

First they came… – Martin Niemoller

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread – Alexander Pope

Fortune favours the bold – Virgil, in Aenied

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ear – Mark Anthony

From the sublime to the ridiculous – Napoleon

From pillar to post – term used in real tennis

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Give me liberty, or give me death! – Patrick Henry

Give us the tools and we will finish the job – Churchill to Roosevelt

Go west, young man – Horace Greeley

God does not play dice – Einstein’s reaction to Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, in a letter to Max Born

God is dead – Nietzsche

God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen – Stephen Hawking

God said “Let Newton be!” and all was Light – Alexander Pope

God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world – Robert Browning

He was not of an age, but for all time – Ben Johnson, on Shakespeare

He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches – GB Shaw

Hell is other people – from the Sartre play No Exit

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination – Andrew Lang

History will be kind to me, as I intend to write it – Churchill

Hope is the worst of all evils – Nietzsche

Hope springs eternal in the human breast – Alexander Pope

I can resist anything but temptation – Oscar Wilde

I counted them out, and I counted them all back – Brian Hanrahan, in Falklands War, referring to Sea Harriers

I don’t want to be Poet Laureate. I’d rather stick to writing – Walter Scott

I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts – from Virgil’s Aeniad

I know the right kind of political Leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating machine – Nye Bevan

I married beneath me, all women do – Nancy Astor

I must plough my furrow alone – Earl of Rosebery

I never see a throne without feeling the urge to sit on it – Napoleon

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics – Richard Feynman

I think the answer lies in the soil – Arthur Fallowfield

I used to be Snow White but I drifted – Mae West

I want to be alone – Greta Garbo, in Grand Hotel

I will show you fear in a handful of dust – TS Eliot

I would sell London if I could find a buyer – Richard I, who needed money for the crusades

If god does not exist, it would be necessary to invent him – Voltaire

If only I had known, I would have become a watchmaker – Einstein

If you can actually count your money, then you're not a rich man – J Paul Getty

If you can't stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen – Harry S Truman

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens – Woody Allen

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king – Erasmus

In the long run we are all dead – JM Keynes on the great depression

It was a dark and stormy night – penned by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton at the beginning of his novel Paul Clifford

It is better to be born lucky than rich

Lay down your arms, and surrender to me – Anne Sheldon

Lies, damned lies and statistics – Disraeli, not Mark Twain

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life – Oscar Wilde

Love is a kind of warfare – Ovid

Man is by nature a political animal – Aristotle

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to – Mark Twain

Man is nothing but what he makes of himself – Jean Paul Sartre

Man proposes, but God disposes – Thomas A Kempis

Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Many a true word is spoken in jest – from Chaucer’s Monks Prologue

Marry in Lent, live to repent

Men should pray for a sound mind in a sound body – Juvenal

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones – Truman Capote Nature abhors a vacuum – Aristotle

Never complain and never explain – Disraeli

Never let school interfere with your education – Mark Twain

Never look a gift horse in the mouth – Saint Jerome

No room to swing a cat – a cat is a whip with nine notches

Nobody expected me to lay a golden egg – Einstein

No man is an island – John Donne

Nothing save a battle lost is so terrible as a battle won – Wellington, after Battle of Waterloo

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds – Robert Oppenheimer, from the Bhagavad Gita

Now I know there is a God in heaven – Einstein’s reaction to a performance by Yehudi Menuhin

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning – Churchill, about El Alamein in 1942

Oh what a tangled web we weave – Walter Scott

One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary – Stephen Hawking

One wears perfume wherever one wants to be kissed – Coco Chanel

Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness – from Book of Judges

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel – Samuel Johnson

Philosophy is a mug’s game – Iris Murdoch

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun – Mao Zedong

Power is the great aphrodisiac – Henry Kissinger

Power without responsibility – Rudyard Kipling

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely – Lord Acton

Procrastination is the thief of time

Property is theft! – French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Publish and be damned – Duke of Wellington on being blackmailed by John Joseph Stockdale and Harriette Wilson

Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry – Oliver Cromwell

Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in a mixed company – Earl of Chesterfield

Religion is the opium of the people – Karl Marx

Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience – Dr. Johnson

Rise early, work hard, strike oil – J Paul Getty

Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: 'Do not march on Moscow’... Rule 2 is: ‘Do not go fighting with your land armies in China’ – Bernard Montgomery

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short – man’s life, according to Thomas Hobbes

Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off – Bismarck

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – on edge of £2 coin, from a letter written by Newton to Hooke

Stop telling God what to do – Bohr to Einstein

Stuff happens – Donald Rumsfeld, after the looting of Baghdad

Tell the truth to shame the devil

Thank God I’ve done my duty – Nelson’s dying words

The ballot is stronger than the bullet – Abraham Lincoln

The buck stops here – Harry S Truman

The chief business of the American people is business – Calvin Coolidge

The city of dreaming spires – Matthew Arnold’s description of Oxford

The common people are only interested in bread and circuses (games) – Juvenal

The customer is never wrong – Cesar Ritz, the Swiss hotelier

The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing – Oscar Wilde

The English winter – ending in July to recommence in August – Lord Byron

The female of the species is more deadly than the male – Rudyard Kipling

The game is afoot – Sherlock Holmes

The ghost walks – saying in the theatre, means that salaries are about to be paid

The great questions of the day cannot be solved by speeches and majority votes, but by blood and iron – Bismarck

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world

The man in the moon came tumbling down, and asked the way to Norwich

The only good Indian is a dead Indian – Phil Sheridan

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – FD Roosevelt in 1932

The only things certain in life are death and taxes – Benjamin Franklin

The proper study of mankind is man – Alexander Pope

The road to hell is paved with good intentions – Saint Bernard of Clairveux

The wages of sin is death – from Book of Romans

Their name liveth for evermore – on war memorials, chosen by Kipling, from Book of Ecclesiastes

There are two teams out there. One of them is trying to play cricket and the other is not – Bill Woodfull during the bodyline series

There’s a sucker born every minute – PT Barnum

They also serve who only stand and wait – the last line of the poem On His Blindness, by John Milton

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana

Three score and 10 – days of our lives, from Book of Psalms

Time and tide wait for no man – means that people cannot stop the passage of time, so should not delay

Time, the devourer of all things – Ovid

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all – Tennyson

To err is human, but it feels divine – Mae West

To err is human, to forgive divine – Alexander Pope

War is all hell – William T Sherman

Warts and all – alludes to the instructions of Oliver Cromwell to Sir Peter Lely, who was painting his portrait, that it include any imperfections

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink – from Rime of the Ancient Mariner

We are all the president’s men – Henry Kissinger

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language – Oscar Wilde

What an artist dies with me – Nero’s last words

What can’t be cured must be endured

When the facts change, I change my mind – John Maynard Keynes

When I want to read a novel, I write one – Disraeli

When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better – Mae West

Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise – Thomas Gray

Who will fight with me? – Julius Caesar

Who will watch the watchers? or Who will guard the guardians themselves? – Juvenal

Wisdom outweighs any wealth – Sophocles

Wives and sweethearts may they never meet

You cannot serve God and mammon

You need a long spoon to sup with the devil

You shouldn’t tell tales out of school