A painter is a choreographer of space.
BARNETT NEWMAN
Cézanne! He was like the father of us all.
PABLO PICASSO
Cézanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.
HENRI MATISSE
In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.
PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR
When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.
PABLO PICASSO
Rembrandt painted 700 pictures. Of these, 3,000 are still in existence.
WILHELM VON BODE
Salvador Dalí seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman’s shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door.
LUIS BUÑUEL
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
PABLO PICASSO
The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.
GEORGES ROUAULT
PAUL CÉZANNE
When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
It’s enough to disgust you with love forever after. Those buttocks he gives those wenches ought not to be allowed.
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU Describing Renoir’s nudes in conversation with his secretary Paul Martet shortly before his death in 1929. Twice President of France, Clemenceau was a great friend of Claude Monet.
If necessary, I would even paint with my bottom.
JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.
KENNETH TYNAN
How vain painting is – we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don’t admire at all.
BLAISE PASCAL
It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
MARK ROTHKO
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
SIMONIDES In his time – the fifth century bc – could ask any price for his verse. He is often credited with the invention of the ‘memory theatre’ system that enabled people to remember long strings of poetry and prose before the invention of printing.
Painting is damned difficult … you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.
PAUL CÉZANNE
When I paint, the sea roars. The others splash about in the bath.
SALVADOR DALÍ
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.
GEORGES BRAQUE
Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do its bidding.
PABLO PICASSO
Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable.
PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR
The painting has a life of its own.
JACKSON POLLOCK
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
A painting without something disturbing in it – what’s that?
GEORGES BRAQUE
A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.
PABLO PICASSO
This is either a forgery or a damn clever original.
FRANK SULLIVAN
A paradox is only the truth standing on its head to attract attention.
G. K. CHESTERTON
There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
NIELS BOHR One of the great physicists, a Nobel Laureate who cracked the structure of the atom and ‘father-confessor’ on the Manhattan Project. He designed his own coat of arms that bore the motto: contraria sunt complementa (opposites are complementary).
All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
KABIR
The word ‘paradox’ has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.
BRIDGET RILEY
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
NIELS BOHR
Unless man can understand two contraries, that is, two contradictory things, together, then truly and without any doubt it is not easy to speak to him of such things. For, until he understands this, he has not yet started out on the path of the life that I am talking about.
HEINRICH SUSO
In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
EDGAR DEGAS
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What is a paradox, if not a truth opposed to the prejudices of the vulgar, ignored by the bulk of mankind, and which current experience prevents their being aware of? What is a paradox for us today will be a demonstrable truth for posterity.
DENIS DIDEROT
Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.
HAROLD S. HUBERT
Children need models rather than critics.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.
PETER DE VRIES
Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don’t put kids under surveillance. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Parents are not interested in justice, they’re interested in quiet.
BILL COSBY
If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them as you think you should and half the amount of money.
ESTHER SELSDON
If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
NORMAN DOUGLAS
If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.
DICK CAVETT
Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
You cannot have genius without patience.
MARGARET DELAND
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
THOMAS EDISON
If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
CHINESE PROVERB
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Impatient people always arrive too late.
JEAN DUTOURD
Beware the fury of a patient man.
JOHN DRYDEN
To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.
MORIHEI UESHIBA
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
GEORGE ORWELL
Peace on earth would be the end of civilization as we know it.
JOSEPH HELLER
Five enemies of peace inhabit with us – avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
PETRARCH
How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn’t have that dangerous beak.
JACK HANDEY
If a sufficient number of people who wanted to stop war really did gather together, they would first of all begin by making war upon those who disagreed with them. And it is still more certain that they would make war on people who also want to stop wars but in another way.
G. I. GURDJIEFF
Peace is costly but it is worth the expense.
KIKUYU PROVERB
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
ORSON WELLES
No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut.
CHANNING POLLOCK The highest-paid magician of his time, and the acknowledged master of conjuring doves from thin air. Always immaculately dressed, his devastating good looks won him a cult following as an actor in European art house movies. In 1969 he retired to his organic farm in California.
Peanut butter is the paté of childhood.
FLORENCE FABRICANT
If you don’t mind smelling like peanut butter for two or three days, peanut butter is darn good shaving cream.
BARRY GOLDWATER
Even what can appear to be the most common, small and simple of objects, can reveal itself to be on its own terms as complex and as grand as a space shuttle or a great suspension bridge.
HENRY PETROSKI
A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.
HOWARD WHITLEY EVES
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
G. K. CHESTERTON
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
MOTHER TERESA
Whenever two people meet there are six present. There is the man as he sees himself, each as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
WILLIAM JAMES
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one con stantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
GEORGE ORWELL
There used to be a me behind the mask, but I had it surgically removed.
PETER SELLERS
You cannot develop a personality with physics alone, the rest of life must be worked in.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
For I was: I was alive: I could feel: I could guard my personality, the imprint of that mysterious unity from which my being was derived.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.
BENJAMIN JOWETT
A river is a personality, with its rages and loves, its strength, its god of chance, its illnesses, its greed for adventure.
JEAN GIONO Best known for his internationally best-selling fable, The Man who Planted Trees (1953), the rights in which he offered for free to anyone who cared to publish it. ‘The goal was to make planting trees likeable,’ he once commented.
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another’s personality, marking vulnerable points.
AYN RAND
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous, and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.
JOSEPH HELLER
Few are open to conviction, but the majority of men are open to persuasion.
GOETHE
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER A doctor who was also an acclaimed concert pianist, Lutheran priest and author of groundbreaking biographies of Jesus and J. S. Bach. In 1905 he set up a missionary hospital in the depths of Gabon which won him the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
The object of oratory is not truth but persuasion.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.
CICERO
The ability to have our own way, and yet convince others that they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women, it is as common as eyebrows.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
The best way to persuade people is with your ears – by listening to them.
DEAN RUSK
The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and, above all, our vanity. The skilful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.
ERIC HOFFER
All are lunatics, but he who can analyse his delusion is called a philosopher.
AMBROSE BIERCE
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
RENÉ DESCARTES
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.
CHARLES M. SCHULZ
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
I’m not a philosopher. Guilty bystander, that’s my role.
PETER O’TOOLE
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to, but you must share a joke with someone else.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
HENRY BROOKS ADAMS An intellectual whose grandfather and great-grandfather were both US presidents. His best work is part autobiography, part social history. He proposed a theory of history based on the second law of thermodynamics and believed the dynamo was as symbolic of the modern age as the Virgin Mary had been of the medieval.
Nothing so absurd can be said that some philosopher has not said it.
CICERO
Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought to be entirely simple. Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that we have, in a senseless way, put there. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its method cannot be if it is to succeed. The complexity of philosophy is not the complexity of its subject matter, but of our knotted understanding.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophy is a wonderful subject, but it is necessarily unfinished and unfinishable. You really can’t solve anything. At the end of my life I want to know more than I did at the beginning. And I couldn’t get that from philosophy.
SIR ISAIAH BERLIN
Wonder is what the philosopher endures most; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this.
PLATO
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
What is the first business of one who practises philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he already knows.
EPICTETUS
Almost all of the hypotheses that have dominated modern philosophy were first thought of by the Greeks.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
For what is philosophy but the study of death?
SOCRATES
There may be some branches of human study – mechanics perhaps – where the personal spirit of the investigator does not affect the result; but philosophy is not one of them.
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
One becomes a Stoic, but one is born Epicurean.
DENIS DIDEROT
Organic Life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy, still be a man.
DAVID HUME
So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE
There are no fat war photographers.
PETER HOWE Former New York Times Magazine and Life magazine picture editor and author of the definitive record of modern war photography, Shooting Under Fire.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
DAVID BAILEY
One should photograph objects, not only for what they are, but for what else they are.
MINOR WHITE
A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR
Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.
EDWARD WESTON
The best zoom lens is your legs.
ERNST HAAS
In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.
LORD KELVIN
Physics. A subject that induces fear and loathing in students and most of their teachers. Synonyms include incomprehensible, waste of money and mind-numbing.
LEON LEDERMAN Nobel Physics laureate in 1988 for his work on neutrinos, particles that have no charge, and if they do have mass, it is very small. Did you know that more than fifty trillion of them pass through your body every second?
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
LORD KELVIN
Anyone who is not shocked by the quantum theory does not understand it.
NIELS BOHR
In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.
FREEMAN DYSON Dyson manages to be both a Christian and a scientist, with a gift for visionary predictions. ‘It’s better to be wrong than vague’ is one of his mantras. He has had many papers published in Physical Review.
A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.
NIELS BOHR
Take quantum theory, the laws of the subatomic world. Over the past century it has passed every single test with flying colours, with some predictions vindicated to ten places of decimals. Not surprisingly, physicists claim quantum theory as one of their greatest triumphs. But behind their boasts lies a guilty secret: they haven’t the slightest idea why the laws work, or where they come from.
ROBERT MATTHEWS
There is no democracy in physics. We can’t say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.
LUIS WALTER ALVAREZ
Before I die, I hope someone will explain quantum physics to me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.
WERNER HEISENBERG
It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.
MICHIO KAKU
I like relativity and quantum theories because I don’t understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.
D. H. LAWRENCE ‘Relativity’
Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that He doesn’t play dice.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school … It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see my physics students don’t understand it. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.
RICHARD FEYNMAN Flamboyant, bongo-playing, joke-telling physicist whose clear and imaginative way of communicating the most complex subjects gained him a huge following. He was the expert witness who took NASA to task over the Challenger disaster.
Physics is not religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.
LEON LEDERMAN
There was no there, there.
GERTRUDE STEIN On her home town, Oak Park, Illinois.
I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.
EDDIE IZZARD
All places are distant from Heaven alike.
ROBERT BURTON
To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfilment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one stands.
MARTIN BUBER
Play is the highest form of research
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
ARNOLD TOYNBEE
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.
BUDDHA
The understanding of atomic physics is child’s play, compared with the understanding of child’s play.
DAVID KRESH
We do not cease to play because we grow old. We grow old because we cease to play.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
CHARLES LAMB
If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world, it is a roast pheasant with bread sauce.
SYDNEY SMITH
Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.
TALLEYRAND
There is but one pleasure in life equal to that of being called on to make an after-dinner speech, and that is not being called on to make one.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth … and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
FRANCIS BACON
The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
FREDERICK THE GREAT
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
WALTER BAGEHOT
There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it.
ANDREW JACKSON
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU The intrepid and controversial aristocrat and bluestocking who travelled and wrote vividly about her visits to the Ottoman empire. She also brought back the Arab techniques of inoculating against smallpox, a disease which had left her badly disfigured.
Nothing gives an author so much pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
VOLTAIRE
I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.
HEINRICH HEINE
Buying is a profound pleasure.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.
OVID
Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.
WILLIAM COWPER Eighteenth-century English nature poet whose life was scarred by depressive episodes. He once tried to drown himself in the Thames near Billingsgate, but failed because the tide was out at the time.
All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year’s revenues.
JONATHAN SWIFT
The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Pleasure is not happiness. It has no more importance than a shadow following a man.
MUHAMMAD ALI
I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
E. B. WHITE One of the small band of brilliantly funny writers that made the New Yorker America’s most influential magazine. Joining the staff in 1927 he remained a contributor until his death in 1985. His children’s novels Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952) remain best-sellers, and his revision of The Elements of Style is still on every writer’s desk.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
An actor entering through a door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
BILLY WILDER
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
ANTON CHEKHOV
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
DON MARQUIS
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
JAMES DICKEY
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
WALLACE STEVENS
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. ELIOT
A haiku is an open door that looks shut.
REGINALD H. BLYTH
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
PLATO
When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry.
NIELS BOHR
Keats and Shelley were the last poets who were up to date with their chemical knowledge.
J. B. S. HALDANE
Poets are masters of us ordinary men in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
SIGMUND FREUD
Whoever wins to a great scientific truth will find a poet before him in the quest.
FREDERIC WOOD-JONES
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
PAUL DIRAC Nobel laureate in 1933, famous for predicting the existence of antimatter and for producing Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930), a model of scientific clarity still used today. His hard-line outlook is evidenced in this admonishment of his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer’s enthusiasm for poetry.
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money, either.
ROBERT GRAVES
Money is a kind of poetry.
WALLACE STEVENS
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
PHILIP LARKIN
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
WALLACE STEVENS
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
CARL SANDBURG
The chief use [of the overt content of poetry] … is to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice bit of meat for the house-dog.
T. S. ELIOT
My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.
GROUCHO MARX
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
T. S. ELIOT
I envy the poet. He is encouraged towards drunkenness and wallows with nubile wenches while the painter must endure wretchedness and pain for his art.
REMBRANDT
ROBERT BURTON
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
G. K. CHESTERTON
A fool and his money are soon elected.
WILL ROGERS
We offer the party as a big tent. How we do that [recognise the big tent philosophy] within the platform, the preamble to the platform or whatnot, that remains to be seen. But that message will have to be articulated with great clarity.
DAN QUAYLE This remark won him a special mention at the 1991 Plain English Foot in Mouth Awards.
90 per cent of the politicians give the other 10 per cent a bad reputation.
HENRY KISSINGER
There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.
SIR ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME
Successful politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.
ADLAI STEVENSON
Since a politician never believes what he himself says, he is surprised when others believe it.
GENERAL DE GAULLE
The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.
BORIS JOHNSON
Next week there can’t be any crisis. My schedule is already full.
HENRY KISSINGER
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
FRANK ZAPPA
Sex and politics are a lot alike. You don’t have to be good at them to enjoy them.
SENATOR BARRY GOLDWATER
The American political system is like fast food – mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.
P. J. O’ROURKE
Politics is the art of preventing people from becoming involved in affairs which concern them.
PAUL VALÉRY
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
PLATO
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
OSCAR AMERINGER
It makes no difference who you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
GORE VIDAL
A liberal is a man who leaves the room when the fight starts.
HEYWOOD C. BROUN Campaigner and champion of the underdog, member of Algonquin Round Table and friend to the Marx brothers. His ‘It Seems to Me’ column was so popular that 3,000 mourners attended his funeral in New York in 1939.
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they have stolen.
MORT SAHL
I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.
RONALD REAGAN
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
RICHARD M. NIXON
Not every problem that someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
HERBERT MARCUSE
Too bad that all the people who know how to run this country are busy driving taxis and cutting hair.
GEORGE BURNS
I admire the Pope. I have a lot of respect for anyone who can tour without an album.
RITA RUDNER
I would have made a good pope.
RICHARD M. NIXON
It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.
POPE JOHN XXIII
Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
My feelings of smallness and nothingness always kept me good company.
POPE JOHN XXIII Known as Il Papa Buono (‘the good pope’) he convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962 which did much to liberalise the Catholic Church. Beatified in 2000, his body was put on display (he died in 1963) and seemed remarkably well preserved, although the Church officially denied this the status of miracle.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Amongst my most prized possessions are the words that I have never spoken.
ORSON REGA CARD
Asceticism is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.
ALI IBN ABU TALIB Known more simply as Ali, he was Muhammad’s right-hand man, and married his daughter. He was the last of the four caliphs who succeeded the Prophet, but the first infallible Imam for the Shia sect, who defied the authority of the others in the great Sunni/Shia split that continues to divide Islam.
You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.
EL-GHAZALI
In this life, all that I have is my word and my balls and I do not break them for nobody.
AL CAPONE
The man who has nothing to boast of but his ancestors is like a potato – the only good belonging to him is under ground.
SIR THOMAS OVERBURY Slowly poisoned while incarcerated in the Tower of London. The devious adulteress Frances Howard had decided to remove him, to clear her way to marrying Robert Carr, a match Overbury had advised his friend against in a poem, The Wife. Once the plot was uncovered in 1614, the poem became a best-seller.
What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
A. A. MILNE
None for me. I appreciate the potato only as a protection against famine; except for that, I know of nothing more eminently tasteless.
JEAN-ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN
Found a little patched-up inn in the village of Bulson. Proprietor had nothing but potatoes; but what a feast he laid before me. Served them in five different courses – potato soup, potato fricassee, potatoes creamed, potato salad and finished with potato pie. It may be because I had not eaten for 36 hours, but that meal seems about the best I ever had.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR During his progress across north-east France in 1944.
Practice is nine-tenths.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
MARTHA GRAHAM
I have a theory that there is something abnormal about children who like to practise instruments They are either geniuses or, more often, completely untalented. I certainly did not like to practise, and the teacher who hit me, and the view of the park, did not help to improve my attitude.
GEORG SOLTI
He who knoweth the precepts by heart, but faileth to practise them, is like unto one who lighteth a lamp and then shutteth his eyes.
SIDDHA NAGARJUNA The the most important Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself, active in the second century ad. He developed the concept of ‘emptiness’: because everything is always changing, nothing is ever fixed or present, therefore reality is ‘empty’. Quantum physics tends to back him up.
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was ‘thank you’, that would suffice.
MEISTER ECKHART
There are few men who dare publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this; Great God, grant that two and two be not four.
IVAN TURGENEV
Often when I pray, I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address.
C. S. LEWIS
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
MAHATMA GANDHI
The fewer words the better prayer.
MARTIN LUTHER
The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a three-speed bicycle is just so unlikely I can’t go along with it.
QUENTIN CRISP
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
EMO PHILLIPS
It’s tough to make predictions – especially about the future.
YOGI BERRA
There are two classes of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.
J. K. GALBRAITH
Old men and comets have long been reverenced for the same reason; their long beards and pretences to foretell events.
JONATHAN SWIFT
The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines, from one city to another, almost as fast as birds fly, fifteen or twenty miles an hour.
OLIVER EVANS
I see no reason to suppose that these machines will ever force themselves into general use.
DUKE OF WELLINGTON On steam locomotives in 1827.
The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.
SIR WILLIAM PREECE Chief Engineer, the British Post Office, 1876.
The ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
WESTERN UNION INTERNAL MEMO, 1876
Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress.
SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS On Edison’s announcement of a successful light bulb in 1880.
Radio has no future.
LORD KELVIN
I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
LORD KELVIN
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.
WILBUR WRIGHT Speech to the Aero Club de France, 1908.
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris, because no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.
ORVILLE WRIGHT
The motor car will help solve the congestion of traffic.
ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR
Aeroplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.
MARSHAL FERDINAND FOCH
Make no mistake, this weapon will change absolutely nothing.
GENERAL DOUGLAS HAIG On the machine gun, 1914.
There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
ERNEST RUTHERFORD
Space travel is utter bilge.
SIR RICHARD VAN DER RIET WOOLLEY British Astronomer Royal (1956–71) in 1956, a year before the launch of Sputnik 1.
Space travel is bunk
SIR HAROLD SPENCER-JONES British Astronomer Royal (1933–55) in 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik 1.
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
POPULAR MECHANICS, 1949
Landing and moving around on the moon offer so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.
LORD KELVIN
It will be years before a woman either leads the party or becomes Prime Minister. I certainly do not expect to see it happening in my time.
MARGARET THATCHER Quoted in an interview with the Liverpool Post in 1974.
The President of today is just the postage stamp of tomorrow.
GRACIE ALLEN
I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That’s all the powers of the President amount to.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
Being a president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
The time is at hand when the wearing of a prayer shawl and skullcap will not bar a man from the White House, unless, of course, the man is Jewish.
WALLACE MARKFIELD Through the character of Jewish stand-up comedian Jules Farber in his 1974 comic novel, You Could Live if They Let You.
McKinley shows all the backbone of a chocolate eclair.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
No president has ever enjoyed himself as much as I.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Sure, it’s a big job – but I don’t know anyone who can do it better than I can.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.
RICHARD M. NIXON
I guess it just proves that anyone in America can be President.
GERALD FORD
I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don’t seem to grasp that I am President.
WARREN G. HARDING
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I. Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.
PEGGY NOONAN Commentator and Reagan speechwriter, she was also responsible for George Bush Sr’s famous 1988 quote: ‘Read my lips, no new taxes.’
The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.
RONALD REAGAN Fortieth President (1977–1981), in 1973, while he was Governor of California.
But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.
RONALD REAGAN
Ronald Reagan doesn’t dye his hair – he’s just prematurely orange.
GERALD FORD
I have opinions of my own – strong opinions – but I don’t always agree with them.
GEORGE BUSH SR
In principle, I am against principles.
TRISTAN TZARA
When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
OTTO VON BISMARCK
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
ALFRED ADLER
Those are my principles and, if you don’t like them … well, I’ve got others.
GROUCHO MARX
No one who has not sat in prison knows what the State is like.
LEO TOLSTOY
The worst evil of being in prison is that one can never bar one’s door.
STENDAHL
What is a ship but a prison?
ROBERT BURTON
A man without a boat is a prisoner.
FAROESE PROVERB
Don’t do drugs because if you do drugs you’ll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.
JOHN HARDWICK
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I’ve spent more time in jail.
ROBERT MITCHUM
The problem when solved will be simple.
CHARLES FRANKLIN KETTERING
The solutions all are simple – after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
POUL ANDERSON
For every problem there is a solution that is neat and simple – and wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
THEODORE RUBIN
You’ve got to take the bull by the teeth.
SAMUEL GOLDWYN
It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
M. SCOTT PECK
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
When you worry, you go over the same ground endlessly and come out the same place you started. Thinking makes progress from one place to another; worry remains static. The problem of life is to change worry into thinking and anxiety into creative action.
HAROLD B. WALKER
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
ALAN WATTS One of the most urbane and approachable of modern mystics, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science to remind us that the way we think of ourselves as ‘an ego in a bag of skin’ is a dangerous illusion, supported by neither science nor intuition.
Early on in the space race, NASA spent much time and effort seeking a metal robust enough to withstand the heat of re-entry and protect the astronauts. The endeavor failed. At some point, a clever person changed the problem. The real problem was to protect the astronauts, and perhaps this could be done without a material that could withstand re-entry. The solution, the ablative heat shield, had characteristics just opposite to those originally sought. Rather than withstanding the heat, it slowly burnt away and carried the heat away from the vehicle.
D. N. PERKINS
There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
ROBERT FULGHUM Unitarian who hit upon a winning formula in his 1986 book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, in which he uses simple prose and a child’s-eye perspective to explore spiritual issues. His books have sold over sixteen million copies.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
THOMAS MERTON
Know the true value of time; snatch, seize and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
LORD CHESTERFIELD
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
PABLO ICASSO
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.
AARON BURR Controversial US politician and third vice-president who famously killed his rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Soon afterwards he was accused of attempting to steal the Louisiana Purchase and crown himself Emperor of Mexico. He was acquitted, but spent the rest of his life on the run, even living in London for a while with Jeremy Bentham.
Progress is not created by contented people.
FRANK TYGER
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness; when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
GEORGE SANTAYANA His writings are universally anthologised, and this passage from The Life of Reason (1905) is almost always misquoted as ‘Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.’ Originally, it was not a quote about learning lessons from history, but about how knowledge is acquired.
A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress.
MILAN KUNDERA
Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopaedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old-fashioned way.
EDWARD DE BONO
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to show us the value of a job.
VICTOR HUGO
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Any comfortable American who is cynical of progress – or the competent decency of modern civilization – hasn’t pondered how life was for our ancestors. Any day that cossacks haven’t burned your home should start out a happy one, overflowing with optimism.
M. N. PLANO A mystery solved. The pseudonym of multi-award-winning hard sci-fi writer David Brin. Best known for dramatising the impact of future technologies on human society, he has also conducted savage but thoughtful attacks on both Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings for their elitism and nostalgia-tinged conservatism.
Belief in progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians. It is the individual relying upon his neighbours to do his work.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?
STANISLAUS LEC Lifelong opponent of all forms of totalitarianism. He escaped from a concentration camp in 1943 and joined the resistance, only to end up battling the Polish communist authorities to allow his work to be published. One of the great twentieth-century aphorists, his massive popularity earned him a state funeral in Warsaw in 1966.
Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
A proverb is the horse which can carry one swiftly to the discovery of ideas.
YORUBA PROVERB
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
JOHN KEATS
Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
CHINUA ACHEBE
My own view is that Scotch proverbs are often a little vague to outsiders, since one can’t see the sense for the Scotch. For example: ‘Better thole a grumph than a sumph.’ That doubtless expresses a high grade of wisdom, painfully arrived at by those who have tholed sumphs, perhaps through no fault of their own, only to discover when it is too late that they were the grumph type all along. Again: ‘If a man’s gaun doon the brae ilka ane gies him a jundie.’ I have a strange feeling that I’ve been through that very thing myself, but I’ll never be sure.
WILL CUPPY New Yorker regular of the 1930s and 1940s whose easy style belied the depth of his research. His favourite method was to copy out notes on to 3- x 5-inch index cards, sometimes filling hundreds for one short article.
Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
VOLTAIRE
Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats.
DOUGLAS BUSCH
Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.
D. H. LAWRENCE St Mawr (1925) in reference to the ‘fiendish psychologist’ Mrs Witt.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
SIGMUND FREUD
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
JAMES THURBER
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.
W. H. AUDEN
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
JOHN ANDREW HOLMES
Everything happens for a reason; if you can’t find a reason for something, there’s a reason for that.
CHRIS LEVI
Man’s ideal state is realised when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy – that he live in accordance with his own nature.
SENECA
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
If you ask me why I came to this Earth, I’ll tell you: I came to live out loud.
ÉMILE ZOLA
Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn’t got anything special in mind. If he broods on this sombre theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady’s watch are revolving more purposely than he is.
JAMES THURBER
There is one thing that we all must do. If we do everything else but that one thing, we will be lost. And if we do nothing else but that one thing, we will have lived a glorious life.
RUMI
In the dim background of our mind, we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
WILLIAM JAMES