Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say
that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.
-- Baron Munchausen (played by John Neville) in The Adventures of
Baron Munchausen
Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying
slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our
memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the
passing years. Heh! That's hard to say with false teeth!
-- The Wienie King (played by Robert Dudley) in The Palm Beach Story
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and
Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making
mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the
mistakes from being corrected.
-- G. K. Chesterton in The Illustrated London News (19/4/1924)
I'm going crazy. I'm standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy!
-- Tracy Lord (played by Katharine Hepburn) in The Philadelphia Story
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to
despise the wealth it prevents you from achieving.
-- Russell Green
The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland;
but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
-- from Unix fortune programme
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.
-- Addison DeWitt (played by George Sanders) in All About Eve
It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept
anything but the best, you very often get it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
So I'm a ditherer? Well, I'm jolly well going to dither, then!
-- Cosmo Topper (played by Roland Young) in Topper
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and
cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen,
in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in
logic, not in imagination.
-- G. K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy, chapter 2)
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray,
Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right
answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
-- Groucho Marx
By whom?
-- Dorothy Parker, upon hearing someone say she was outspoken
If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Frobisher
getting through the Latin degree papers of the London University
Examinations Board he wouldn't have had to fall back on camels and the
eyes of needles, and Miss Frobisher's name would be a delightful
surprise to encounter in Matthew, Chapter 19; as would, even more
surprisingly, the London University Examinations Board.
-- character A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of
Love
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for
the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
-- John Maynard Keynes
It's a perfect situation
I can't hope to understand.
-- Electronic ("Try All You Want" on the album Electronic)
I'm villifying you for God's sake--pay attention!
-- Henry II (played by Peter O'Toole) in The Lion in Winter
Prince John (Nigel Terry): A knife! He's got a knife!
Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn): Of course he has a knife. He always has a
knife. We all have knives! It's 1183 and we're all barbarians!
-- from The Lion in Winter
I hate cellphones. I feel like, if God meant you to carry on loud one-way
conversations in public, he would've made you a crazy person.
-- Garrison Keillor (as Guy Noir) on The Prairie Home Companion
There is no case of Coming to an End but has about it something of an
effort and a jerk, as though Nature abhorred it.
-- Hilaire Belloc (On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, p.255)