Humorists

"Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand."

"To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal."

"The coffee having arrived (how hard it is to write without the ablative absolute!) we guzzled genteelly for a while..."

"Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun."

"I don't much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p.m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling."

"I could almost hear him scrabbling about in his brain for a deft, light opening. His Oscar Wilde touch. Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore."

"The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot."

""You would now be an enemy, in the third class, of my own organization." "Only third class?" I asked in the indignant tones which Queen Victoria surely used when she received the Abyssinian Order of Chastity, Second Class."

"What a dark world—who knows?— Ours to inhabit is! One touch and what a strange Glory might burst on us, What a hid universe!"

"No Jew was ever fool enough to turn Christian unless he was a clever man."

"Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan — spoiled."

"No... the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman."

"America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!"

"Oh, for the simple life, For tents and starry skies!"

"The past is our cradle, not our prison, and there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition."

"How full and rich a world Theirs to inhabit is— Sweet scent of grass and bloom, Playmates’ glad symphony, Cool touch of western wind, Sunshine’s divine caress. How should they know or feel They are in darkness? But, oh, the miracle! If a Redeemer came, Laid finger on their eyes— One touch and what a world, New-born in loveliness!"

"An Edward's England spat us out - a band Foredoomed to redden Vistula or Rhine, And leaf-like toss with every wind malign. All mocked the faith they could not understand."

"Teach foreign how to be alive in England."

"Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and, generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school."

"The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science, their labour bore fruit. To the eternal glory of British science their labour bore fruit. They suggested that if you do not drink it clear, or with lemon or rum and sugar, but pour a few drops of cold milk into it, and no sugar at all, the desired object is achieved. Once this refreshing, aromatic, oriental beverage was successfully transformed into colourless and tasteless gargling-water, it suddenly became the national drink of Great Britain and Ireland – still retaining, indeed usrping, the high-sounding title of tea."

"When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles, – but never England."

"An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one."

"Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles."

"In England everything is the other way round."

"I recur here to my personal point about the tendency to miss what the title means; or even what the title says. An article like this is called subjective because it has no subject. In a rambling column, whether because it is personal or impersonal, it is permissible to introduce personal trifles about oneself, as well as about other people, so long as it is made sufficiently obvious that they are trifling. And I may remark in this connexion, or disconnexion, that I happen to have a very strong objection to that trick of missing the point of a story, or sometimes even the obvious sense of the very name of a story. I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book. For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is, merely by discovering what it professes to be. … It is odd that one example occurred in my own case... in a book called The Man Who was Thursday."

"[S]he had a singular spaciousness of mind in which nothing little or mean could live."

"On the Continent people have good food; in England, people have good table manners."

"Trent read and re-read the pitiful message [a suicide note], so full of the awful egotism of grief."

"I know, if anyone does — all research workers know — how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them."

"And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot."

"You may as well know, Philip — you'll soon find out, anyhow — the truth is she will flirt with any man that she doesn't actively dislike. She's so brimful of life she can't hold herself in — or she won't, rather; she says there's no harm in it, and she doesn't care if there is. Before her marriage she didn't go on in that way, but since it turned out badly she has been simply uncivilized on that point. And her being perfectly clear-headed about it makes it so much worse."

"He was less afraid of gentlemen than of most other kinds of men; for instinct told him that, however detestable a gentleman's personal character might be, he was usually not inclined to be censorious or even inquisitive about the conduct of his fellow-creatures."

"There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings."

"That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile — that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself."

"Is it a cosmic law, d'you think, that conceited men's hats are always too small?"

"As he went through the half-darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like many another in case like his, was far from grasping fully how bad his luck had been, how little the chance that life had offered. Neglect and harshness had marked him in infancy; there had been nothing at any time to tell against the effect of them. But in all of the past that he remembered and could understand there had been more than enough to be stored up as matter for savage resentment, for the soul-sick criminal's conviction that he owes the world no more than such repayment as he can make in its own coin."

"Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime."

"I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism too, unless I misunderstand that system."

"She [Mabel Manderson] uttered a little laugh of impatience. 'So you think he has been talking me round. No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do it. Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are, Mr Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was foolishness in you to have a certain suspicion of me after seeing me and being in my atmosphere, as you said.' Trent started in his chair. She glanced at him and went on: 'Now, I and my atmosphere are much obliged to you, but we must stand up for the rights of other atmospheres. I know a great deal more about Mr Marlowe's atmosphere than you know about mine even now. I saw him constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a poor woman's pocket, Mr Trent.'"

"George the Third Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder."

"Chapman & Hall Swore not at all. Mr Chapman's yea was yea, And Mr Hall's nay was nay."

"Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew — here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment."

"'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he [Philip Trent] demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character — what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of openwork; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could associate you with the kind of abomination I imagined is a fool — the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.'"

"What I like about Clive Is that he is no longer alive. There is a great deal to be said For being dead."

"Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium."

"John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie And wrote "Principles of Political Economy.""

"Edward the Confessor Slept under the dresser. When that began to pall, He slept in the hall."

"When their lordships asked Bacon How many bribes he had taken He had at least the grace To get very red in the face."

"The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps, But Biography is about chaps."

"It was a weakness of Voltaire's To forget to say his prayers, And one which to his shame He never overcame."