"The population of the United Kingdom has, for the first time, reached sixty million. If they stood on each other's shoulders they would reach perhaps twenty feet in the air before toppling over."

"So those of you listeners who don't want to hear what the weather will be like in six months time... look away now."

"David Cameron there, just a short walking distance away from our microphone."

"...so do wrap up!"

"I've been waiting to be arrested all day. I'm disappointed!" [Mair replies] "We're all with you on that one."

"...makes my TV work look professional."

"We asked a minister for an interview - you know the rest."

"Do you have any trouble sleeping at night? [Reply] No, sir. I sleep very well."

"Moments later he punched her unconscious. [Pause] No, he didn't, don't send us letters"

"… and if you want to hear more of that interview, fly to America and watch TV on Sunday night."

"Remember, PM is not here to give financial advice. Your interest in the programme may go down as well as up."

"We struggle onward, ignorant and blind,"

"Theognis appears as a finely formed nobleman who has fallen on bad times, with the passions of a nobleman such as his time loved, full of fatal hatred toward the upward striving masses, tossed about by a sad fate that wore him down and made him milder in many respects. He is a characteristic image of that old, ingenious somewhat spoiled and no longer firmly rooted blood nobility, placed at the boundary of an old and a new era, a distorted Janus-head, since what is past seems so beautiful and enviable, that which is coming — something that basically has an equal entitlement — seems disgusting and repulsive; a typical head for all those noble figures who represent the aristocracy prior to a popular revolution and who struggle for the existence of the class of nobles as for their individual existence."

"To beget and breed a man is easi er than to put into him good wits; none hath ever devised means whereby he hath made a fool wise and a bad man good. If God had given the Children of Asclepius the art of healing a man's evil nature and infatuate wit, they would receive wages much and great; and if thought could be made and put into us, the son of a good father would never become bad, because he would be persuaded by good counsel. But by teaching never shalt thou make the bad man good."

"Bright youth passes swiftly as a thought."

"No man takes with him to Hades all his exceeding wealth."

"The deckhands are in control, and the base have the upper hand over the noble."

"Unless the gods deceive my mind, That man is forging fetters for himself."

"Ploutos, no wonder mortals worship you: You are so tolerant of their sins!"

"Wine is wont to show the mind of man."

"ἀμφ' ἀρετῇ τρίβου, καί τοι τὰ δίκαια φίλ’ ἔστω,"

"Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον μηδ' ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου, φύντα δ' ὅπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀίδαο περῆσαι καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον."

"Too many tongues have gates which fly apart Too easily, and care for many things That don’t concern them."

"πολλοί τοι πλουτοῦσι κακοί, ἀγαθοὶ δὲ πένονται:"

"One finds many companions for food and drink, but in a serious business a man's companions are few."

"Don’t wag the tail of life if it goes well,"

"Adopt the character of the twisting octopus, which takes on the appearance of the nearby rock. Now follow in this direction, now turn a different hue."

"The lucky man is honored ..."

"Surfeit begets insolence, when prosperity comes to a bad man."

"χρήματα μὲν δαίμων καὶ παγκάκῳ ἀνδρὶ δίδωσιν, Κύρν᾽: ἀρετῆς δ᾽ ὀλίγοις ἀνδράσι μοῖρ᾽ ἕπεται."

"I heard someone calling out "Five minutes, Miss Bankhead." There was a response to the call, and this response was delivered in a voice that, having once heard, I would never stop hearing inside my head as I wrote lines for ladies that somehow resulted from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger. Here was the voice for which I had written the part of Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, and written it for that voice without ever having heard it except in films. I went backstage after the play that night and she received me in her dressing room with that graciousness that has nothing to do with her Southern origin and genteel breeding but with her instinctive kindness to a person in whom she senses a vulnerability that is kin to her own. I suppose I simply mean that she saw or sensed immediately that I was meeting, for the first time in my life, a great star, and that I was more than just properly awed. I was virtually dumb-struck."

"Tallulah has never hesitated to speak what she feels to be the truth, no matter about the possible hurt to herself, because when you speak the truth it is you, the speaker, who is most likely to be hurt. Tallulah is the strongest of all the hurt people I've ever known in my life. And of hurt people I've known a remarkable number, Including some I have hurt myself, and one of them is Tallulah. She has forgiven me for it, but I am not yet ready to forgive myself."

"She was magnificent. There ain't nobody like her. In her heyday nobody had a bigger ball. She had that magnificent beauty that is ugly in a funny way. Judith Anderson and Laurette Taylor had it too. They came off being the most beautiful women in the world through an illumination of their own personality. I've seen Tallulah look absolutely dreadful, then take a shot of ammonia and Coca-Cola and turn into a beauty."

"My first memory of the great lady — for that she was, above all — was a college boy invitation I sent her to attend the Yale-Princeton game. Never a thought entered my mind that the lady would answer the telegram, but she did, and altho it was in the negative, she had a devoted fan forever. Later, I not only came to know her, but worked with her in radio and on the screen — and fan I still was, to the end."

"Tallulah never bored anyone, and I consider that humanitarianism of a very high order indeed."

"The whole point about Tallulah was that she had no inhibitions. Now some people can take this, others can't."

"But everybody loves Tallulah! Who'd have the heart not to!"

"A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country."

"On The Little Foxes I begged the producer, Samuel Goldwyn, to let Tallulah Bankhead play Regina because Tallulah was magnificent on the stage. He wouldn't let her. … A great admirer of hers, I wanted in no way to be influenced by her work. It was Willie's intention that I give a different interpretation of the part. I insisted that Tallulah had played it the only way it could be played. Miss Hellman's Regina was written with such definition that it could only be played one way. I had to do that part exactly the way Tallulah did it, because that's the way Lillian Hellman wrote it. But I was always sad that Tallulah couldn't record Regina from the theatre, because she was marvelous."

"That's because Tallulah's always skating on thin ice, and they want to be there when it breaks."

"Tallulah Bankhead is a wicked archangel with her flowing ash-blonde hair and carven features. Her profile is perfectly Grecian, flow of line from forehead to nose like the head on a medallion. ... She is a Medusa, very exotic, with a glorious skull, high pumice-stone cheek bones, and a broad brow, and was equally interesting sculpturally when she was plump as she now is cadaverously thin. Hers is the most easily recognizable face I know and the most luscious. ... Miss Bankhead's cheeks are like huge acid-pink peonies, her eyelashes are built out with hot liquid paint to look like burnt matches, and her sullen, discontented, rather evil rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet and is as shiny as Tiptree's strawberry jam."

"The most outrageous actress on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line is indisputably Tallulah Bankhead. With a career that spanned fifty years, she appeared in fifty-one plays, eighteen movies, and made countless radio, television and nightclub appearances; but she is best known for "molding her life into a stunning theatrical role," as Notable American Women puts it. Named for Tallulah Falls in her native Alabama, her throaty rasp, golden-blond hair, ripping wit, and absolute scorn for convention conquered everybody she encountered in real life, on screen, and especially on stage where she triumphed brilliantly playing her naturally quick wit and sterling rapport with others. … Nobody, past or present, could beat the stunning beauty, with huge expressive eyes, to a punch line."

"I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late, start without me."

"Going down on a woman gives me a stiff neck, going down on a man gives me lockjaw, and conventional sex gives me claustrophobia."

"My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine."

"Codeine...bourbon..."

"There's less in this than meets the eye."