"I am a sportsman all over, and to the back-bone – 'Unting is all that's worth living for – all time is lost wot is not spent in 'unting – it is like the hair we breathe – if we have it not we die – it's the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger."

"'Untin' fills my thoughts by day, and many a good run I have in my sleep. Many a dig in the ribs I gives Mrs. J. when I think they're runnin' into the warmint…No man is fit to be called a sportsman wot doesn't kick his wife out of bed on a haverage once in three weeks!"

"It is an inwariable rule with the dealers to praise the bad points and let the good 'uns speak for themselves."

"Life would be very pleasant if it were not for its enjoyments."

"There may be said to be three sorts of lawyers, able, unable, and lamentable."

"The supply of good fellows is by no means in excess of the demand. A man has only to hoist the flag of hospitality to insure a very considerable amount of custom."

"Thus attired, with smiles assumed at the door, the young ladies entered the drawing-room in the full fervour of sisterly animosity."

"Better be killed than frightened to death."

"Mr. Jorrocks then called upon the company in succession for a toast, a song, or a sentiment. Nimrod gave, "The Royal Staghounds"; Crane gave, "Champagne to our real friends, and real pain to our sham friends.""

"More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice."

"Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting."

"The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one."

"He was a gentleman who was generally spoken of as having nothing a-year, paid quarterly."

"It is, I reckon, difficult to conceive of a single area of government policy that is at once so important for each of us, so catastrophically complicated, so insanely unjust, so obscenely ineffective, and has been quite so comprehensively cocked up by successive administratations as the British pension system."

"There's been an accident!" they said, "Your servant's cut in half; he's dead." "Indeed!" said Mr Jones, "and please Give me the half that's got my keys."

"When Baby's cries grew hard to bear I popped him in the Frigidaire. I never would have done so if I'd known that he'd be frozen stiff. My wife said: 'George, I'm so unhappé! Our darling's now completely frappé!"

"Uncle, whose inventive brains kept evolving aeroplanes, fell from an enormous height upon my garden lawn last night. Flying is a fatal sport, uncle wrecked the tennis court."

"Billy, in one of his nice new sashes, Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes; Now, although the room grows chilly, I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy."

"When Grandmamma fell off the boat, And couldn’t swim, and wouldn’t float, Maria just sat by and smiled - I almost could have slapped the child!"

"Weep not for little Leonie, Abducted by a French Marquis! Though loss of honour was a wrench, Just think how it's improved her French."

"Ich muss cherchez mon hôtel. What a charming Schwätzerei, sir! Lebe wohl! Adieu! Farewell! Vive le Congo! Hoch der Kaiser!"

"O'er the rugged mountain's brow Clara threw the twins she nursed, And remarked, "I wonder now Which will reach the bottom first?""

"What hours I spent of precious time, What pints of ink I used to waste, Attempting to secure a rhyme To suit the public taste, Until I found a simple plan Which makes the lamest lyric scan!When I’ve a syllable de trop, I cut it off, without apol.: This verbal sacrifice, I know, May irritate the schol.; But all must praise my dev’lish cunn. Who realise that Time is Mon."

"Guten Morgen, mon ami! Heute ist es schönes Wetter! Charmé de vous voir ici! Never saw you looking better!"

"That morning, when my wife eloped With James, our chauffeur, how I moped! What tragedies in life there are! I'm dashed if I can start the car."

"At last incapable of further harm, The lewd forefathers of the village sleep."

"It did not last: the devil, shouting "Ho. Let Einstein be," restored the status quo."

"The better production of our generation has been mainly lyrical and it has been widely diffused."

"And I've swallowed, I grant, a beer of lot - But I'm not so think as you drunk I am."

"Now there once was a lass, and a very pretty lass, And she was an isotope's daughter"

"God heard the embattled nations sing and shout "Gott strafe England" and "God save the King!" God this, God that, and God the other thing – "Good God!" said God, "I've got my work cut out!""

"To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell."

"The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory."

"One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog.""

"If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself."

"I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else."

"It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

"If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment."

"Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce."

"Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied"."

"A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands."

"The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business – advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise."

"He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig."

"A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's."

"There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep."

"Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.""

"Forth we went, a gallant band— Youth, Love, Gold and Pleasure."

"Oh would I were a boy again, When life seemed formed of sunny years, And all the heart then knew of pain Was wept away in transient tears! When every tale Hope whispered then, My fancy deemed was only truth. Oh, would that I could know again, The happy visions of my youth."

"It seems to me that, with but slight reserve and modification, we may apply to our departed friend his own pathetic and beautiful elegy upon another."

"From the date of our correspondence on this subject, I conceived a lively interest and a sincere friendship for Mr. Blanchard, which every year served to increase. It was impossible to know and not to love him. He was thoroughly honest, true, and genuine; ever ready to confer a kindness; and of a grateful disposition, which exaggerated into obligation the most commonplace returns to his own affectionate feelings and ready friendship. And yet ...we met more seldom than I could have wished, and, with a few exceptions among men of letters, our common associates were not the same."