If tin whistles are made of tin, what are foghorns made of?
%
"Odd things, animals.
 Dogs look up to you. Cats look down to you.
 Only pigs see you as an equal." 
    -- Churchill
%
"a difficulty for every solution" 
    -- Samuel, on the Civil Service
%
Go mad this weekend: buy some beef! 
    (advert at a supermarket)
%
The trouble with the rat race is that, even if 
you win, you're still a rat
%
The University of California Department of Statistics...
where mean is normal, and deviation standard
%
Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often,
and for the same reason.
%
A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is
to make a copy of everything before he destroys it
%
War is Peace   Freedom is Slavery   Ignorance is Strength
    1984
%
"The English people are like the English beer--
 froth on top, dregs at the bottom; the middle, excellent." 
    -- Voltaire
%
Theoreticians have always succeeded in providing an understanding for
all observed phenomena--even those which later proved to be incorrect
    (anonymous)
%
"Mr. Mandelson said it was an historic day when the politicians
 took charge of their own affairs." (sic.) 
%
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often
 a good thing to do -- and always a clever thing to say"
    -- Will Durant
%
"Any person who knowingly causes a nuclear weapon test explosion
 or any other nuclear explosion is guilty of an offence"
    -- Nuclear Explosions Act, 1998
%
Yorkshire Water has been deluged by a flood of complaints
following its poor handling of the drought 
    (BBC news)
%
If you see a long line of rats streaming off of a ship, the correct
assumption is not "Gosh, I bet that's a real nice boat now that those
rats are gone". 
    -- Mike Sphar
%
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in
 human history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
    -- Mitch Ratcliffe, in 'Technology Review', 1992
%
If all else fails, immortality can always
be assured by spectacular error.  
    -- Galbraith
%
The trouble with conspiracy theories is
that they assume the government is organised.
%
An Englishman thinks that 100 miles is a long way;
an American thinks that 100 years is a long time.
%
"Fog In Channel: Continent Cut Off" 
    (urban-legend newspaper headline, c. 1905)
%
"What lawyers call intellectual property is
 no more than theft from the public domain."
    -- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
%
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
 it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to
 make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." 
    -- Hoare
%
"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were a man, but if
 he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
    -- Richard Feynman
%
"The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down."
    -- Mencken
%
"The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision
 making ability to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee."
%
"I wouldn't call Civil Service delays 'tactics', Minister," he replied
 smoothly. "That would be to mistake lethargy for strategy."
    -- Humphrey Appleby, from 'Yes, Minister', Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay
%
"Speculation, by definition, is untrue."
    -- Peter Mandelson
%
"What is a committee?  A group of the unwilling,
 picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary."
    -- Richard Harkness
%
"I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue."
    -- Richard Nixon, on Watergate, 1978
%
"If we let people see that kind of thing,
 there would never again be any war."
    (US spokesman, on news film of Iraqi soldiers killed by helicopter gunfire)
%
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
 persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
 depends on the unreasonable man." 
    --  George Bernard Shaw
%
"If we do not conjure up a war into being,
 certainly no one else will do so."
    -- Alfred von Kiderlen-W�chter (German Foreign Minister, 1910)
%
"Foot-and-mouth believed to be first virus
 unable to spread through Microsoft Outlook"
%
The Clairvoyant Society of London will not meet
Tuesday because of unforeseen circumstances
    (announcement in the Financial Times)
%
"Unacknowledged poets are the legislators of the world."
    (quoted from New Statesman by A. Monkhouse, 1933)
%
"You can't say that, because it's true."
    (unnamed Russian censor, to Malcom Muggeridge, 1933)
%
"Vote Labour -- Sleep Tory"
    (unofficial slogan of Oswald Mosley)
%
"You've got to remember most anarchists don't get up that early"
    -- Tony Harris, (chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority,
   describing events during the morning of May Day 2001)
%
"Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours,
 it is likely to be the milkman." 
    -- Winston Churchill, attrib.
%
To an optimist, the glass is half full.
To a pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To an engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
%
If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
we couldn't react to a lot of the world around us.
    -- Calvin and Hobbes
%
The Boss: What makes you think my mother is a moron?
Dilbert: She fed you.
%
Experience is what enables you to recognise a mistake
the second time you make it.
%
"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do."
    -- Bertrand Russell
%
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think,
 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.'
 Now they have two problems."
    -- Jamie Zawinski
%
The computer is only a tool. Unfortunately, so is the user.
%
"We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked.
 It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."
    -- Richard Mottram (to Martin Sixsmith, describing the Jo Moore DTLR fiasco)
%
DRINK COFFEE -- Do stupid things faster with more energy!
%
"Treason doth ne'er prosper / And what is the reason?
 If treason should prosper / None dare call it treason."
    (Glorious-Revolution-era ditty)
%
"Saying that road tax should be spent on transport is like
 saying that alcohol duty should be spent on pubs."
%
"There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards,
 children and the United States of America." 
    -- Otto von Bismarck
%
"Religion is what the common people see as true,
 the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful."
    -- Seneca
%
"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the
 proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to."
    -- Hannen Swaffer
%
"I never make predictions. I never have, and I never will."
    -- Tony Blair
%
"Computer games don't affect kids. I mean, if Pac-Man affected us as
 kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills
 and listening to repetitive music."
    -- Marcus Brigstocke
%
"Of course we are not patronising women. We are just going to explain to
  them, in words of one syllable, what it is all about."
    -- Olga Maitland
%
Suburbia: where they cut down the trees then name streets after them
%
"Remember, the plural of 'moron' is 'focus group'."
    -- James A Wolf
%
"... it was not appropriate for the jury to make a statistical evaluation
 of separate items of evidence by applying mathematical formulae such as the
 Bayes Theorem, as such an exercise would encroach upon the jury's task of
 weighing up all the evidence together." 
    (R v. Adams)
%
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other
 languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their
 pockets for new vocabulary." 
    -- Booker T. Washington
%
"The government wants to bring an end to so-called vertical drinking."
  (from the BBC's 'Today in Parliament')
%
"Nuclear weapons are so dangerous that only geriatric lunatics
 in the Politburo should have control of them."
    -- Alan Lothian (characterizing CND's support for unilateral disarmament)
%
"Eden may have invaded Egypt, but one can't be too censorious, everybody gets
 a bit silly when they're stoned." 
    -- Jeremy Scott
%
"Sitting in a church doesn't make you a Christian,
 any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car."
%
"Being powerful is like being a lady.
 If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
    -- Margaret Thatcher
%
"My years of hip-hop sessions came in handy as I could converse well with
 Fast Fingers. I knew the lingo and when to use it, and as far as he was
 concerned, I was one of the brothers. Strangely, neither of us was one of
 the brothers, but I figure that's just a technicality." 
    -- MixerMan
%
"Like any Englishman armed with a cricket bat, he was doomed to fail."
    -- Guy Ladenburg (prosecuting counsel, comments on Paul Kelleher's
        first attempt to behead a statue of Margaret Thatcher)
%
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps
 if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at
 the very least you need a beer."
    -- Frank Zappa
%
"There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers.
 While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain."
    -- Rothschild, ca. 1800
%
"I speak better English than this villain Bush."
    -- Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf (attrib.)
%
"Who's Whom -- a sort of Who's Who for pedants."
    -- Marcus Brigstocke
%
"Every public action which is not customary either is wrong, or, if it is
 right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be
 done for the first time."
    -- Francis Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica
%
"Another sport which wastes unlimited time is Comma-hunting."
    -- Francis Cornford
%
"Nothing says 'unprofessional job' like wrinkles in duct tape."
%
"Tony Blair has made 'morale boosting' visits
 to the wives of servicemen serving in the Gulf." 
    -- BBC News
%
"... they're not anarchists, just thugs who can't be bothered to put in the
 weekly commitment needed to be football hooligans."
    -- Nick Barlow (describing violent May Day protestors)
%
"Every problem in the world can be fixed with either flowers,
 or duct tape, or both."
    -- David Millington
%
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
 respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
    -- Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language'
%
"'Our team was the worst in the First Division and I'm sure it'll be the worst
 in the Premier League.'" [Sir Jack actually said] "'Our tea was the worst in
 the First Division and I'm sure it'll be the worst in the Premier League.'"
 Profuse apologies."
    (correction, in The Guardian)
%
"Burnham's ideas appear in '1984', more or less
 unchanged by their passage through Orwell."
    -- Phil Edwards 
%
"Actually, he's a libertarian, which, as near as I can tell,
 is just a Republican who doesn't believe in God."
    -- Sarah Vowell
%
"To do each day two things one dislikes is a precept I have followed
 scrupulously: every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."
    -- W Somerset Maugham
%
"That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting."
    -- Amanda Cross
%
"What the bloody hell is the point of 24-hour rolling news
 if it doesn't carry terrifying-lizard-related news?"
 (Anthony Wells, on learning from the web that 'a giant
  lizard is terrorising Beirut')
%
"Have you always been revolutionary socialists?"
"No, we vote Conservative."
    (Simon Hoggart, interviewing a middle-class
    couple at a reading of Tony Benn's speeches)
%
"Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."
    -- Grace Hopper
%
"MP3s are for people who download music. People who buy Mercedes
 cars can afford to buy their music."
    (Mercedes dealer, to customer requesting an in-car MP3 player)
%
"Whether intentionally or not, fish control and potato control were billeted
 together in St. John's College, Oxford, making this ancient seat of higher
 learning the biggest fish and chip shop the world has ever seen."
    -- Peter Hennessey, on the organisation of wartime rationing
%
"How can you make good ideas sound so bad?"
"I'm an engineer."
    -- Scott Adams
%
"They accused us of suppressing freedom of expression.
 This was a lie and we could not let them publish it."
    -- Nelba Blandon (Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship)
%
"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism
 by those who do not have it." 
    -- George Bernard Shaw
%
"Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance
 can be tolerated only in racehorses and fancy women."
    -- Kelvin
%
"Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in
 half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But
 the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on
 exploding for centuries."
    -- Christopher Morley
%
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure
  and the intelligent are full of doubt."
    -- Bertrand Russell
%
"[These atrocities] -- they all happened, and they did not happen
 any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out
 about them when it is five years too late."
    -- George Orwell (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942)
%
"Now is the winter of our discount tents."
    (advertisement, supposedly seen in a camping-supplies store during a sale)
%
"Electronic voting is one of those things like unguarded plutonium stores in
 Russia: people are only calm about it because they don't know about it. The
 rational, informed response would be to run around in circles, howling."
    -- Harry Hutton (on the 2004 Venezuelan recall referendum)
%
"Cabbage-- the opinions of taxi drivers."
  (new definitions, from `I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue')
%
"DO YOU HAVE A PARTNER?
 By partner we mean someone you habitually lie to, apart from us."
    (application form, from the 'Department of Social Scrutiny')
%
"Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?"
    -- Keith Waterhouse
%
"Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden."
    ('The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin')
%
"In Lent she ate onion soup and gave up drink; but otherwise she 
 must have drunk the maximum compatible with survival and sanity."
    (Telegraph Obit of Jennifer Paterson, one of the 'Two Fat Ladies')
%
"She always rode home from boozy lunches fantastically over the limit;
 her only precaution was to suck a creosote cough lozenge, lest she
 meet a policeman. Once, puzzled by the big roundabout at Shepherd's 
 Bush, she rode up on to the grass for a better view. Luckily she 
 never killed anyone."
    (Telegraph Obit of Jennifer Paterson, one of the 'Two Fat Ladies')
%
"Minister if you are going to promote women just because they're the
 best person for the job you're going to provoke a lot of resentment
 throughout the whole of the civil service!" 
    -- Humphrey Appelby, 'Yes Minister'
%
"Sir Humphrey: Well, you're a banker, surely you read the Financial Times?"
"Sir Desmond: Can't understand it. Full of economic theory."
"Sir Humphrey: Why do you buy it?"
"Sir Desmond: Oh, you know, it's part of the uniform."
%
"Sir Humphrey: Bernard, Ministers should never know more than they 
 need to know. Then they can't tell anyone. Like secret agents, 
 they could be captured and tortured."
"Bernard: You mean by terrorists?"
"Sir Humphrey: By the BBC, Bernard."
%
"Sir Humphrey: The ship of state, Bernard, is the only ship
 that leaks from the top.
%
"Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism."
"Sir Humphrey: We call it diplomacy, Minister."
%
"Sir Humphrey: With the administration in Brussels and the Parliament
 in Strasbourg? Minister, it's like having the House of Commons in 
 Swindon and the Civil Service in Kettering."
%
"Bernard: It's one of those irregularly declining words. 
 I have an independent mind, you are an eccentric, he’s round the twist."
%
"Bernard: It's another of those irregular verbs. I hold
  confidential briefings, you leak, he's been charged
  under section 2A of the Official Secrets Act."
%
"Bernard: I don't think Sir Humphrey understands economics, 
 Prime Minister; he did read Classics, you know."
"Hacker: What about Sir Frank? He's head of the Treasury!"
"Bernard: Well I'm afraid he's at an even greater disadvantage in 
 understanding economics: he's an economist."
%
"I only can properly enjoy carol services if I am having an
 illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this?
 Perhaps because they are essentially pagan, not Christian, celebrations."
    -- Alan Clark
%
"What, come back to this? The ghetto: alleyways stinking of piss, beggars
 in every doorway, straights and students coming to look at the freak show..."
    (Russel T. Davies, on Canal Street)
%
"Vince: What about Paul McGann?"
"Both Together: Paul McGann doesn't count!"
    (Russel T. Davies)
%
"Government incompetence [is] one of the UK's
 most important safeguards against totalitarianism."
    -- John Lettice
%
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many
 obituaries with great pleasure"
    -- Clarence Darrow
%
"We are not knocking down doors at four in the morning with people
 booted and suited in riot gear. Most of the removals occur around
 half-five, half-six, seven in the morning."
    -- Tony McNulty denies reports of 'dawn raids' on asylum seekers
%
"novissima autem inimica destruetur mors omnia enim 
 subiecit sub pedibus eius cum autem dicat"
    -- I Corinthios 15:26
%
"If the media object to a judgment or sentencing decision, 
 we suggest they focus their efforts on persuading the 
 Government to rectify the legal and policy framework."
    -- Lords' Select Committee on Constitution: Eleventh Report
%
"Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men
 are guilty if they forget what it was to be young"
    -- JK Rowling ('Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix')
%
--
"The Minister's office rang back saying that he would be delighted
 to see me for tea. That evening I went home, very excited, and
 told my partner, 'I'm going to see the Minister for tea.' He 
 replied, 'There's a Minister for Tea?'"
    -- Chris Bryant, MP
      (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/whall/?gid=2008-10-23a.149.1)
%
“That’s another of those irregular verbs, isn’t it?” said Bernard. 
"I give confidential briefings, you leak, he is being prosecuted
 under section 2a of the official secrets act."
%
"meetings, n.:
    A place where minutes are kept and hours are lost."
%
"If you Google my name ... From the Rawalpindi News to the Inuit 
 Intelligencer, I am world-famous as the Bad Sex guy with the 
 shitty temper."
    -- Giles Coren (Spectator, October 2008)
%
"We used to quip that "password" is the most common password. Now 
 it's "password1." Who said users haven't learned anything about 
 security?"
    -- Bruce Schneier (December 2006)
%
"The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not 
 see them lit again in our lifetime."
    (Attrib. Edward Grey, 1914)
%
"I am firm.  You are obstinate.  He is a pig-headed fool."
    -- Katharine Whitehorn
%
"a moat is an effective barrier, especially if you manage
 water levels so an area in the middle is very shallow over 
 gooey mud. A moat is also much prettier than a wall or razor wire"
    -- Dan Holdsworth
%
"I am invariably puzzled by the attitude of Oxbridge to its 
 ecclesiastical past. Hearing grace recited before dinner by
 people you know don’t believe a word of it seems to be 
 considered quite normal."
   -- David Colquhoun
%
"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, 
 and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true."
    -- Bertrand Russell
%
"The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is 
 freedom from fear."
    -- Aung San Suu Kyi
%
"Once they make it legal, they'll spoil all the fun"
    -- Maurice Bowra (attrib.)
%
"What are the most essential things about acting?", Donald Sinden
asked John Gielgud, who responded (with hardly a pause), "Feeling 
and timing," and then, head erect, his eyes twinkled to the side, 
as he added, "I understand it is the same in many walks of life"
%
You know the story of the young actor who was set to play Hamlet and,
wanting to understand the full psychology of the part, asked an older
actor if he thought Hamlet had actually slept with Ophelia? "I don't
know about the West End, laddie, but we always did on tour."
    -- Donald Sinden
%
"In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital
thing"
    -- The Importance of Being Earnest
%
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's
 opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
    -- De Profundis, Oscar Wilde
%
"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what
 one wants, and the other is getting it. "
    -- Mr Dumby, (Lady Windermere's Fan)
%
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man
 does. That's his."
    -- The Importance of Being Earnest
%
"Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women
 of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained
 thirty-five for years."
    -- Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest
%
"It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be 
 – that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject 
 of prosecution."
    -- Hartley Shawcross, then (1951) Attorney-General
%
"what was asked of the Director in this case was not a statement of
 prosecuting policy but a proleptic grant of immunity from prosecution.
 That, I am quite satisfied, the Director had no power to give.”
    -- Bingham of Cornhill, R (Pretty) v DPP [2002] 1 AC 800
%
"I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against 
 black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free
 society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal
 opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.
 But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die" 
    -- Nelson Mandela, 1961.  
%
"You know it cannot have been a good night when you get into a fight
 with Spider-Man and two cross-dressing men"
    -- Mark Davies (defence lawyer, regarding 'Cage fighters picked on
            because they were dressed as women for a stag night')
%
"I would prefer to remain in prison for another 20 years than bargain
 my beliefs for freedom."
    -- Samir Geagea
%
"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it
 would be a merrier world"
    -- J. R. R. Tolkien
%
"A traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend"
    -- J. R. R. Tolkien
%
"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love
 stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men. This must be
 recognized if life is to remain. We must learn the love of man."
    -- Pablo Casals
%
"Celebrity can be malign in that it becomes a form of idolatry, and
 people live their lives vicariously through the rich and famous rather
 than attending to their own lives."
    -- John Sentamu
%
"In the darkness of secrecy all sorts of things can go wrong. If things
 are really done in public you can see that the judge does behave
 himself, the newspapers can comment on it if he misbehaves — it keeps
 everyone in order"
    -- Jeremy Bentham
%
"I try not to get drunk at lunchtime any earlier in the week than
 Thursday."
    -- Giles Coren
%
"Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word "database" are
 typed with the left hand?  Now the layout of the QWERTYUIOP typewriter
 keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even use
 of both hands.  It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is
 not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears."
%
"His 100th birthday was celebrated ... After reading the Telegraph's 
 obituary of the screenwriter Ivan Moffat last Saturday, he remarked: 
 'Everyone seems to be dead.' Lord Oranmore and Browne, who died on 
 Thursday, is succeeded as 5th baron"
%
"I would nationalise Elizabeth Hurley and allow each of us to claim
 our share."
    -- JG Ballard ('lost' NS interview, mid 1990s)
%
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are
 the portals to discovery."
    -- James Joyce
%
"What a lot of parties. masked parties, Savage parties ... parties
 where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St
 John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and
 hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths..."
%
"tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned
 crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked
 Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in 
 Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris"
%
"all the succession and repetition of massed humanity ... Those vile 
 bodies"
%
"See, you always knew where you were with a public-school traitor.
 Just look for the 16 year old pipe-smoking sodomite with a copy 
 of EM Forster under his arm" 
    [ spooks ] s2, ep3
%
"We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's
 fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely
 fucked." 
    -- Richard Mottram, on a "good day to bury bad news".
%
"Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if
 they forget what it was to be young" 
    -- Ch37, Order of the Phoenix, JK Rowling
%
"The practice of a profession entails discipline, which for me meant
 the production of two thousand words of fair copy every day, weekends
 included. I discovered that, if I started early enough, I could
 complete the day's stint before the pubs opened."
    -- Anthony Burgess
%
"Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest
 inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any
 logical process."
    -- Kenneth Clark
%
"It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a
 civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism  and disillusion,
 just as effectively as by bombs."
    -- Kenneth Clark
%
"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today"
    -- David, Vice-Admiral Beatty (re: the Battle of the Jutland)
%
"Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be
 set on its use ... Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing 
 else comes close"
    -- Stephen Fry
%
"applying logic to English slang is never a sound idea"
    -- Stephen Fry
%
"I suppose waiting hand and foot on loud public-school boys
 is marginally better than being unemployed"
    -- Stephen Fry
%
"It's quite simple. He was a silly old queen and I'm a clever old queen"
    -- Hardy Amies on Norman Hartnell
%
"Encountering a roadblock consisting of eight young virgins, dressed in
 white and lying in the path of his armoured vehicles, he ordered a
 good-looking young Gurkha to walk forward and drop his trousers.
    -- Telegraph Obit of John Owen ("a much admired High Court judge")
%
"Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!"
    -- Duke of Edinburgh, on being offered the finest Italian wines by 
       PM Giuliano Amato at a dinner in Rome in 2000.
%
"People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even
 been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans."
    -- Duke of Edinburgh
%
"Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really
 must try better with your beard." 
    -- DoE to a fashion designer
%
"Unless specified in detail, all drinks are champagne in Lottie's 
 parlour."
    -- Vile Bodies (Waugh)
%
"Unless the people at home understand what they are sending their
 young people into and understand the horrors that they are having to
 endure [on the battlefield], we're never going to get a handle on any
 serious effort to achieve world peace"
    -- Walter Cronkite
%
"This argument, says a middle-aged lady in a business suit called
 Marion, is just more London stuff ... " (What were her other outfits
 called?)
    -- Guardian style guide, on 'syntax'.
%
"comment is free, but facts are sacred"
    --  CP Scott
%
"Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites,
 standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to
 college."
    -- Kurt Vonnegut
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"If you think the idea of a portable shrine archaic then look no
 further than the photo album on your smartphone"
    -- Grayson Perry
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