“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
SEARCHING FOR LOST QUOTATIONS
An important function of the Newsletter – and, indeed, of the
radio show – is the tracking down of sources for quotations that have been
asked about by readers and listeners.
The same research method is applied to the origins and use of phrases
and sayings. Since the list was begun
in December 1987, there has been something like a 47% clear-up rate – though
recently thanks to e-mail, the Internet and some dedicated sleuths – the rate
has gone up to 64%.
I should emphasize that the queries appearing on
the list are the ones that are still giving us difficulty. They do not include the many requests for
information about quotations which we can answer easily from what knowledge we
have. These matters tend to be dealt
with through the Newsletter and e-mail and are not listed here.
Many people have turned to us as a last resort, having exhausted all other lines of inquiry. But some queries resolutely remain unsolvable – or at least that is how it seems until someone stumbles across the answer, in some cases years after the query was originally posted.
In response to requests from ardent sleuths, I have drawn up a list of what one of them termed the ‘hard core’ of queries that are still giving problems.
If you can supply chapter and verse – and that is what we are after, not
vague surmise – for any of these quotations or phrases, then you may rest
assured that you will put someone out of his or her misery. It is helpful if you can refer to the query
number when providing information about it.
E-mail your information to the addresses given in HOW TO GET IN TOUCH
WITH “QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”. All contributions will be acknowledged
individually. Selected highlights from
the results are printed in the Newsletter.
________________________________________________________________________
Q20 A precise source for the 4th Earl of
Q43 Any pre-1938 use of the phrase, ‘The butler did it!’
Q103 Who wrote: ‘Il mondo in parte disegnar si puole: / Ma pazzo è quel, che dominar lo vuole’?
Q232 An original source for Augustus John’s remark to Nina Hamnet: ‘We have become, Nina, the sort of people our parents warned us about’? Or the identity of the person who quoted it in a British newspaper in 1975-6?
Q247 A source for: ‘Everything’s done in my own little way / My own little tea-set, my own little tray’?
Q376 ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello clouds’ – origin or citations before
the Nigel Molesworth books in the 1950s.
Q416 Georges Feydeau, the French writer of farces (1862-1921), said: ‘In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped.’ What is the connection, if any, between this remark and He Who Gets Slapped – the English title of the play (1914) by the Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev?
Q524 Who referred to a woman of generous proportions as being ‘designed to give shade to her young’?
Q572 ‘When there is a great cry that something should be done, you can depend on it that something remarkably silly probably will be done’ – this was once attributed in the Herald Tribune to ‘a great English statesman from the nineteenth century’ – who he?
Q579 Gemma O’Connor once presented a delightful entertainment with the title Ferocious Chastity. This was taken from a remark – ‘the ferocious chastity of Irishwomen’ – reputedly contained in a letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels. But where is it?
Q764 ‘Having distributed our guineas [?] to the populace, we drove on to the sound of renewed cheering’ – what is this? I recall someone using it in 1965.
Q788 Was the slogan ‘He’s back – and he’s angry!’ used for a film? Before 1996, that is.
Q862 Precise sources, please, for two widely-quoted sayings of John Ruskin: (1) ‘There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. Those who buy on price alone are this man’s lawful prey’; (2) ‘It is bad to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all; but when you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was b(r)ought to do. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better’?
Q899 A source for: ‘It is within the province of all of us to be great or small, according to the degree of service we render, service of one man to another, to a community, to a nation, to all mankind. It is by service we are born, we live, and we are carried to our last resting place. It is therefore not just an obligation, it is the very purpose of life – to serve’ – a British Royal perhaps?
Q914 ‘The trouble with socialism is that it would take up too many evenings’ – Wilde? And, if so, where?
Q955 Did a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising say: ‘Nothing fails in
Q962 ‘Keep alive in our hearts that spirit of adventure which makes men scorn the security of the familiar to wrestle with the challenges of the unknown’ – what is this, a prayer or some other exhortation, presumably quite recent?
Q1368 Where did the phrase ‘not a happy bunny’ originate? The earliest example I have so far found is from 1989 in the UK.
Q1748 Which
1940s / 50s film noir begins: ‘It was hot.
The only kind of hot you can get in
Q1976 What is ‘’Arry’s At Was Anging On the Atstand In the All’ – a poem or song? A source, please.
Q2186 Any thoughts on the origin and use of ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’ (first citation found in a 1954 novel) or ‘Trust us, we’re doctors’ (in use by 1993)?
Q2487 Who said: ‘A revolutionary must always have
clean fingernails’?
Q2571 The expression ‘pipe isn’t fooling pussy’
occurs in Alan Bennett’s film An
Englishman Abroad (1983). Presumably
it refers to sex, but was it an established coinage?
Q2800
P.G. Wodehouse more than once uses the expression ‘sleep poured over me
in a healing wave’ – where is this from?
‘Sleep which does something which has slipped my mind to the something
sleeve of care poured over me in a healing wave’ – The Code of the Woosters,
Chap. 14 (1938) – last line of book; ‘It wasn’t long before sleep poured over
me in a healing wave, as the expression is’ – Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen,
Chap. 6 (1974).
Q3205 Origin of ‘when hardy comes to hardy’ or
‘when Hardy comes to Hardy’, meaning the same as ‘when push comes to
shove’? Is it Irish?
Q3534 A source for the anecdote about Lord
Palmerston saying (to Queen Victoria?): ‘Change, change, all this talk about
change. Things are quite bad enough
already!’?
Q3649 Where is this to be found in P.G. Wodehouse:
‘If it were not for quotations, conversation between gentlemen would consist of
an endless succession of “What hos”’?
Q3670 Did the Duke of
Q3677 A source for ‘Out of my way, peasants!’ – and
usage, perhaps in a film?
Q3737 ‘He ran a pin in Gwendolyn / In
Q3742 That LUFTHANSA is an acronym for ‘Let us f---
the hostesses and not say anything’ was reported in an American book and quoted
in Godfrey Smith’s Sunday Times
column some time before 1983. What was
the book and who was the author?
Q3746 Tolstoy is often quoted as having written
‘Whilst there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefield’ – but where did he
say it?
Q3752 Where does the phrase ‘Hordes, Frobisher,
hordes’ come from – a sea captain in a film?
Q3758 Who in particular said, ‘Irony is wasted on
the stupid’? Swift has been mentioned.
Q3766 Was it Ben Jonson who said something about
everyone who lives in
Q3779 From a Victorian diarist? – ‘ ... had a
glance at a cold chicken and a bottle of claret before retiring to bed.’
Q3856 Did Byron really write (and
if so where?): ‘The most beautiful contact between the earth and sea took place
at the Montenegrin littoral. When the
pearls of nature were sown, handfuls of them were cast on this soil’? And is there any proof that he called
Q3869 Edward Lear, the poet and
artist, quoted many times: ‘We come no more to the golden shore where we danced
in days of old’. Where did he get it
from?
Q3902 An origin for this
exclamation: ‘May courage abound with cheerfulness and the day end well’?
Q3916 ‘The mistake often made by
the young is to assume that the old know what they are talking about’ has been
ascribed to Henry Kissinger. Any firmer
attributions?
Q3925 Did Marcus Aurelius say
something to this effect: ‘That which does not constantly strive to advance
will not remain the same, it will inevitably regress’ – and if so, where?
Q3946
Where did George Cadbury (of the chocolate firm) say that he wanted the
business to be ‘A force for good in a troubled world’?
Q3952
‘Common sense is nothing but undiagnosed ignorance’ – is this Nietzsche
or somebody?
Q3963 Does anyone
know the origins of the (?) poster poem ‘The Animals of Drink’ – ‘After one
hour he is a monkey / After two hours he is an ass / After three hours he is a
tiger / After four hours he is a sloth ’?
Q3987
‘Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever’ – always attributed to
Napoleon – but when and how did it enter circulation?
Q3989
Children’s rhyme: ‘The tower of toys for a minute / Stood steady and
firm and tall ... ’, ending, ‘No wonder that Teddy refuses / To build up that
tower again’ – more, please? (There was
a
Q4014
Who said something to this effect: ‘Imprisonment is a long term process
with an uncertain outcome whereas hanging is sure and takes only a moment’?
Q4042 Which British political figure used the
expression ‘the consistency of the grave’?
Q4045 What was the exact date of the Giles cartoon
in the Daily Express with the
caption: ‘There was only one man who entered Parliament with good intentions –
Guy Fawkes’? Probably very late 1940s.
Q4057
A source for the expression, ‘Get back in your hole, it’s rat week’?
Q4059
A source for the saying ‘Manners, pianos, tables and chairs, all belong
to the man upstairs’?
Q4062 Origin and full text of
the parody of ‘Devon, Glorious Devon’ including: ‘In Devon, glorious Devon, /
Where it rains six days out of seven, / Where barefaced hags. / Pursue the
stags. / It’s their idea of heaven’ etc?
Q4066 In The Green Hat,
Michael Arlen writes: ‘Mr H. G. Wells
says that there is no money to be made out of any book that cannot bring a
woman in within the first few thousand words.’ The source of this remark, please.
Q4099
‘Man knows not what the day bodes but must abide what it brings’ – what
is this?
Q4105 In The Letters of Noël Coward, there is this in a c. 1956 letter to
Marlene Dietrich: ‘A very brilliant writer once said (Could it have been me?),
“Life is for the living” ... ’ Coward
used the shorter version ‘Life is for [ ... ] living’ in the introduction to ‘A
Bar on the Piccola Marina’ in his 1959 Las Vegas cabaret recording – which
version he had already put in his play Design
for Living (1933). But why is this
near-proverb not more widely recorded?
Google Books has the shorter by 1888.
Q4106
Early examples of something like ‘the world is made for those not
blessed with self awareness’?
Q4107
Is SMOBELMABEES – or something like it – an acronym/mnemonic for
remembering – what? Fallen Angels?
Q4111
What is the poem about the story shown on a willow pattern plate that
ends something like ‘and patter paling round the sun’?
Q4112
Bertie Wooster (in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories) apparently invokes
Captain Scott’s last messsage at some point?
Where?
Q4117
Origin of ‘Which part of the word “no” don’t you understand – the “n” or
the “o”?’ – a film perhaps?
Q4118
‘How cowardice rushes in where courage once ruled’ – or words to that
effect. Source?
Q4119
In the film Sex’n’Drugs’n’Rock’n’Roll,
Ian Dury says to his son that the painter Delacroix said, ‘Inspiration is about
getting to one’s desk at 9 a.m.’ Did he
really?
Q4127
In a 1986 book Wetland – Life in
the Somerset Levels, an unattributed quotation is: ‘The slimed, light
bodies of the secret eels’. Where is
this from?
Q4178
Did John Buchan say something to the effect that the epitome of
adventure was ‘journeys made in haste by night’?
Q4204
Who called the Bible ‘a collection of self-aggrandizing myths of a
nomadic tribe of unruly Semites’?
Q4205
About which politicians (perhaps) was it said that, ‘Beneath that bluff,
unprepossessing exterior lies an equally unprepossessing interior’?
Q4214
Text of ‘Prayer from a Sick Room’, beginning ‘Think on me, Lord, and be
very answerable to my necessities’?
Q4215
Does this mean anything to anybody ‘Abercandi Day [spelling?] – it was
the day Napoleon seduced his coachman’?
Q4218
Origin of ‘Remember that night by the compost heap; two weeds in the
garden of love’?
Q4220
An origin for the saying, ‘Where ignorance prevails, vulgarity generally
asserts itself’ or ‘ ... vulgarism predominates’ or ‘ ... vulgarity invariably
inserts itself’?
Q4252 Why were Bohemian Concerts (popular music
recitals from, say, 1890-1930), so called?
Q4263 What is the
Arabic origin of ‘Ye Benn Gudana [sons of Ghudaneh / Ghudineh] are neither gold
nor pure silver but ye are pottery’?
Q4275 Louis Armstrong famously replied to someone
who asked, ‘What is jazz?’ – ‘If you have to ask, you ain’t got it’ (or words
to that effect). Are there other
(perhaps earlier) examples of put-downs in which someone is told that if they
have to ask about a certain topic, it means they’ll never understand it?
Q4286 Someone’s grandfather was fond of saying,
‘There’s many a man, though poor, hard up’.
Anyone else know this?
Q4292 ‘Success isn’t always what you know or who
you know but sometimes what you know about who you know’ – has been attributed
(after 1964) by Fletcher Knebel. Any
other claimants?
Q4294 This exchange between a surgeon and a nursing
sister is reported from a
Q4295 A source for this saying by Dr Spooner to Roy
Harrod: ‘You mustn’t think you aren’t the man you once used to think you were’?
Q4299 What is the origin of the phrase ‘sugar me
pink!’?
Q4301 ‘It is better for a man to dream of many
beautiful women than to awake next to one ugly one’ – what is this? A modern proverb?
Q4304 How well-known is the expression ‘Where were
we when the rope broke?’ said between two people who have temporarily
interrupted a job they are doing together?
A date for its origin?
Q4310 David Skinner wants to know about the saying, ‘I’ve just washed my hair and I can’t do a thing with it!’ and thinks it must be from a TV commercial ‘from my youth.’ Well, I am sure that it must have been used somewhere in advertising copy at some time (possibly for Kreml Shampoo in the US) but it was being described as ‘an old saying’ as long ago as 1929 (in an American book, Secrets of Charm by Josephine Huddleston) and it appears in A Weaver of Dreams by Myrtle Reed (1911). Any ideas?
Q4311 ‘We are ordinary people yet in our mother’s
eyes, we tread the earth like princes’ – from an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey, but an origin?
Or uses of the final phrase on its own.
Q4312 Tony Craddock writes: ‘My late grandfather who
died in 1972 was fond of quoting “Fantasia
Weeks
is on the march” when referring to the
feminist movement. A self-educated working-class socialist he was fond of quoting Bernard Shaw, Robert Burns and the like.
I can’t find any reference to this quote at all or to the lady in
question and I can’t say if the spelling is correct. There was a saying that “John
Wilkes is on the march” and Wilkes did write a poem on women. Is this a clue?
Q4321 Who said, ‘The greatest
love story in Western Literature is the story of Martin Luther and Jesus
Christ, as told by Johann Sebastian Bach’?
Q4342 ‘The secret of happiness
is to count your blessings while others are adding up their troubles’ – William
Penn? A proper source, please.
Q4347 Are there any pre-20th
century appearances of Napoleon’s instruction to Josephine, ‘Home in three
days; don’t wash’. Indeed, where did it
originate?
Q4348 Origin of ‘I thought we
were the good guys’?
Q4350 Lord (‘power tends to
corrupt’)
Q4369 What is the origin of ‘rien s’empêche comme le papier vide’
which roughly translates as ‘nothing puts off [a writer] so much as a blank
sheet of paper’?
Q4404 It is a while since I have descanted on the
enjoyableness of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis
Letters – exchanged between George, Eton master and father of Humphrey, and
Rupert, the publisher – and published in six volumes from 1978 onwards. Tim Riley likes them so much that he has even
established a webpage where he chases up some of their references. On one, he came to me: ‘Lyttelton quotes these lines:
“When were you chipped from the blue bowl of air
To haunt our vernal valleys, kingfisher?
Love moves through valleys even more enchanted,
Where rivers of the heart are halcyon-haunted.”
‘Neither he nor Rupert Hart-Davis could identify the author. By the way, Lyttelton was a serial misquoter,
but he always had the essence of the thing – from three millennia of
literature.’ Any offers? I have drawn a complete blank.
Q4405 Mark Holmes asks: ‘I wondered if you can help me with the origin of a quote: “It serves as
a reminder that well-deployed silence is a thousand times more devastating than
any sound”?’ Nothing showing up on the
radar so far but I did find this Seeing
Senses: On Film Analysis (1998): ‘Silence as a plot device. Silence can often be even more devastating
than any sound effect.’
Q4406 James Hogg wonders who first described
journalism as ‘Better than working’? It
seems that Patrick Skene Catling was quoting his father – more precisely on
‘writing’ – when he took the phrase for his 1960 memoir. But beyond that? Well, the format ‘ … is better than working’
seems long established. I have seen a
1690 ‘Praying is better than working’ …
Q4407 Edel Smith introduces me to an expression
that perhaps I have heard before, but more likely not. ‘There is a joke about a bloke dying and
going to hell and being asked to choose a permanent dwelling from a variety of
nasty looking torture rooms. However, in one room people were standing ankle
deep in manure while drinking tea. “This
one doesn’t look too bad,” he says. “I
think I’ll stay here”. Two minutes later
comes the order, “Right tea break over, back on your heads”. Does the expression come from the joke or
does it pre-date it? And is it even a
very common phrase or just one we use in our family?’ I rather think the phrase does not pre-date
the joke – even though it may not be very old.
All I have been able to establish is that in about 1975, a British group
I had never heard of, with the name ‘If’, apparently brought out an LP with the
title Tea Break Over, Back On Your Heads’. Curious.
Q4408 Rachael Harris’s grandfather was an RAF pilot
killed in action in 1941. His widow (no
longer alive) had this inscribed on his grave in Germany: ‘Nor too closely
approach the margent of things beyond our ken’.
This happened before 1956 when she herself died. Rachael wants to know if this is taken from
somewhere. It certainly seems like a
fragment – but of what? Incidentally,
the phrase ‘beyond our ken’, though now rather tainted by its use as the title
of the late 1950s BBC radio comedy show, goes back to the early 18th
century. The OED has a 1691 citation of ‘beyond all ken’ but there is an Isaac
Watts line ‘Glories beyond our Ken of mortal Sight’ in approximately 1715.
Q4478
Azeem Sahu-Khan says that back in the 1980s he read a number of novels
based on Roman life. These included I, Claudius by Robert Graves, Marguerite
Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and
Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March. ‘There is one quote I remember from that
time which could be from one of those three novels. I think it may be in the context of a Roman
general talking to one of his lesser officers.
It goes like this, “You have hardly seen the flame, you have never felt
the heat, yet you talk to me of fire”.’
Q4519 Who would customarily pray, ‘Thank you Lord
for another day in which I was not found out’?
Q4520 Text of poem known by the early 1950s about
the four winds – north, south, east and west – which included a lone about one
of the winds blowing across the desert and ‘exposed the bones of long dead
men’? Kipling’s ‘The English Flag’ while
containing some of these elements, is not it.
Q4529 Who said, ‘The art of politics is to prevent
situations in which we are faced with intolerable alternatives’?
Q4551 A source for Bismarck description of Napoleon
III as, ‘a sphinx without a riddle’?
Q4563 Who said, ‘The essence of engineering is not
in a contrivance of mechanisms however complex but rigid simplicity ‘?
Q4580 Origin of
the tale about a Sicilian bandit who, when asked on his deathbed to forgive his
enemies, replied, ‘Indeed I do, father – for I have killed them all’?
Q4591 Can we identify the sculptor who responded to the
inevitable question of how he managed to visualise within a block of stone the
form of the lion sculptures for which he was famous, by replying ‘Well, I look at the stone and carve away the
bits that aren’t lion …’
Q4593 Who was it that referred to the Honours List
listing many of the great and the good and suggested it was ‘the meaning of
Pros and Cons’?
Q4597 An origin for ‘What would have happened if
what did happen had not happened’? Has
been attributed to Lord Palmerston but there appears to be no evidence for
this.
Q4598 An origin for the ‘Senility Prayer’ – ‘God
grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good
fortune to run into the ones that I do, and the eyesight to tell the
difference’. It is, of course, based on
the ‘Serenity Prayer’ usually attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr. I can’t find it much before 2000.
Q4599 Who said, ‘I reserve the right to be solemn
in the morning’? Has been attributed to
Albert Schweitzer.
Q4600 Does anyone know of this couplet: ‘As the blood runs down the rill / It makes
the parting sadder still.’
Q4601 Origin of saying, ‘Never disturb a lady when
she is being a martyr, it’s her favourite occupation’.
Q4604 Who said, ‘It’s bad luck to be
superstitious’?
Q4609 Who originated the view, ‘Insanity is doing
the same thing over and over and expecting different results’?
Q4630 Who said, perhaps between the World Wars: ‘No
wonder British English businessmen are successful as they only have other
British English businessmen to compete with’?
Q4632 Seneca we should measure wealth not by how
much we have, but how little we need
Q4638 ‘It always seems impossible until it’s
done’ – an actual source for this quote attributed to Nelson Mandela?
Q4651 Who, when his wife died, ‘threw himself under
a blonde’?
Q4656 Stanley Baldwin? – ‘I have enormous respect for
the Conservative Party conference. And I
have enormous respect for my butler. But
I would not dream of consulting either of them to ask how I should carry out my
job as Prime Minister.’
Q4664 Who said: ‘I have many acquaintances but my
true friends I can count on the fingers of one hand’?
Q4666 A source for ITN editor Geoffrey Cox’s advice
to TV interviewer Robin Day, ‘Never say Sir, never say please’?
Q4669 Who said, ‘Do not listen to anyone who asks
you to hand over freedom so that you will then receive many benefits in return
for you will find those benefits do not arrive, and having handed over your
freedom you will be powerless to do anything about it’?
Q4670 Who said, ‘The performance was not so good
today, me thought I heard the prompter more often that the actors / players’?
Q4673 ‘When will justice come to Athens? / Justice
will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as
those who are’ – attributed to Thucydides?
Q4674 A French source for Napoleon III on smoking:
‘This vice brings in one million francs in taxes every year. I will certainly forbid it at once as soon as
you can name a virtue that brings in as much revenue’?
Q4678 Who exclaimed, ‘Golly gosh, Carruthers’?
Q4680 When did Cecil Rhodes say, ‘Your hinterland
is there’ (which is written on his Cape Town statue)?
Q4681 ‘As I walked over Westminster Bridge ... too
soon for the rise of the moon’ – is this from a 1957 poem?
Q4682 Who said, ‘There are decades where nothing
happens and here are weeks when decades happen’ – Lenin?
Q4684 Orson Welles reputedly told someone who had
pointed out that no one else appeared to be present to hear Kane utter his last
word Rosebud, ‘If you ever tell anyone else about that, I will kill you!’ Source?
Q4685 P.G. Wodehouse quotes Pliny the Elder as
saying that a man who lets himself get above himself is simply asking for
it. Does this allude to an actual remark
of Pliny’s?
Q4689 Origin of saying, ‘Prodigal of effort,
Economical of means’ ?
Q4692 ‘Most attacks take place at night during a
rainstorm uphill where four map sheets join’ – where does this lament come from
– First World War?
Q4693 Who said, ‘Every man still puts his pants on
one leg at a time’?
Q4694 ‘I am looking for a quote by Margaret
Thatcher. Something like “ their freedoms are not (or don’t mean the same
as) our freedoms”’?
Q4695 Who invented the joke: ‘An auditor is a man
who watches the battle from the safety of the hills and then comes down to
bayonet the wounded’?
Q4697 Did M. M. Gallivet originate, ‘I do not
intend to tiptoe through life only to arrive safely at death’?
Q4698 A primary source for Noël Coward’s alleged
remark, ‘The secret of success is the capacity to survive failure’?
Q4699 A primary source for Talleyrand’s alleged
remark, ‘He who is absent is wrong’?
Q4701 A source for: ‘The Sussex Downs and the
Sussex Weld, / Sussex sheep in a Sussex field, / Sussex grass and Sussex
tussocks, / and sussocks, sussocks, sussocks, sussocks, sussocks, sussocks!’?
Q4702 ‘Nationalism is a feeling against’ - Lord
Acton?
Q4704 Was it Walpole who, being reproached for bribing
members to vote against their conscience, replied that he only bribed members
to vote FOR their conscience?
Q4707 Who spoke of, ‘the paralysis of perfection’?
Q4718 ‘I hate the Russians, the Prussians and the
British’ – Adenauer?
Q4719 A source for: ‘The art of eating funguses /
encompasses / knowing your Amanitas from your Boletas / and if in doubt /
feeding them to your friends first’?
Q4725 Source for J.G. Herder, ‘Nostalgia is the
noblest of all pain’ (quoted by Isaiah Berlin)?
Q4735 From which film: ‘Rumplemeyer, you have your
orders, shoot’?
Q4737 Context for Jesse Jackson’s remark: ‘I do not
love all my children equally. Some of
them need more love than others’?
Q4741 What is this: ‘Shut her down, Clancy, she’s
pumping mud’?
Q4758 Of which composer’s Requiem did someone say,
‘Would that it had been his’?
Q4760 Who said: ‘The gut is the second brain’?
Q4769 Who
said, ‘No-one but a fool would demand a promise; none but a knave would give
one’?
Q4787 Did Sir Cedric Hardwicke say, ‘I have been a
great actor for so long that I no longer know what I truly think on any
subject’?
Q4801
‘We are not the highest in the county but you will find our sweetmeats
second to none’ – is this from a radio adaptation of Middlemarch?
Q4802
Who said, ‘When two people stand very close together they either fight
or go to bed’?
Q4803 Who
said, ‘Every generation thinks the previous one was the last age of innocence’?
Q4808
Where does this come from (in Greek) Klearchos de tade eipen =
‘Clearchus said these things / the following words’?
Q4810
Where did Ibsen write this: ‘Money may be the husk of many things but
not the kernel. It brings you food, but
not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends;
servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but no peace or happiness’?
Q4816 Origin of, ‘If you ask a clock how it works,
all it will tell you is the time’?
Q4817 What is the anecdote about a throne falling
over backwards on stage and an actor commenting, ‘Whatever happens, never let
the audience know that what they see is anything other than what they are
supposed to see’?
Q4821 Origin of ‘They left as gentlemen often do
with a minimum of fuss and a lot of loot’? (1970s)