An eclectic collection that made us pause for thought.
| 28 November 2008 | "Some silver linings will come out of this cloud."
Sir John Parker, chairman of National Grid and of the Court of the Bank of England, speaking of the current crisis in an interview with Judi Bevan for The Spectator |
| 21 November 2008 | "I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time."
Charles M. Schulz |
| 14 November 2008 | "Why did nobody notice?"
Her Majesty the Queen's pithy question on the credit crunch to the director of research at the London School of Economics, on a visit last week.
His answer is not worth repeating but you can read more on the subject in Simon Jenkins' excellent article in The Guardian of 12th November. |
| 6 November 2008 | "Yes we can."
Barack Obama, US President Elect |
| 31 October 2008 | An example of ambiguous drafting or mis-spelling? -
"The management does not except responsibility for loss of contents or damage to vehicles whilst left in this car park. Vehicles are left entirely at the owners risk."
The Horse & Groom, Charlton |
| 24 October 2008 | From a trader on a BBC website:
"This is worse than a divorce.
I've lost half my net worth and I still have a wife.”
|
| 17 October 2008 | A Churchillian comment on the financial crisis:
"Never has so much been owed by so few to so many!"
Anon |
| 10 October 2008 | "For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is coming to an end."
Philip Stephens, Financial Times |
| 3 October 2008 | "As profits grow incrementally, do losses accumulate excrementally?"
Tim Moss, letter in the Financial Times. |
| 28 September 2008 | "If you get arrogant, you lose your way and start making mistakes."
Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, in a 2005 interview with Euromoney |
| 18 September 2008 | "Better a genius without faith than a believer without talent."
Father Alain Couturier, the Dominican monk, commenting on the selection of artists and architects for French church buildings in an article in Harpers Bazaar.
(With thanks to Jackie Wullschlager, FT, reviewing work by Georges Rouault) |
| 11 September 2008 | "Where the wind of the argument goes, there we must follow."
Plato's Republic. (With thanks to Katherine Whitehorn) |
| 4 September 2008 | "The gestation period for an elephant is about the same as a Financial Services Authority consultation."
Ian Morley, chairman of Carazon Capital, writing in the Financial Times |
| 26 August 2008 | Description of the Pyramids at Giza by 19th century artist William Holman Hunt:
"Extremely ugly blocks..arranged with most unpicturesque taste."
(With thanks to Tate Britain where some of his paintings of Egypt are currently on show) |
| 19 August 2008 | "I like working on holiday because it makes me feel important."
Tim Dowling, writing in The Guardian Weekend |
| 12 August 2008 | "I want America to know that I'm, like, ready to lead."
Paris Hilton, commenting on the McCain advert in which she featured. |
| 8 August 2008 | "There are three sides to every argument: my side, your side and the truth."
Anon |
| 1 August 2008 | "A good book is a guilty pleasure to be enjoyed in secret."
Angela Dixon |
| 25 July 2008 | Definition of an economist:
"An economist is a fellow who knows 101 ways of making love and doesn't have a girl."
Dr. William C.Freund, former chief economist for the New York Stock Exchange (as recounted by P.J.O'Rourke in his book On the Wealth of Nations). |
| 18 July 2008 | When told by his host that it was a great honour to have accepted his invitation to lunch on his 90th birthday, Sir John Gielgud replied: "Oh, I'm delighted to have been asked. All my real friends are dead, you know."
Gyles Brandreth (who was the host) |
| 11 July 2008 | "Besides, its very simple: if I didn't have servants I couldn't knit any more for the poor" said that excellent lady at that excellent luncheon.
Andre Gide. |
| 4 July 2008 | "It is amazing what you can achieve when you don't care who gets the credit."
Accredited, appropriately, to a number of different people including
Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and George C. Marshall. |
| 26 June 2008 | As her 4x4 was brought to her at a valet car park, the driver was overheard to remark:
"I don't know what all the fuss is about - if it's so bad for the environment, why does it have climate control?"
With thanks to the FT Letters page. |
| 19 June 2008 | "We will become independent of nature."
The Cyprus Minister of Agriculture, when discussing his Government's plans to deal with the island's severe water shortage. |
| 12 June 2008 | "Success has many parents but failure is an orphan"
Greek proverb |
| 5 June 2008 | Standing in a bus queue at Hay-on-Wye in his ecclesiastical garb, in pouring rain and wind, when asked if he could do anything about the appalling weather, Bishop Gene Robinson replied:
"I'm in sales, not management!"
(With thanks to The Guardian.) |
| 29 May 2008 | Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.
Harold MacMillan |
| 15 May 2008 | "If you want to grow your business, remember that 1 plus 1 is 11, not 2."
A Chinese entrepreneur |
| 8 May 2008 | "No longer young, knowing life is a brief flash of light, the poet finds in the gaze and the lips of the beloved everything he needs to keep going."
Harry Eyres on the poet Vincente Aleixandre (Financial Times) |
| 1 May 2008 | "Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons"
Woody Allen |
| 28 April 2008 | A Chinese judge told the defendant that if he wanted a fair trial he would have to pay the judge 10,000 Yuan. When the defendant asked why, the Judge replied:
"Because that is what the claimant has paid me!"
|
| 21 April 2008 | "Better perfect than not at all!"
A tailor in Jermyn Street |
| 14 April 2008 | "We want to give flyers an experience they will remember."
A BA (or BAA?) spokesman before the ill-fated opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow.
(With thanks to Clive James) |
| 7 April 2008 | "In uncertain times like this, all you can do is look for the cloud at the end of the tunnel."
Anon (a financial adviser) |
| 31 March 2008 | Asked what is the most important lesson life has taught her, Pamela Anderson replied:
"Opportunity only gives you knockers once."
(With acknowledgements to The Guardian)
|
| 28 March 2008 | "Mr Walsh [BA's Chief Executive] is not available for interview this morning..."
James Naughtie, BBC Today Programme, on the morning after the disastrous opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow. |
| 18 March 2008 | "War is God's way of teaching the Americans geography."
(Heard on BBC Radio 4) |
| 11 March 2008 | "If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."
Dorothy Parker |
| 4 March 2008 | "The way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large one."
Anthony Blond, publisher, who died last week. |
| 26 February 2008 | "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair."
Kingsley Amis |
| 19 February 2008 | "My month without alcohol went so well that I finished early."
Tim Dowling (The Guardian) |
| 12 February 2008 | "There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeeding man has doubled in 25 years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny."
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species, published 1859. |
| 8 February 2008 | "Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies."
Bette Davis
(With thanks to Julie Burchill) |
| 1 February 2008 | "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."
Gorge Bernard Shaw |
| 25 January 2008 | "Debt is like a crazy aunt we keep down in the basement. All the neighbours know she's there, but nobody wants to talk about her. "
Ross Perot (with thanks to Jeff Randall, Daily Telegraph) |
| 18 January 2008 | "Memorial Services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set."
Harold Macmillan |
| 11 January 2008 | Why did God create economists?
In order to make weather forecasters look good.
(With thanks to the Financial Times) |
| 4 January 2008 | Asked why banks traditionally have large and impressive head offices, a partner in a top acocunting firm explained:
"They need to disguise the fact that banking is no more than an accounting exercise!" |
| 28 December 2007 | "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." Groucho Marx |
| 21 December 2007 | Definition of a helicopter:
"Magimicks belong Yesus"
From Papua New Guinea |
| 14 December 2007 | "All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy"
Spike Milligan |
| 7 December 2007 | The opening words of a recipe for trifle, attributed to Mrs Beeton, but probably apocryphal:
"Take a bottle of Napoleon Brandy, pour into a silver salver, swill and throw away." |
| 30 November 2007 | "I have the body of an eighteen year old. I keep it in the fridge."
Spike Milligan |
| 23 November 2007 | "She is the most balanced person I know - she has a chip on both shoulders"
AB |
| 16 November 2007 | ""In terms of progress, history has confirmed that the future can be a lot worse than the present."
Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times |
| 9 November 2007 | "It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen."
Brigitte Bardot |
| 2 November 2007 | "It's just 99% of lawyers who give the rest a bad name"
Clive Anderson (via Simon Hoggart, The Guardian). |
| 26 October 2007 | "I have a slight feeling that politicians are all bastards in the end. To be successful in politics you have to be a compromiser and you have to lie."
Helen Mirren (FT Magazine) |
| 19 October 2007 | "At my age I do what Mark Twain did: I get my daily paper, look at the obituaries page and if I'm not there I carry on as usual."
Patrick Moore |
| 12 October 2007 | "Blackpool is what America would be like if it were poor."
Simon Hoggart, The Guardian |
| 27 September 2007 | Definition of a stockbroker: " Someone who invests your money until it is all gone" |
| 3 September 2007 | "Human Relations are difficult -and some of our relations are not even human."
|
| 27 August 2007 | "In the old days we was nice to the nice people and we was nasty to the nasty people. Nowadays we have to be nice to everyone."
A recently retired policeman - with thanks to Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator. |
| 20 August 2007 | Definition of Humour:
A weapon of mass distraction.
Pieter-Dirk Uys |
| 13 August 2007 | "We fought for freedom and all we got was democracy."
Comment from the floor at an election rally in South Africa (as reported by Pieter-Dirk Uys) |
| 6 August 2007 | Bear in mind the gambler's advice: If you don't know who is the patsy in the room, it's you.
John Kay, Financial Times. |
| 29 July 2007 | "Formula for success: Rise early, work hard, strike oil."
John Paul Getty |
| 22 July 2007 | "What matters is not how well you are playing when you are playing well, but how well you are playing when you are playing badly".
Martina Navratilova, as quoted by Clive James on BBC Radio 4. |
| 16 July 2007 | Definition: Non-executive Directors
"They are like bidets - no one knows what they're for, but they add a touch of class."
Martin Lukes (author: Lucy Kellaway) |
| 8 July 2007 | Asked by a young couple on a country lane in Essex how far it was to the next village, a local man working in a field paused and then replied:
"If you walks for 'alf an hour and sits down for 'alf an hour, it'll take longer".
GD |
| 30 June 2007 | "He who has a yacht has a different wife every night."
Modern Greek proverb, according to Taki, The Spectator. |
| 23 June 2007 | "It is slowly dawning on us that the human population is growing, and our need to burn things in order to survive is going to outweigh the ability of new things to grow."
Antony Gormley, interviewed by Peter Aspden, Financial Times |
| 16 June 2007 | "The only thing that makes writing fun is the anticipation of applause"
Tom Wolfe, in an interview with Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times |
| 9 June 2007 | "Never give more than one excuse."
Sarah Hegarty |
| 2 June 2007 | "He believes his future as a politician is behind him."
Comment by Sir John Major's spokesperson on the suggestion he might run as mayor of London |
| 25 May 2007 | "Be careful how you treat those on the way up as you might meet them on the way down."
Anon |
| 18 May 2007 | "Sustainable Development - that's an oxymoron, isn't it?"
Antony Gormley, from an interview with Peter Aspden in the Financial Times |
| 11 May 2007 | "Those who watch television lose the world, those who read gain it."
Werner Herzog, in an interview with Brigid Grauman, Financial Times 17 March 2007 |
| 4 May 2007 | Definition of the Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Ambrose Bierce |
| 27 April 2007 | "Architecture is frozen music"
Goethe |
| 20 April 2007 | "People have one thing in common: they are all different."
Robert Zend |
| 10 April 2007 | "Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down."
Anon. Quoted in 'More on Oxymoron' by Patrick Hughes. |
| 31 March 2007 | "Tourism is sin, walking is virtue."
Werner Herzog, as quoted by Bruce Chatwin (with acknowledgements to the FT). |
| 24 March 2007 | "How very stupid of me not to have thought of that myself."
Thomas Huxley, on reading Charles Darwin's Origin of Species |
| 17 March 2007 | "He who waits for a roast duck to fly into his mouth will be waiting a long time."
Old Chinese proverb |
| 8 March 2007 | "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money"
Attributed to Everett Dirksen |
| 12 February 2007 | Description of Marketing: "Cast your bread upon the waters and wait for it to come back as a ham sandwich". |
| 14 January 2007 | "Today is better than tomorrow" - participant in the documentary film "Iraq in Fragments" by James Longley (with thanks to Peter Aspden, Financial Times) |
| 26 December 2006 | Married woman, overheard at a party: "When one of us dies, I'm going to live in the south of France." |
| 15 November 2006 | "There are two ways of doing everything and the wrong one always comes first"
Anon |
| 30 September 2006 | "A verbal contract is not worth the paper it is written on." Samuel Goldwyn. |
| 15 August 2006 | "Every garden, however small, should have at least 20 acres of rough woodland."
Lord Rothschild |
| 13 July 2006 | Jean Paul Sartre to waitress in cafe: "Coffee with no cream, please."
Waitress: "We have no cream today, monsieur".
Sartre: "How about coffee with no milk?"
(With thanks to Duncan Campbell in The Guardian) |
| 16 May 2006 | "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" Ernest Rutherford |
| 6 April 2006 | "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom" Shirley Conran |
| 20 February 2006 | "The greater the number of species that become extinct, the closer we become to extinction" Gerald Durrell |
| 27 November 2005 | "How do you make God laugh?" "Tell him your plans for the future. " Ken Dodd on BBC Radio 4 |
| 14 November 2005 | "The difference between a good garden and a bad one is a fortnight".
Attributed to Bob Flowerdew on Gardener's Question Time, BBC Radio 4. |
| 1 August 2005 | "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Plato (427-347 B.C.) |
| 19 July 2005 | "The evil heart of humankind is the cause, religion is the excuse." Angela Dixon |
