Some of the best quotes in the English language.

[Rick Lee]

Hadn't read most of these before. Simply awesome.

These glorious insults are from an era when cleverness with words was still valued, before a great portion of the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words, not to mention waving middle fingers.

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison," and he said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A Member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "on whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about." - Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend.... If you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." - Jack E. Leonard

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt." - Robert Redford

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." - Thomas Brackett Reed

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... For support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (18 44-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening but this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

[m21sniper]

“The most difficult thing about planning against the Americans, is that they do not read their own doctrine, and they would feel no particular obligtion to follow it if they did." -Admiral Sergei I. Gorshkov, father of the Russian blue water navy

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who can never be free except made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."--John Stuart Mill

"It is the unconquerable nature of man and not the nature of the weapon he uses that ensures victory." - General George S. Patton

“With two thousand years of examples behind us we have no excuse, when fighting, for not fighting well.” - T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia)

"You have never really lived, until you have almost died. For those who fight for it, life has a flavor that the protected will never know..."
- Hemingway

“It is not the big armies that win battles, it is the good ones.”
-Maurice de Saxe eighteenth-century marshal- general of France and noted rake

“There is nothing so pleasing as to be shot at by one’s enemy without result.”
-Sir Winston L. S. Churchill, World War II British leader and combat veteran

“Why study an army that has lost two world wars?”
-Michael A. Palmer,U.S. Army officer, on the Germans

“War is the mother of everything.”
-Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher

“War is nothing but the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.”
-Karl von Clausowitz, On War

“The most persistent sound which reverbrates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.” -Arthur Koestler, Janus

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
- Robert E. Lee, remark at Fredericksburg, VA. 1862

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” -General William T. Sherman, speech 1880 from which we derive the phrase “War is hell.”

“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” -George Orwell, Shooting of an Elephant

“In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.” -Heroditus, Histories

"You Americans do not realize what formidable warships you have in these four battleships. We have concluded after careful analysis that these magnificent ships are in fact the most to be feared in your entire naval arsenal. When engaged in combat we could throw everything we have at those ships and all our firepower would bounce off or be of little effect. Then when we are exhausted, we will detect you coming over the horizon and then you will sink us."

Fleet Admiral Sergei I. Gorshkov, Soviet navy CINC, 1985

"Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will now have war as well." - Winston S. Churchill

"A decent boldness ever meets with friends."
~ Homer

"Never confuse motion with action."
~ Benjamin Franklin

"Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action."
~ Abraham Lincoln

"Words may show a man's wit but actions his meaning."
~ Benjamin Franklin

"War is death's feast."
~ George Herbert

"I war not with the dead."
~ Homer

"Birth is the beginning of death."
~ Thomas Fuller

"I die hard but am not afraid to go."
~ George Washington

"Death is a distant rumor to the young."
~ Andy Rooney

"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."
~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Have the courage to live. Anyone can die."
~ Robert Cody

"No hero is mortal till he dies."
~W. H. Auden

"He who doesn't fear death dies only once."
~ Giovanni Falcone

"Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny."
~ Aeschylus

"The act of dying is one of the acts of life."
~ Marcus Aurelius

"Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead."
~ Euripides

"I want to live forever, or die in the attempt."
~ unknown

"That was a time when only the dead could smile."
~ Anna Akhmatova

"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
~ Benjamin Franklin

"What happens if you get scared half to death twice?"
~ Steven Wright

"We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees."
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway."
~ John Wayne

"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
~Winston Churchill

"A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own."
~ Thomas Mann

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."
~ Bertrand Russell

"Whom the Gods love die young no matter how long they live."
~ Elbert Hubbard

"Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
~ William Goldman

"Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity."
~ John Milton

"To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home."
~ unknown

"When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is."
~ Ayn Rand

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
~ John Arbuthnot

"The constant recollection of death is the test of human conduct."
~ Marcus Aurelius

"When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness."
~ Tecumseh, Shawnees Indian Tribe

"Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death."
~ Lyman Beecher

"Death: A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor."
~ Seneca

"The best way to keep good intentions from dying is to execute them."
~ unknown

"The same man will be loved when he is dead. —Extinctus amabitur idem"
~ Horatius

"He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."
~ Saki

"And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but Death who comes at last."
~ Sir Walter Scott

"One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"What a pity is it That we can die but once to save our country!"
~ Joseph Addison

"I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American."
~ Daniel Webster

"Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death."
~ Earl Wilson

"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
~ Martin Luther King Jr

"Death is just nature's way of telling you, "Hey, you're not alive anymore.""
~ Richard Moll

"Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"
~ Virginia Woolf

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
~ Voltaire

"old men go to death, and death comes to young men."
~ Francis Bacon

"War is not nice."
~ Barbara Bush

"The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."
~ John A. Fisher

"War is the science of destruction."
~ John Abbott

"To secure peace is to prepare for war."
~ Carl von Clausewitz

"War is a profane thing."
~ Norman Schwarzkopf

"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."
~ Jose Narosky

"The true purpose of war is peace."
~ me

"We make war that we might live in peace."
~ Aristotle

"War does not determine who is right, only who is left."
~ Bertrand Russell

"It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it."
~ Douglas MacArthur

"In war nothing is impossible, provided you use audacity."
~ George Patton

"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving the peace."
~ George Washington

"Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it. . . . You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week."
~ Will Rogers

[m21sniper]

"Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war."
~ Winston Churchill

"It is more difficult to organize peace than to win a war; but the fruits of victory will be lost if the peace is not well organized."
~ Aristotle

"Dulce bellum inexpertis. — War is lovely for those who know nothing about it."
~ Erasmus Rotterdamus

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead."
~ Ernest Hemingway

"Who would desire peace, prepare for war. Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum"
~ Flavius Vegetius Renatus

"We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon- no alternative."
~ Golda Meir

"War loses a great deal of its romance after a soldier has seen his first battle."
~ John Singleton Mosby

"After war, It's easy to be happy.
~ me

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
~ Robert Lynd

"Chains are worse than bayonets."
~ Douglas Jerrold

"Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue."
~ Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

"Steady boys. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance" ~Major General John Sedgwick's last words, 9 May, 1864, just before he was shot dead by a Confederate sharpshooter

"The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea."
~ John Adams

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
~ Voltaire

"Kill no more pigeons than you can eat."
~ Benjamin Franklin

"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."
~ Winston Churchill

"I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again."
~ Bill Maher

"So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs."
~ Elbert Hubbard

"Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another over it."
~ George Bernard Shaw

"I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable."
~ Henry David Thoreau

"That which does not kill me had better be able to run away damn fast."
~Me

"Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses."
~ Simone Weil

"You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times each day."
~ Ambrose Bierce

"I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4000 Cubans, who are trained to kill me, so don't think for one second that you can come down here, flash your badge and make me nervous."
~ Jack Nicholson/Col. Nathan R. Jessop in A Few Good Men (1992)

"The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is also in ours."
~ Sigmund Freud

"it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others."
~ Voltaire

"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."
~Voltaire

"Those who can make you believe absurdities
can make you commit atrocities."
~Voltaire

"Liberty of thought is the life of the soul."
~Voltaire

"Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law."
~Voltaire

"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?"
~Voltaire

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
~Voltaire

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
~Voltaire

"I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms."
!Voltaire

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it."
~Voltaire

"God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well."
~Voltaire

"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
~Voltaire

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
~Voltaire

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."
~Voltaire

"Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause."
~Voltaire

"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other."
~Voltaire

“The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack it seemed, as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor, that I had been caught in the Apocalypse. The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.”
~Former Viet Cong Guerilla, Truong Nhu Tang

"My aim was to whip the rebels. To humble their pride. To follow them to their innermost recesses, and to make them fear and dread us. 'Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom'"
~William Tecumseh Sherman

"altus volo mugio extraho"(High Speed Low drag)

"I got tired of coming up with last minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other ****ing people."
"Let this be a learning experience, gentleman. If you resist we will kill you and the man next to you. Now move out of here in an orderly fashion."
"All of my life... Saturday morning cartoons. The best."
"Never been caught. Beep beep."
"You have faith. I don't!
"Make Honolulu glow in the dark."
"Hence the name: movement. It moves a certain distance, then it stops, you see? A revolution gets its name by always coming back around in your face. Welcome to the revolution!"
~William Stranex

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp
rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all this evening they would be reporting news from Hell before breakfast. "[/SIZE]
~WT Sherman

"For a war to be won, it is not enough for one side to claim victory. It is also necessary for one side to admit defeat. Yet in the Arab-Israeli wars, the side that had won every time was not allowed to claim victory, while the side that had lost was prevented from admitting defeat. Why? Because each time the United Nations had intervened to put the victor and the vanquished on an equal basis and lock them into a problematic situation in the name of a mythical quest for an impossible peace."
~Amir Taheri

"Forget rationality, there is nothing more vengeful than a terrified Soccer Mom."
~M21sniper

[m21sniper]

(Some of these are pre encoded for speedy use)

When the day comes that nobody comes back from a war, it will be because a war has at last been properly executed by all parties involved.

"I want you boys to hurry up and whip these Germans so we can get out to the Pacific to kick the shiit out of the purple-pissing Japanese, before the Goddamned MARINES get all the credit!"
~Patton

"War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over."
~WT Sherman

"I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it (regardless)."
~WT Sherman

“Before we are through with them, the Japanese language will only be spoken in hell.”
~General Curtis Lemay - Strategic Air Command

"You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting."
~Ulysses S. Grant - General of the Army and US President.

"I have never advocated war except as a means of peace."
~General George S. Patton.

"Kill Japs!!! Kill Japs!!! Kill Japs!!!"
~William "Bull" Halsey

“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
~US Grant

“If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.”
~US Grant

“In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.”
~US Grant

“I never held a council of war in my life. I heard what men had to say - the stream of talk at headquarters - but I made up my own mind, and from my written orders my staff got their first knowledge of what was to be done. No living man knew of my plans”
~US Grant

“No other terms than unconditional and immediate surrender. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”
~US Grant

“I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”
~US Grant

“I have made it a rule of my life to trust a man long after other people gave him up, but I don't see how I can ever trust any human being again.”
~US Grant

“If you see the President, tell him from me that whatever happens there will be no turning back.”
~US Grant

“Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.”
~US Grant

"Sometimes a good war is better than a bad peace."
~Me

"Ride now... Ride now... Ride... Ride for ruin... and the world's end! Death! Death! Death! "
~Theoden King

"The board is set... the pieces are moving"
~Gandalf

"It's the deep breath before the plunge."
~Gandalf

"So it begins, the great battle of our time"
~Gandalf

"Men want to be like me, women want to be with me. You can't hang with me, you got nothing on me. I don't fear you...i fear no man that breathe's the same air as me!"
~me

"You, my friend, have more outbursts than a Special ed student with terrets syndrome and an expired prescription plan."
~me

"The reason the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis."
~from a post-war debriefing of a German General

"Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth."
~Iron Mike Tyson

"The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinese or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other amiable characteristics, the Russian has no regard for human life and they are all out sons-of-biitches, barbarians, and chronic drunks."
~General George S. Patton

"The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."
~Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).

"It seems to me a certainty that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of the Arab woman are the outstanding causes for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have been developing."
~Gen. George S. Patton, Jr

“lies, damned lies, and statistics”
~Mark Twain.

[speeder]

Rick, those are great. You should check some Dorothy Parker, she was the best. She said things like, "He could bore the ass hole into a wooden hobby horse..."

[m21sniper]

I'm partial to Churchill quotes myself.

[Bill Douglas]

Another one for Sniper; was it Stormin' Norman who said "The idea is not to die for your country, but have the other chap die for his."

"I drew upon my fine command of the English language and said nothing" Oscar Wilde.

"Don't tell anyone, and who ever you tell, tell them not to tell anyone either" Bill Douglas.

[m21sniper]

"The object of war is not to die for your country, it's to make the other poor bastard die for his."
~George S. Patton

[ODDJOB UNO]

that was enjoyable english. from some very interesting figures.

patton was is and always will be a role model for me. ie. lead/follow or get the HELL OUTTA MY WAY!

[m21sniper]

There are some really juicy Patton quotes in the ones i posted above. He didn't like the Russians. LOL....

[BeyGon]

Pardon my redundancy W.C. Fields

Pardon my redundancy W.C. Fields

Pardon my redundancy W.C. Fields

Pardon my redundancy W.C. Fields

Pardon my redundancy W.C. Fields

Pardon my redundancy W.C. Fields

[Talewinds]

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you survive."
- Mark Twain

“I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”
-George Washington


"The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep," George Washington wrote. "Few know the predicament we are in."

"It is better to deserve without receiving, than to receive without deserving"
-Robert Greene Ingersoll

"Pain is Temporary, quitting is forever."
-Lance Armstrong

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious"
-Uncredited

"Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our Master."
-Dwight Eisenhower

“When you drive a Boxster instead of a 911 everyone knows your life has not turned out quite as well as you had hoped.”
-Jeremy Clarkson

"Circumstances may cause interruptions and delays, but never lose sight of your goal."
-Mario Andretti

"It's easy to make a lot of money, if that's all you want to do is make a lot of money."
-Citizen Kane’s Mr. Bernstein

"The writing it would seem is on the wall. And what is written is that the venerable and venerated 911 is in the twilight of its years. ... It's difficult to see the demand or the car lasting more than a couple more years. ... The 911 is as good as it can be made"
-Road and Track, August 1980

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
-Thomas Jefferson

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both"
-Benjamin Franklin

"Character is much easier kept than recovered."
-Thomas Paine

"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."
-John Wooden

"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
-Alexis de Tocqueville

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”
-Vince Lombardi

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character”
-Albert Einstein


“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

“Success is not the key to happiness, rather, happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
-Albert Schweitzer

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
-Harry Truman

"Everything I lacked in knowledge and experience I tried to make up for with watchfulness and industry"
-Nathaniel Greene confiding in John Adams

[cl8ton]

Anyone on Twitter read this guys tweets? Funny stuff...
shiotmydadsays

[craigster59]

To do is to be. Socrates
To be is to do. Jean-Paul Sartre, Plato
To be or not to be. William Shakespeare's Hamlet
Do-be-do-be-do. Frank Sinatra
Do be a Do Bee, don't be a Don't Bee. Miss Connie from Romper Room
Scooby Dooby Doo. Scooby Doo
Yabba Dabba Doo. Fred Flintstone
Inka Dinka Doo. Jimmy Durante
Boop Boop be Doop Betty Boop
De do do do, de da da da. The Police
Doo Wah Diddy. Manfred Mann
Doh! Homer Simpson
I am what I do. Martin Buber
Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am.) Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
I yam what I yam. Popeye
I am. God
God is dead! Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead! God

[equality72521]

Originally Posted by cl8ton

Anyone on Twitter read this guys tweets? Funny stuff...
shiotmydadsays

That's awesome!

[craigster59]

There doing a TV pilot starring Wm Shatner based on that.

[s_wilwerding]

"Sometimes a good war is better than a bad peace."
~Me

This is a variation on a Studs Terkel quote, which is that "Any peace is not necessarily better than any war."

[Tobra]

"For every pig, there is a pig fucher."

John Startz, MD

[MattKellett]

I'm also a fan of Churchill's quotes and none more than this one, of which my history teacher was fond of saying in class:

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill

[cashflyer]

So much of Patton's speech was edited that many find it interesting to read the unedited version. So, here: The Famous Patton Speech