Quotes to inspire and reflect

It doesn’t matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you’re hatched from a swan’s egg!

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.

Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

The Emperor’s new clothes.

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.

on expanding universities

They write about it.

More will mean worse.

Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;

Can get by without it.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work … I want to achieve it through not dying.

On bisexuality: It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me and she said ‘no’.

Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.

Committee—a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done

Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

I’m the greatest.

Countless chuckles of the waves of the sea.

Hell to ships, hell to men, hell to cities.

See in what peace a Christian can die. dying words to his stepson Lord Warwick

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

‘We are always doing’, says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.’

Sir Roger told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgement rashly, that much might be said on both sides.

A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.

From hence, let fierce contending nations know

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

What pity is it

When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,

And, pleased th’ Almighty’s orders to

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

The jaws of power are always opened to devour.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

A government of laws, and not of men.

Governing a large nation is like cooking a small fish.

The law, in all vicissitudes of government … will preserve a steady undeviating course … On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.

What you do not want done to you, do not do to other people.

The people are the foundation of the country, and food is of the highest importance to the people.