Pithy quotes

[Xema]

A friend who teaches high-school English put me up to this. What she seeks is short quotations that are examples of excellent use of the English language.

The quotes can be up to a short paragraph in length, though brevity is the soul of wit. They should be fully attributed when possible. The goal is not so much an admirable sentiment as a well-expressed one.

[silenus]

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”-- Winston Churchill: Speech made in the House of Commons as the Battle Britain peaked on August 20, 1940.

Lady Astor: “Winston, if I were your wife I’d put poison in your coffee.”
Winston: “Nancy, if I were your husband I’d drink it.”

This exchange is sometimes attributed to Winston’s good friend F.E. Smith, but in Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan’s *The Glitter and the Gold * she writes that the exchange occurred at Blenheim when her son was host.

Churchill was the master of the well-turned phrase.

[twickster]

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” (Oscar Wilde)

[Bosstone]

It isn’t the teat, it’s the tumidity. - William Safire, regarding an anti-pornography law

[Morgyn]

Hard to beat Sir Winston, but this one is a particular favourite of mine.

@James D. Nicoll

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. 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.

NB: As far as I know, this is the canonical quote and correct attribution, but I’ve heard enough variations that I must insert a Caveat Emptor.

[Xema]

Silenius, I think your first Churchill quote is the better candidate. The second is undeniably clever, but its language is rather ordinary.
One of my favorites: “She had the look of a beast that has just been thrown into a sawdust pit to fight for its life.” - Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[silenus]

“Peccavi.” - General Charles Napier, in his telegraph to London that he had conquered Sind.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Woody Allen: Yeth. Pith.

[Askance]

@John Donne

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

@H.L.Mencken

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”.

@Blaise Pascal

Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.

@C.K. Chesterton

As for sin, let us call it folly and have done with it, for until we call it folly we shall never have done with it. The conception of sin flatters us grossly. There is something grandiose in it that cannot but appeal to the child in every man. That we infinitesimal creatures, scrambling like ants over the face of this minor planet in pursuit of our personal aims - that we have it in our power to affront the majesty of the universe is a most preposterous, delightful fancy …

@Winston Churchill

It is the habit of the boa constrictor to besmear the body of his victim with a foul slime before he devours it; and there are many people in England, and perhaps elsewhere, who seem to be unable to contemplate military operations for clear political objects, unless they can cajole themselves into the belief that their enemy are utterly and hopelessly vile… This may be very comforting to philanthropic persons at home; but when an army in the field becomes imbued with the idea that the enemy are vermin who cumber the earth, instances of barbarity may very easily be the outcome. This unmeasured condemnation is moreover as unjust as it is dangerous and unnecessary.

HTH

[Chef_Troy]

@William F. Buckley

If enough of us are wrong, we’re right.

I call this “Buckley’s Law” – it applies to words like “flammable” that have entered the dictionary through sheer fatigue on the part of the lexicographers.

[Chef_Troy]

@Wilson Mizner

Many a live wire would be a dead one if it weren’t for his connections.

Mizner is also said to have described a dishonest politician by saying, “He’s the only man I know who’s had his pockets lined with plastic so he can steal soup.”

[Gatopescado]

“What the hell kind of Assfoolery is that?” -Gatopescado, during an argument with his wife.

[sneezy5660]

The wise man speaks because he has something to say; the fool because he has to say something.-Plato

This is my new favorite saying.

[Shodan]

@Mark Twain

Eschew surplusage.

Regards,
Shodan

[js_africanus]

“This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put.” —Winston Churchill

[Lakai]

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

~~Gilbert K. Chesterton

[js_africanus]

@Lakai

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

~~Gilbert K. Chesterton

Did he read The Wretched of the Earth?

[Typo_Knig]

“There are 500,000 words in the English language - and seven of them you cannot say on television.” - George Carlin

Your HS English teacher friend may be too fond of employment to want to go there, but I like the quote. More recent estimates are 1-2 million words in English (sorry, no cite). And now you can say anything on cable …

“What does the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand?
What does the mind do, each morning, waking?”
The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin

“A Ph.D. is not an inoculation against stupidity.” - Robert L. Park, Ph.D.

“They don’t call economics ‘the dismal science’ because it’s fair. They call it that because of Sir Eustis Dismal, the 18th Century Brittish economist who suggested making smokestacks out of children.” -John Hodgeman, The Daily Show Wed. 05/17/06

That last one is a joke, you do realize that, M-Okay?

[js_africanus]

@Typo Knig

“They don’t call economics ‘the dismal science’ because it’s fair. They call it that because of Sir Eustis Dismal, the 18th Century Brittish economist who suggested making smokestacks out of children.” -John Hodgeman, The Daily Show Wed. 05/17/06

That last one is a joke, you do realize that, M-Okay?

Technically, I think the last one was a good joke.

[Beadalin]

I loves me some Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. Here’s one from The Elephant’s Child:

Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake came down from the bank, and knotted himself in a double-clove-hitch round the Elephant’s Child’s hind legs, and said, “Rash and inexperienced traveller, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armour-plated upper deck” (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile), “will permanently vitiate your future career.”

That is the way all Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.