“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
Home page Searching for lost quotations
UPDATED 19 June 2008
Posted 25 January
2006
Q3534 A source for the anecdote about Lord Palmerston
saying (to Queen
Posted 24 March
2006
Q3546
What is the missing word here: ‘Gossip is the
–––– of sinners’?
Q3549
‘If you get the basics right – sleep, breathing and exercise
– all else follows’ – does anyone recognize this?
Q3550
‘And all the way from Canada came Cousin Cinnamon Bear’
– what is this, from a children’s story from long ago?
Posted 19 April 2006
Q3560 Is ‘He
only saw an armadillo once and never went to Argentina’ from a music-hall
song?
Q3564 Who originated the jibe: ‘He had a face like a tenement. Not so much lived-in as
squatted-in’?
Q3567 Does anyone else know this nursery rhyme (around since the 1880s at least):
‘Pining little Peter, he only knows one song / “I want it, oh I
want it, oh I want it”, all day long, / “I want it, oh I want it,
oh give it to me quick!” / ... What you want, my little Peter, is a tiny little stick’?
Q3571 What were the circumstances in which Lord Carrington said (during the
Q3575 Did anyone in particular say, ‘The best way to save/respect/defend
tradition is by changing it’?
Q3577 Has anyone in particular said, ‘The adventure begins when / where
you least expect it’?
Q3586 ‘He who looks to the past is blind in one eye but he who doesn’t
look to the past is blind in both eyes’ – an origin for this
(modern) proverbial saying?
Q3587 From which Victorian novel does this come: ‘She had turned the ugly
corner of thirty’?
Q3596 Any thoughts on the origin of this: ‘The reason why the weaker sex
is the stronger sex is that the stronger sex has an incredible weakness for the
weaker sex’?
Q3603 Has anyone else heard the expression ‘like a pig with small
coal’ to something crunchy (like pork crackling)?
Q3605 Seen displayed beside a rock formation in
Q3606 Does anyone else know these expressions: ‘What he can’t reach,
he jumps for’ (i.e. over-eager) and ‘If she were hung for beauty,
she’d die innocent’?
Q3608 A source for this inscribed on a wooden bench in
Q3616 Source and more of a poem remembered from childhood: ‘Tim Tompkins as a
rule was taught at home and school / To behave with perfect manners like a
gent. / But one day Tim sadly lapsed and his manners quite collapsed / And he poured marmalade in spoonfuls on the cat’?
Q3626 Where does this come from: ‘’Twill be more relief than pity to
mine eyes / To weep the final slumb’r’?
Posted 12 July
2006
Q3645 ‘Oh what a joy and also a pain it is to be the exception’ –
remembered from the 1960s but an origin?
Q3646 Who said something like: ‘Because I was fortunate enough to have
been brought up in the true religion, I never had any religious doubts’?
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”’?
Posted 12
September 2006
Q3667 Adopt thou the medium / ’Tis the Golden
Rule. / Nor aspire to the wit / Nor descend to the
Fool – Cowper The Conversation
or what?
Q3670 Did the Duke of
Posted 17 October
2006
Q3677 A source for ‘Out of my way, peasants!’ – and usage, perhaps in a film?
Posted 29 March
2007
Q3724 ‘Hope has two beautiful
daughters. Their names are anger
and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not
remain the way they are.’
This is widely ascribed to
Q3730 Foulkes’s
Law Of Random Results ‘In
parenthood, as in business, politics and war, the correlation between the
efforts of the people in charge and the results, whether dazzling or
disastrous, is negligible.’ (Quoted by K Whitehorn. The Observer. 3 Aug 1986) Where did she get it from?
Q3732 Durlston Country Park, Swanage,
has 19th century inscription: ‘Look round and read great nature’s
open book’. Is this original?
Q3734 Information, please, about a music-hall song entitled
‘Lord Lovat’s Red Rose’?
Q3737 ‘He ran a pin in Gwendolyn / In
Posted 10 May 2007
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?
Q3744 An origin for ‘I don’t care if I’m in the minority /
who is in the majority, as long as I get to write the minutes’?
Posted 27 May 2007
Q3746 Tolstoy is often quoted as having written ‘Whilst there are
slaughterhouses there will be battlefield’ – but where did he say
it?
Posted 30 May 2007
Q3750 The line ‘You can’t know
where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been’
is in the song ‘Ain’t Nothing Cooler Than
the Blues’ on a Hitman Blues Band album
(2000). Had it
been used before this?
Posted 6 June 2007
Q3752 Where does the phrase ‘Hordes, Frobisher, hordes’ come from
– a sea captain in a film?
Posted 18 June
2007
Q3756 ‘Play it again Sam’ is famously not spoken
in
Q3758 Who in particular said, ‘Irony is wasted on the stupid’? Swift has been mentioned.
Posted 3 July 2007
Q3764 Did anyone in particular proclaim
‘Adaptability is the essence of survival’?
Q3766 Was it Ben Jonson who said something about everyone who lives in
Q3768 Who said ‘Only servants apologize’? Alan Clark MP?
Q3769
Who said, ‘Everything is like physics: all the rest is
accounting’?
Posted 25 July
2007
Q3775 Who wrote the line, ‘Even the wind seemed out of breath ... ’?
Q3778 ‘Progress is both inevitable and
disillusioning’ – said who?
It is quoted in the novel The CID
Room by Peter Alding.
Q3779 From a Victorian diarist? – ‘ ... had
a glance at a cold chicken and a bottle of claret before retiring to
bed.’
Posted 8 August
2007
Q3784 Where does the term ‘the Disraeli effect’ come from? It refers to the ability of politicians
on the right to push through liberal policies more easily (i.e. Nixon opening
up relations with
Q3785 Where does ‘By my troth, quoth Lancelot [or Launcelot], this is an dreadful place’ come
from? It was thought to be in Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur, but
can’t be found there.
Posted 1 October
2007
Q3801
‘Every man is an effect of the past, a manifestation
of the present and a cause of the future’ – a source?
Posted 26 October 2007
Q3808
Father to son: ‘I feel the pressing / pressings of
mortality. You stand between me and
... ’? Christopher Fry has
been suggested.
Posted 17 December 2007
Q3833 What
is the origin of this verse: ‘Sometimes I think the oyster’s what /
I most decidedly am not. / How wonderful if I might learn / To
be as still and taciturn. / It builds a pearl within its shell / Instead of
letting forth a yell / When irritated, while I chatter/ And
fume at things that do not matter. / If only I were like the oyster / Residing
calmly in its cloister. / If only I could be akin / When
something gets beneath my skin’?
Posted 5 February 2008
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
Posted 4 March 2008
Q3867 What
is the song about ‘Women, the slugs on the cabbage of life ... Bringers
of trouble and causers of strife’?
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?
Q3871
‘Times is hard – send chocolate’ –
what is this, a message home during the First World War?
Posted 1 April 2008
Q3881 Where
in P.G. Wodehouse is the Taj Mahal
described as ‘a pretty nifty little tomb – but draughty’
(this is not the tomb mention in The
Clicking of Cuthbert)?
Posted 23 April 2008
Q3883 A
poem beginning ‘Look around. / Up in the air and on the ground. / Is this the way you wanted your enemies to pay?’ may
be by a Second World War poet. Any
suggestions who the poet was?
Q3885 In
Kipling’s Stalky & Co. is this: ‘M’Turk climbed on the railings, where he held forth
like the never-wearied rook’ – to what is this an allusion?
Q3886 Did
G.E. Lessing write ‘What is first said as a joke is later meant
seriously’ in
Q3887 How
did the saying ‘Their Gods are not our Gods’ arise?
Posted 29 May 2008
Q3888 A quotation about
statistics suggesting that one can employ the most sophisticated methodology
but it all comes down to the village postmaster filling in forms and putting
anything he damn well pleases?
Q3893 What
is the origin of the term ‘dog hanging’ for a public gathering like
a wedding?
Q3894 Has
anyone written on the origin of these two stock market / investment / Wall
Street maxims: ‘Sell in May and go away’ and ‘Fortunes are
made when blood flows in the streets’?
Posted 4 June 2008
Q3901
‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to
fail’ is mostly attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but is there any
evidence he included it in any of his proverb books?
Q3902 An
origin for this exclamation: ‘May courage abound with cheerfulness and
the day end well’?
Posted 19 June 2008
Q3907 A
possible starting point for the journalistic advice: ‘Never let the facts
get in the way of a good story’?
Q3909
Within the last year or two what did Tony Blair say about being
Prime Minister along the lines of ‘This job is like having your arse
kicked morning, noon and night’?
Home page Searching for
Lost Quotations
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