Quotations

"The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right." 

Edmund Burke

"To the man-in-the-street who, I'm sorry to say,

Is a keen observer of life,

The word intellectual suggests right away

A man who's untrue to his wife."
W.H. Auden

"Not heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r."

 Dryden translating Horace applies to Brexit.





"Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?"
Lord Byron, Don Juan




"Christians have killed each other quite persuaded

That all the apostles would have done as they did."
Ibid.


"A sleepy Venus seemed Dudu, 

Yet very fit to "murder sleep" in those, 

Who gazed upon her cheek's transcendent hue, 

Her Attic forehead, and her Phidian nose : 

Few angles were there in her form, 'tis true, 

Thinner she might have been, and yet scarce lose :

Thinner she might have been, and yet scarce lose 

Yet, after all, 't would puzzle to say where 

lt would not_spoil some separate charm to pare."

Ibid.

I remember a Spectator cartoon in which an ineffably languorous young man says to a languid beauty: 

I jumped from the working class to the upper class without landing in between.

To which languid beauty replies languidly: Then why are you wearing a diver's watch?