Sandi Toksvig > Quotes

“When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. 'This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar' she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’ It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?”
― Sandi Toksvig

“Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also an excellent cartoon by Disney.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Heroines & Harridans

“You must stand up for everyone’s right to be who they are— otherwise you may find one day that it is you who is singled out, who is seen as different, and then there will be no one to defend you.” After”
― Sandi Toksvig, Hitler's Canary

“I used to look at Jinks and marvel at her smooth complexion, but over the years I have come to realise that she has been spared wrinkles by virtue of never having succumbed to heavy thought.”
― Sandi Toksvig, The Travels of Lady Bulldog Burton

“Apparently advertisers don't like clever or insightful television programmes because such fare encourages people to discuss what they've seen during the ad breaks. This would explain much about the current state of broadcasting.”
― Sandi Toksvig, The Chain of Curiosity

“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), British politician”
― Sandi Toksvig, Peas & Queues: The Minefield of Modern Manners

“The killing of time is the worst of murders. Daniel Defoe”
― Sandi Toksvig, Peas & Queues: The Minefield of Modern Manners

“Most people on the bus seem to have no interest in looking out of the window for inspiration. They are engrossed in their phones. People constantly checking their messages seems to me rather like endlessly opening the front door just in case an unexpected visitor has turned up.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“The planet has been taken over by testosterone-fuelled madness.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“I had failed to follow the fundamental school rule that you ought to turn up every day. The truth is I found it boring and I don’t do well with that. I have learned to deal with hurt, embarrassment, pain of many sorts, but boredom in this world seems unforgivable.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“For years the physicist Donna Strickland was not deemed notable enough for an entry. She finally got her place in Wikipedia on the day she won the Nobel Prize. Surely that cannot be what it takes to be remembered? No man is held to such a standard.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“I love passion perhaps more than anything. I think life is nothing without it and we all strive to feel it every day for those we love and for what we do, and even if it’s just for sausages it is a fine thing.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“Mary was a famous fairground attraction but she doesn't really count as she rather famously turned out to be a monkey.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Heroines & Harridans

“Strictly speaking it (Virago) refers to a heroic, warlike woman, but there are many other less flattering synonyms - biddy, bitch, dragon, fishwife, fury, harpy, harridan, hussy, muckraker, scold, she-devil, siren, spitfire, termagant, tygress, vituperator, vixen, wench....
I long to be a combination of all of them because every one of those epithets sounds like a woman who would stand up for herself.”
― Sandi Toksvig

“In October 2015 Emily Temple-Wood, one of the site’s long-standing editors, told the Atlantic magazine that she had identified almost 4400 female scientists who met Wikipedia’s inclusion standards but did not have a page. For years the physicist Donna Strickland was not deemed notable enough for an entry. She finally got her place in Wikipedia on the day she won the Nobel Prize. Surely that cannot be what it takes to be remembered? No man is held to such a standard.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“It never ceases to amaze me how many women struggle with self-belief while the vast majority of men have no trouble with it at all.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“I can’t see words without reading them.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“Sailors will tell you that seasickness comes in two stages – in the first you think you’re going to die and in the second you’re very afraid you’re not going to.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“Then we got a new games mistress called Miss Smith. She was young and good fun. She taught dance, loved music and a laugh. She also talked about God. A lot. She had been ‘born again’, which seemed an unpleasant thought.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“I am reminded of the Sunday school class who were asked to draw pictures of their favourite Bible stories. The teacher admired many sheep and angels and then she came to a small boy who had drawn four people on an aeroplane. She asked him which story it was meant to represent. ‘This,’ he replied, ‘is the flight to Egypt.’ The teacher nodded and pointed to the four people. ‘So, who do we have here?’ ‘That’s Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus,’ replied the boy. ‘And the fourth person?’ asked the teacher. ‘Oh, that’s Pontius the Pilot.”
― Sandi Toksvig, The Chain Of Curiosity

“Why does anyone ever decide to be an artist of any kind? It is the strangest life to endlessly put your head above the parapet and then wait to be shot down.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“Do you even know the difference between a girder and a joist?’ he asks pompously. ‘Ah, well, yes,’ answers the Irishman in his laconic way. ‘Goethe wrote Faust and Joyce wrote Ulysses.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“I got the part in the film and quickly learned how unimportant I was. It was shot in a rather grand house in Hampstead. You could tell the owners were rich. The place was decorated with that disregard for either fashion or comfort which only the British who inherit wealth seem to manage.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“As Charlotte Brontë said, ‘Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.’ Parts”
― Sandi Toksvig, Peas & Queues: The Minefield of Modern Manners

“Margrie himself was made the first ‘Mr London’, a title which has the pleasing sense of them having had a swimsuit round in the competition. Margrie believed that he was a perfect example of a new evolutionary stage in human development, which he called Peckham Man. It never ceases to amaze me how many women struggle with self-belief while the vast majority of men have no trouble with it at all. He must have been insufferable.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“I wonder if the idea of having all knowledge so easily available has made us intellectually lazy. I’m not the first to worry. Socrates objected to the invention of writing. He thought it would erode memory. He quoted from the wisdom of King Ammon, who said to the Egyptian god Theuth, the inventor of letters, ‘this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness … they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters … they will appear to be omniscient but will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality’. We can so easily be misled into thinking we have knowledge when actually often all we have is data.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“He made money in pawnbroking and moneylending, which is never nice, but also traded in goat skins – which is at least unusual.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“The woman next to me has no laces in her shoes and looks exhausted. She carries her belongings in a faded carrier bag. I cannot tell how old she is. Somewhere between forty and death.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“In Denmark”
― Sandi Toksvig, The Chain Of Curiosity

“What kind of books do you want?’ the librarian enquired. ‘Local history,’ I said. She shook her head and muttered darkly, ‘They’ll be scattered.’ I wasn’t sure what that meant. It’s the sort of thing people say at crematoriums, not libraries. She kept staring at me, so I left without any books.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus