John May > John's Quotes

“Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea.
Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“If I was your wife, I would poison your coffee."

"Madam, if I was your husband, I would drink it!”
― Lady Astor and Winston Churchill

“(Exchange with Winston Churchill)
Churchill explains that having a woman in Parliament was like having one intrude on him in the bathroom, to which the Lady Astor retorted, "Sir, you are not handsome enough to have such fears".”
― Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor

“Lady Astor was also said to have responded to a question from Churchill about what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball by saying, "Why don't you come sober, Prime Minister?"
(Reported exchange with Winston Churchill)”
― Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor

“Classic Insults—The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
    She said, "If you were my husband I'd poison your tea."
    He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
    "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.”
― Eleanor Gustafson

“If I were married to you, I’d put poison in your coffee,” Lady Astor once famously remarked to Winston Churchill. “If I were married to you,” he replied, “I’d drink it.”
― Anonymous

“[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.)

What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine."

A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'

“The problem with the illiberal left is that it believes a “progressive” take on issues is an objective take, and cannot conceive that there are other legitimate points of view. As William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, a liberal is someone who claims to be open to all points of view—and then is surprised and offended to find there are other points of view.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'

“...my beloved Eudosia [a member of Buckley's household staff], who is Cuban, very large, quite old, and altogether superstitious, and speaks only a word or two of English (even though she has been with us for 19 years), is quite certain that the gentleman who raped the 16-year-old girl in New Caanan three years ago and escaped has successfully eluded the police only because of his resourceful determination to ravage Eudosia before he dies. Accordingly she demanded, and I gave her, a shotgun, into which I have inserted two empty shells. Still, Eudosia with blank cartridges is more formidable than Eugene McCarthy with The Bomb.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Cruising Speed: A Documentary

“Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace”
― William F. Buckley Jr.

“Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.

“Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.

“Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt. In those days the size of the national debt was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size. Mr. Roosevelt’s wisemen worried deeply about the mounting tension ...

And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a Maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe it to ourselves.” With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending. Anyone thenceforward who worried about an increase in the national debt was just plain ignorant of the central insight of modern economics: What do we care how much we - the government - owe so long as we owe it to ourselves? On with the spending. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect ...”
― William F. Buckley, Jr.

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”
― Groucho Marx

“Humor is reason gone mad.”
― Groucho Marx

“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.”
― Groucho Marx

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”
― Groucho Marx

“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
― Groucho Marx

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

“When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'.”
― Groucho Marx

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”
― Ernest Benn

“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.”
― Groucho Marx

“Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others.”
― Groucho Marx

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.”
― Groucho Marx

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”
― Groucho Marx