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• What is an adult? A child blown up by age - Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 86) French Writer

• They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn - Laurence Binyon (1869 - 1943) British Poet

• Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care: youth like summer morn, age like winter weather: Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare - William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) English Dramatist

• We do not necessarily improve with age: for better or worse, we become more like ourselves - Sir Peter Hall (1930 - ) British Theatre Director

• Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned - Gerald Brenan (1894 - 1987) British Writer

• I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am - Bernard Baruch (1870 - 1965) American Financier and Presidential Advisor

• What do the ravages of time not injure? Our parents' age (worse than our grandparents') has produced us, more worthless still, who will soon give rise to a yet more viscous generation - Horace (Quintus horatius Flaccus 65 - 8 B.C.) Roman Poet

• The wiser mind mourns less for what age takes away, than what it leaves behind - William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) British Poet

• It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year - Tom Lehrer (1928 - ) American Teacher and Songwriter

• At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves - George Orwell (Eric Blair 1903 - 1950) British Novelist

• I have come that they might have life and have it to the full - Jesus (6 B.C. - 27 A.D. approx.)

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• America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation - Georges Clemenceau (1841 - 1929) French Statesman

• America .. where law and customs alike are based on the dreams of spinsters - Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) British Philosopher

• Long Island represents the Americans' idea of what God would have done with nature if he'd had the money - Peter Fleming (1907 - 71) British Writer

• America is a large friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair - Arnold Toynbee (1889 - 1975) British Historian

• Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that it the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world - Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924) American Statesman

• There's not a single crowned head in Europe whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of any parish in America - Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) American Statesman

• What a blessing this smoking is! perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America - Arthur Helps (1813 - 75) British Historian

• Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam - Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 81) Canadian Sociologist

• In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is - Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) American Writer

• God bless the USA, so large, so friendly and so rich - W.H. Auden (1907 - 73) British Poet

• The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth - Malcolm Bradbury (1932 - ) British Academic and Novelist

• The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof - Mary McCarthy (1912 - 89) American Novelist

• My kingdom is not of this world - Jesus (6 B.C. - 27 A.D. approx.)

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• Never trust a man who, when left in a room with a tea cosy, doesn't try it on. - Billy Connolly (1942 - ) Comedian [submitted by Jude P]

• As our life is very short, so it is very miserable, and therefore it is well it is short - Jeremy Taylor (1613 - 67) English Theologian

• Life is an incurable disease - Abraham Cowley (1618 - 67) English Poet

• The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on - Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) British Poet

• There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live - Jean de la Bruyère (1645 - 96) French Satirist

• Books are good in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life - Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 94) Scotish Writer

• For life is but a dream whose shapes returen, some frequently, some seldom, some by night and some by day - James Thomson (1834 - 82) British Poet

• Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings - Eugene O'Neill (1888 - 1953) American Dramatist

• Life isn't all beer and skittles - Thomas Hughes (1822 - 96) British Novelist

• When we have found how the nucleus of atoms are built up, we shall have found the greatest secret of all - except life - Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937) New Zealand Physicist

• Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises -Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902) British Writer

• Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind - Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) British Philosopher

• I am the way, the truth and the life - Jesus (6 B.C. - 27 A.D. approx.)

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• ... the illustrious place, built by the skill of the ancient Romans, called throughout the world the great city of London - Bishop Helmstan of Winchester (c.839)

• I would sell London if I could find a suitable purchaser - Richard 1 (1157 - 1199) King of England: comment made while raising money for the third crusade.

• Provided that the city of London remains as at present, the Clearing-house of the world - Joseph Chamberlain (1836 - 1914) British Politician

• London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1856 - 1930) British Writer

• London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow at once is deaf and loud, and on the shore vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) British Poet

• When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford - Samuel Johnson (1709 - 84) British Lexicographer

• The British loathe the middle-aged and I await rediscovery at 65, when one is too old to be in anyone's way - Sir Roy Strong (1935 - ) British Art Crtic

• This sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we are British, thank God - Lord Montgomery (1887 - 1976) British Field Marshall: comment on a bill to relax the laws against homosexuals.

• There are no countries in the world less known by the British than these selfsame British Isles - George Henry Borrow (1803 - 81) British Writer

• The British love permanence more than they love beauty - Hugh Casson (1810 - ) British Architect

• Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is the tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist - Francis Kilvert (1840 - 79) British Diarist and Clergyman

• A city set on a hill cannot be hidden - Jesus (6 B.C. - 27 A.D. approx.)

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• Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together - Thomas Szasz (1920 - ) American Psychiatrist

• Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles - George Mikes (1912 - 1987) Hungarian born writer and humourist

• In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female - Cyril Connolly (1903 -74) British Journalist

• Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round - David Lodge (1935 - ) British Author

• Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did - James Baldwin (1924 - 87) American Writer

• The Christian view on sex is that it is, indeed, a form of Holy Communion - John Robinson (1919 - 1983) Bishop of Woolwich

• It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished: the sex novel is now normal - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) Irish Dramatist and Critic

• It has to be admitted that we English have sex on the brain, which is a very unsatisfactory place to have it - Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 - 90) British Writer and Editor

• The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfilment - Malcolm Muggeridge

• I do not condemn you, go and sin no more - Jesus (6 B.C. - 27 A.D. approx.) to the adulterous woman

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• There never was a good war, or a bad peace - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 90) Statesman

• Men love war because it allows them to look serious. It is the one thing that stops women laughing at them - John Fowles (1926 - ) British Novelist

• War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future - Pope John Paul ll (Karol Wojtyla: 1920 - )

• Wars, conflicts, it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify - Charles Chaplin (Sir Charles Spencer C; 1889 - 1977) British Film Actor

• History is littered with wars which everybody 'knew' would never happen - Enoch Powell (1912 - 1998) British Politician

• This war, like the next war, is a war to end war - David Lloyd George (1863 - 1945) British Statesman

• War makes for better reading than peace - A J P Taylor (1906 - 90) British Historian

• War is like love; it always finds a way - Bertoit Brecht (1898 - 1956) German Dramatist

• In starting and waging war, it is not right that matters but victory - Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) German Dictator

• I'm sick of war for many reason; three of them will do: It's 1815, I'm French, and this is Waterloo - Mel Brooks in 'To Be Or Not To Be' (Melvyn Kaminsky 1926 - ) American Film Director/Actor

• You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come -
  Jesus (6 B.C. - 27 A.D.; roughly)

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