Top 100 Quotes

Here are the top 100 quotes from the Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations, as selected by the Oxford Dictionary team.

No coward soul is mine.

Emily Bront, 1846

100 classic quotes

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a
role.
Dean Acheson, 1962
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.
Lord Acton, 1887

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever
England.
Rupert Brooke, 1914
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle, 4th century BC

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a

heaven for?
Robert Browning, 1855

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil Armstrong, 1969

It's a great life if you don't weaken.

John Buchan, 1919

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in

possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, 1813

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil

to triumph
Edmund Burke (attributed, not found in his writings)

Revenge is a kind of wild justice.

Francis Bacon, 1635

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley.
Robert Burns, 1796

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.

Irving Berlin, 1942

I awoke one morning and found myself famous.

Lord Byron, 1824

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can

see more than they.
Bernard of Chartres, 12th century

Veni, vidi, vici [I came, I saw, I conquered].

Julius Caesar, 1st century BC

In the beginning was the Word.

Bible (St John's Gospel)
Politics is the art of the possible.
Otto von Bismarck, 1867
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
William Blake, 180410
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre [It is
magnificent, but it is not war].
Pierre Bosquet, 1854

It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you

don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.
Mrs Patrick Campbell, 1940
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder,
Printing, and the Protestant Religion.
Thomas Carlyle, 1838
The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterdaybut never
jam today.
Lewis Carroll, 1872
After forty a woman has to choose between losing her figure
or her face. My advice is to keep your face, and stay sitting
down.
Barbara Cartland, 1993

Reader, I married him.

Charlotte Bront, 1847

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Delenda est Carthago [Carthage must be destroyed].

Cato the Elder, 3rd century BC
Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness
towards anyone.
Edith Cavell, 1915

Honey, I just forgot to duck.

Jack Dempsey, 1926, having lost the World Heavyweight
title
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Charles Dickens, 1859

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself

mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
Raymond Chandler, 1944

Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the

angels.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1864

Let not poor Nelly starve.

Charles II, 1685
He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght.
Geoffrey Chaucer, 14th century

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in

Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, 1624

The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the

expense damnable.
Lord Chesterfield, on sex

'Excellent,' I cried. 'Elementary,' said he.

Arthur Conan Doyle; origin of the misquotation,
'Elementary, my dear Watson'.

When men stop believing in God they don't believe in

nothing; they believe in anything.
G. K. Chesterton, 1936

Great wits are sure to madness near allied.

John Dryden, 1681

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Winston Churchill, 1940

The times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan, 1964

The sinews of war: unlimited money.

Cicero, 1st century BC

Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children,

and cut their own fingers.
Arthur Eddington, 1944

War is nothing but the continuation of politics with the

admixture of other means.
Karl von Clausewitz, 1832-4

Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety nine per cent

perspiration.
Thomas Alva Edison, c.1903

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816

E=mc.
Albert Einstein, 1905 (usual form of his statement)

Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast.

William Congreve, 1697
Mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun.
Nol Coward, 1931
Variety's the very spice of life.
William Cowper, 1785

April is the cruellest month.

T. S. Eliot, 1922
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I
have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of
England too.
Elizabeth I, 1588
I'm glad we've been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the
East End in the face.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, 1940

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may

she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.

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There is no 'royal road' to geometry.

Euclid, 4th century BC

Martin Luther King, 1963

Never give a sucker an even break.

W. C. Fields, 1941

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing
theirs and blaming it on you.
Rudyard Kipling, 1910

Shaken and not stirred.

Ian Fleming, 1958

Gentlemen prefer blondes.

Anita Loos, 1925

Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he

wants so long as it is black.
Henry Ford, 1909

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?

Christopher Marlowe, 1593

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

E. M. Forster, 1910
All that matters is love and work.
Sigmund Freud, attributed
Two roads diverged in a wood, and II took the one less
travelled by.
Robert Frost, 1916

Fame is the spur.

John Milton, 1638
England expects that every man will do his duty.
Horatio Nelson, 1805
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal, 1670
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Alexander Pope, 1733

Nice work if you can get it, And you can get it if you try.
Ira Gershwin, 1937
He would, wouldn't he?
Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963
My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left
in the obscurity of a learned language.
Edward Gibbon, 1796
Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?
Duke of Gloucester, 1805

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933
O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to
deceive.
Sir Walter Scott, 1808

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it is written on.

Sam Goldwyn, 1974
Give me liberty, or give me death!
Patrick Henry, 1775
Clear your mind of cant.
Samuel Johnson, 1783
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
John Keats, 1818
Ask not what your country can do for youask what you
can do for your country.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1961

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Superhuman effort isn't worth a damn unless it achieves

results
Ernest Shackleton, 1916
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
William Shakespeare, 1601
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
George Bernard Shaw, 1903
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819

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Am I no a bonny fighter?
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886

Earth has not anything to show more fair.

William Wordsworth, 1807

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts

of love.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats, 1899

The lady's not for turning.

Margaret Thatcher, 1980
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, 1875-7.
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain, 1897 (popular version)
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes [I fear the Greeks even when
they bring gifts].
Virgil, 1st century BC
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it.
Voltaire (actually a later summary of his attitude rather
than his own words)
Publish and be damned.
Duke of Wellington, c.1825
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Mae West
To lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose
both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde, 1895
A week is a long time in politics
Harold Wilson, c.1964
Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a
hellhound.
P. G. Wodehouse, 1938
They think it's all overit is now
Kenneth Wolstenhome, closing moments of World Cup
Final, 1966.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is
to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf, 1929

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