“A good newspaper,” said the writer Arthur Miller, “is a nation talking to itself.” Being a good newspaper, The Times strives to be exactly that ideal. Being intelligent, too, it realised some years ago that one way to promote that end was to make use of the words of interesting people talking to others. As a consequence, in the Daily Universal Register section of every edition, next to the birthdays, the anniversaries and the plashings of voles, there began to appear a stimulating quotation or saying of note, of which this volume is a selection.
Because the quotes which have appeared in the newspaper were assembled on random lines, this is not intended to be a traditional, comprehensive dictionary of famous quotations as such, though I hope it is nevertheless a valuable work of reference. Rather, the content has been grouped into common themes. Again, the hope is that, taken together in this way, these insights, musings and witty observations will provide food for thought. Those readers who wish to find quotes from specific people can easily do so by consulting the index at the back of the book.
Winston Churchill, the originator of a memorable line or two himself, believed it “a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations”. He may have been playing up his own inattentiveness as a schoolboy, but what can the rest of us gain from a ramble through the thoughts of greater minds? One thing is that they do think alike. Over the centuries, the same subjects and reflections recur, for after all much is constant in the human race. Often, too, even the words are similar, and at certain times in history seem to occur to people almost simultaneously. Was it William Faulkner or André Gide who said something about not being able to swim for new horizons without losing sight of the shore?
And, besides being treated to some world-class lectures in the essentials of philosophy, politics, success and common sense, there is the satisfaction (and surprise) of discovering how many expressions that we use every day are actually quotations. Who first said he was going from the sublime to the ridiculous? Napoleon, while leaving Russia. Who held that hell could be paved with good resolutions (often misquoted as good intentions)? That was Mark Twain. And was it a logistics company or the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen who advised that the difficult takes a little time, the impossible a little longer?
Similarly, it is good to be reminded of the proper context of phrases often cited without knowledge of to what they refer. Making the pips squeak, a favourite standby of politicians, initially had nothing to do with taxing the rich. It was coined in 1918 with regard to the scale of German reparations for the First World War.
When Stanley Baldwin talked of newspapers having “power without responsibility”, he was himself quoting his cousin Rudyard Kipling, and when his successor as prime minister returned from Germany holding in his hand “peace with honour”, he was referencing a remark of his mid-19th century predecessor, Lord John Russell.
In the preparation of the text, every effort has been made to attribute correctly the quotations chosen. Their sources have been given where they are known to be contemporaneous with or authored by the speaker. Where it might be helpful, an English translation is given from a foreign language.
Remembrance of Things Past? Nothing to do with Proust originally, it comes from a Shakespeare sonnet. Fools rush in; hope springs eternal; to err is human; even that Cup Final favourite sing-song about death’s sting – all 18th century poet Alexander Pope. Let us salute Samuel Johnson as a compiler of dictionaries, but I can’t agree with him that making – and reading – them is “dull work”.
James Owen