“Marvellous, old cock! I never realized Malvolio could be played as a bore.”
“what Lawrence Olivier once wickedly said to Alec Guinness” according to Tom Carson in The Atlantic Monthly September 2004
“How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that happens in life.”
Marcus Aurelius Meditations
“For they [John Smith’s audience] did believe in the spirit of the devil which, as everyone knows, is in all of us.”
Walter Lippman The Public Philosophy
“‘In any look toward 2050, you have the problem of trying to calculate how many babies those who are currently unborn are going to be having. You can’t do that.’”
Nicholas Eberstadt, quoted in “The Population Dud,” The Catholic World Report, May, 2002 according to Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 5 #8 (July/August 2002)
“In another illustration of dwarfed ambition, Whitby bills itself as ‘Durham’s Business Centre.’”
Christie Blatchford in National Post November 25, 2000
“Ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got no control over ‘cause, if you ain’t got no control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’. And it ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got control over ‘cause, if you got control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’.”
U.S. baseball player Mickey Rivers, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995
“how much human nature loves the knowledge of its existence, and how it shrinks from being deceived, will be sufficiently understood from this fact, that every man prefers to grieve in a sane mind, rather than to be glad in madness.”
St. Augustine City of God
"That is the worst idea... since Abraham Lincoln said, ‘I'm sick of kicking around the house all day, let's go take in a show.’"
Edmund Blackadder in Black Adder Goes Forth [it turns out he actually called it “the worst idea in the history of entertainment” according to https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526713/characters/nm0000100 - such are the perils of checking quotations].