“usually to be found nailing his colors to the fence”.

Humphrey Carpenter regarding former Church of England Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, quoted in National Review October 14, 1996

“He was nothing if not straightforward – and he was not straightforward.”

A “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted in a letter from Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996

“Once, at a public meeting, some bad poet from out of the crowd handed Sulla an epigram the man had written about him, with every other line longer than it ought to be. Sulla, who was conducting an auction, immediately ordered a reward to be paid the scribbler from its proceeds – on the condition that he never wrote anything again!”

Cicero Selected Political Speeches

“When the locusts come, they devour everything.”

Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry

“the immortal phrase ‘a comprehensive background of ignorance,’ a condition I suppose I exemplified at the time.”

This quotation comes from somebody named Zimmerman and the quoted phrase is from George Edison, his tutor at Trinity College, University of Toronto; alas my note to myself on its origin is otherwise incomplete.

In my latest National Post column I say the WE scandal must not put us to sleep with its characteristically Canadian dull murkiness.

“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

"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].