“In opposition to his enervated gang of outcast wrecks you are able to marshal the flower and strength of all Italy.”
Cicero Selected Political Speeches [referring on the one hand to Catalina and on the other to the people of Rome]
“King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built one all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”
Monty Python and the Holy Grail quoted on www.imdb.com
“I have only one fault, namely, that I am evil.”
Another “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted by Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s in letter to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996
“That fellow was bred by a buzzard and hatched by the sun.”
Whit Boykin quoted by Reid Buckley in National Review April 21, 1997
“You have to have a lot of patience to learn patience.”
“Stanislaw Lec Polish writer (1909-66)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 9, 2013
“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