Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by British Authors - Page 20

I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

I still believe that music is one of the greatest gifts that God gave to man.

We need a foreign policy which responds to challenges like forced marriage, and which speaks to the particular needs of women and girls at risk of being sold into slavery.

Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.

My dad is a builder, and my mum's a nurse. They're just very normal people.

Constantly having to think about money is not nice. People used to say, 'Being rich doesn't make you happy'. And I'd think, 'I've got no electricity, nothing - tell that to my empty fridge'.

When a father of a daughter dies, you elevate them. And you sort of deify them.

It's infrequent that that happens - great performances and magical cinematography and great direction.

I think the people in this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.

I'm just not convinced that the British people I know and love are interested in revolution.

I was brought up a Muslim and I respect the religion I was born into, but I don't practise it. However, I do believe in thanking God for my happy life.

I want to stand up for Britain's national interests.

The first time I ever played Glastonbury I would have never have thought that a grime artist would have ever headlined it.

I wore an Urban Outfitters dress on my wedding day. It was one I had in the back of my wardrobe. It was white. We went to City Hall here in New York. I wore it with blue velvet boots my husband bought for me. I loved it. It was my favorite thing. It was chilled and spontaneous.

Like most girls, I suffered from pimples, too. I tried dozens of treatments but was never satisfied with any.

We urgently need a major programme of investment in renewable energy generation to tackle climate change.

I wish my dad or somebody had taught me how to fight and defend myself. Because you're very vulnerable if you can't stick up for yourself.

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.

I would go to school and try to talk to my mates about music and playing instruments and stuff, and they would turn around and go, 'What're you talking about? Shut up.' And I realised that I was the weird one.

I thought we were getting more liberal as a society, more inclusive and I'm gutted racism has come back stronger with Brexit, devastated and I feel Brexit promotes a racist attitude.

Brexit is not going to solve the causes of Brexit.

When you see players coming into the new season with injuries and already carrying strapping on various parts of their bodies in January, then it only serves to highlight how hard the sport is and how demanding the schedule can be. There really isn't an off-season and that's the nature of the beast.

Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.

I love painting. I love writing. I love creating and being around people who are creating.

I have always maintained you should be able to bench press and deadlift at least twice your body weight.

I'm a very keen baker; I pride myself on my cakes. I go along the classic sponge line, but I like to jazz it up: I've made some psychedelic birthday cakes.

Why shouldn't we want everybody to have a piece of Giles in their wardrobe?

Controlling the design of an everyday object is very satisfying.

Pressure is the biggest single factor in Test cricket.

Every organization has a responsibility to stamp out bullying and discrimination. From what I read and understand through various conversations, British Cycling recognize they've fallen short in a number of areas.

Sitting here at the beginning of the 21st century, we're only 200 years into the industrial revolution. We don't have an enormous dataset to draw on, so whatever shaped curve we're on, we're only at the beginning of it.

I do think evolution is an important aspect of keeping a tradition alive. If it freezes and remains very static in its form, it dies, and so a natural evolution has to occur.

One of the most exciting opportunities created by renewable energy technologies like solar is the ability to help the world's poorest develop faster - but more sustainably too.

Look what the Rumble in the Jungle did for Zaire. No one had ever heard of Zaire until then. After Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman for the title, no one forgets it.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite.

I was so glad when geek went from being a bad word to a good word.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

When you're in your 40s, you become more conscious of life being of limited duration and that you need to create memories and go on little adventures from time to time.

In the end, pragmatism requires a workable compromise. But none exists on Brexit.

Passing a beggar who asks for money causes discomfort - and so it should. The act of facing and acknowledging human suffering and hardship on this scale ought to imprint itself on a society that has such glaring divides in income and comfort.

At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

I am in a small minority as a black female with a disability. But I've shown that even with conditions like MS, it's not the setback that it has to be.

I think I'm a girl's girl in the sense that I support women a lot, and I'm definitely all for girl power, but I think I'm quite a tomboy at heart - even though I love my fashion and dressing up, I think my essence is very boyish.

Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.

I envisage there being absolutely no regulation whatsoever - no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights - for the smallest companies that are trying to get off the ground, in order to give them a chance.

I've a rare Turkish swimming cat.

We have the character of an island nation: independent, forthright, passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility, we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.

I think technical education and vocational skills and having a trade mean something.

My idea of sexy is that less is more. The less you reveal the more people can wonder.

There are some people who watch NASCAR for the highly skilled driving - but most people watch it for the crashes.

The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.

The great marriages are partnerships. It can't be a great marriage without being a partnership.

Private schools do confer other advantages, of course: whether it be networks, or a sense of confidence that can shade into a poisonous sense of social superiority.

If you're a likable person and you're passionate, then people are drawn to that wherever you are in the world.

Once, when I was playing a nude scene in an indifferent play in New York, a critic wrote, 'Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with too few flying buttresses.' Do you think that's fair?

Heathrow is in my constituency and I have been at both the Terminal 4 and Terminal 5 planning inquiries. At these inquiries my community has been assured by the inquiry inspectors, BAA and government ministers that each development would be the last piece of expansion of the airport because of its ever-increasing noise and air pollution.

I've accomplished more than I ever dreamed. But I'm hungry for more.