“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
SEARCHING FOR LOST QUOTATIONS
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An important function of the Newsletter – and, indeed, of the radio show – is the tracking down of sources for quotations that have been asked about by readers and listeners. The same research method is applied to the origins and use of phrases and sayings. Since the list was begun in December 1987, there has been something like a 47% clear-up rate – though recently thanks to e-mail, the Internet and some dedicated sleuths – the rate has gone up to 59%. Many people have turned to it as a last resort, having exhausted all other lines of inquiry. But some queries resolutely remain unsolvable – or at least that is how it seems until someone stumbles across the answer, in some cases years after the query was originally posted.
In response to requests from ardent sleuths, I have drawn up a list of what one of them termed the ‘hard core’ of queries that are still giving problems.
If you can supply chapter and verse – and that is what we are after, not
vague surmise – for any of these quotations or phrases, then you may rest
assured that you will put someone out of his or her misery. It is helpful if you can refer to the query
number when providing information about it.
E-mail your information to the addresses given in HOW TO GET IN TOUCH
WITH “QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”. All contributions will be acknowledged
individually. Selected highlights from
the results are printed in the Newsletter.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q20 A precise source for the 4th Earl of
Q22 ‘Being President is a fine and dandy job, but what do I do in the afternoon’? – not Calvin Coolidge, apparently, but whom?
Q43 Any pre-1938 use of the phrase, ‘The butler did it!’
Q103 Who wrote: ‘Il mondo in parte disegnar si puole: / Ma pazzo è quel, che dominar lo vuole’?
Q209 A source for: ‘They could take a hint as well as Queen Elizabeth’?
Q232 An original source for Augustus John’s remark to Nina Hamnet: ‘We have become, Nina, the sort of people our parents warned us about’? Or the identity of the person who quoted it in a British newspaper in 1975-6?
Q247 A source for: ‘Everything’s done in my own little way / My own little tea-set, my own little tray’?
Q287 ‘We like our leaders ruthless, dedicated, uncompromising, demanding of themselves, our officers and us, in that order. We don’t mind what they do in their private lives so long as we come first. We will adopt their goals as our own, defend them from their critics, sacrifice our own interests and suffer reverses with them.’ Source?
Q338 Was it Wittgenstein who said: ‘The desire to classify betrays an inadequate mind’?
Q343 ‘A man can stand by a fair stream all day and curse it as foul and by nightfall the water would still run pure’ – might be from Virgil’s Aeneid or Georgics?
Q376 ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello clouds’ – origin or
citations before the Nigel Molesworth books in the
1950s.
Q416 Georges Feydeau, the French writer of farces (1862-1921), said: ‘In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped.’ What is the connection, if any, between this remark and He Who Gets Slapped – the English title of the play (1914) by the Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev?
Q524 Who referred to a woman of generous proportions as being ‘designed to give shade to her young’?
Q565 A source, please, for the story told about the former British Prime
Minister Harold Wilson, as here in the Glasgow Herald (26 May 1995): ‘He was a great man for one-liners ... [A]
little girl started crying while Wilson was addressing an election rally. The mother went to take her out of the hall,
but
Q572 ‘When there is a great cry that something should be done, you can depend on it that something remarkably silly probably will be done’ – this was once attributed in the Herald Tribune to ‘a great English statesman from the nineteenth century’ – who he?
Q579 Gemma O’Connor once presented a delightful entertainment with the title Ferocious Chastity. This was taken from a remark – ‘the ferocious chastity of Irishwomen’ – reputedly contained in a letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels. But where is it?
Q597 The film of Evita has made me think again of
Tim Rice’s lyrics for the song ‘Don’t Cry for Me,
Q616 Where do the lines come from which appear on the fly
leaf of John Buchan’s novel A Prince of
the Captivity (1933) – ‘As when a Prince / Of dispers’d
Israel, chosen in the shade, / Rules by no canon save his inward light, / And
knows no pageant, save the pipes and shawms / Of his
proud spirit’?
Q729 An actual source for the famous phrasebook line, ‘My postillion has been struck by lightning’. In Karl Baedeker’s The Traveller’s Manual of Conversation in Four Languages (1836 ed.) is: ‘Postilion, stop; we wish to get down; a spoke of one of the wheels is broken.’ In an 1886 edition I have found: ‘Are the postilions insolent?; the lightning has struck; the coachman is drunk.’ From these examples it is quite clear that the preposterous phrase could quite likely have appeared in Baedeker or similar, but where? In 1935, the phrase was said to come from a Dutch phrasebook.
Q764 ‘Having distributed our guineas [?] to the populace, we drove on to the sound of renewed cheering’ – what is this? I recall someone using it in 1965.
Q788 Was the slogan ‘He’s back – and he’s angry!’ used for a film? Before 1996, that is.
Q841 A source for this text in poker-work on a calendar: ‘Seeke out ye goode in everie man, / and speke of alle the beste ye can; / then wil alle men speke wel of thee / and say how kynde of hearte ye bee.’ This was ascribed to Chaucer but cannot be found in his works.
Q845A ‘Vive la différence’ – any information on this saying? An untraced reference has Anatole
Q862 Precise sources, please, for two widely-quoted sayings of John Ruskin: (1) ‘There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. Those who buy on price alone are this man’s lawful prey’; (2) ‘It is bad to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all; but when you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was b(r)ought to do. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better’?
Q875 Which French sage said: ‘Life works out ... but not as you expect it [La vie s’arrange ... mais autrement]’?
Q894 Did J.K. Galbraith – or another – say: ‘Capital harnesses the most selfish people for the most generous of causes’?
Q899 A source for: ‘It is within the province of all of us to be great or small, according to the degree of service we render, service of one man to another, to a community, to a nation, to all mankind. It is by service we are born, we live, and we are carried to our last resting place. It is therefore not just an obligation, it is the very purpose of life – to serve’ – a British Royal perhaps?
Q914 ‘The trouble with socialism is that it would take up too many evenings’ – Wilde? And, if so, where?
Q921 Who said: ‘Socialists are more concerned with hating the rich than helping the poor’?
Q924 A source for: ‘Every devil has a virtue ... every angel has a vice’?
Q947 ‘To succeed you must first ask the right question’ – is this from Aristotle?
Q955 Did a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising say:
‘Nothing fails in
Q961 A source for: ‘If I could choose between power and influence, I would choose influence’?
Q962 ‘Keep alive in our hearts that spirit of adventure which makes men scorn the security of the familiar to wrestle with the challenges of the unknown’ – what is this, a prayer or some other exhortation, presumably quite recent?
Q1003B ‘That’s better beer, Bill’ – what is this? From an advertisement perhaps, 1920s?
Q1005 ‘Come all you people and listen to me / As
you take your vacation down by the salt sea.
/ If you wish for the Gods and your Fates to be
kind / Ah never mind / never mind / never mind.’ What is this?
It was heard by Tim Rice in
Q1092 ‘And never a word was spoken and never a tear was shed’ – source?
Q1156 [Horse chestnut tree] ‘lit by ten thousand candles bright.’ Source?
Q1197 Where does this come from: ‘Methinks the
Goths are gathering at the gates of
Q1240 Source for ‘The rose is the crown of your garden but the daisy is its heart’?
Q1258 A source for: ‘Alcohol serves in the compass, without it the needle will cleeve, / But it spinneth the heads of the soldier, and washes the stripes from his sleeve’?
Q1303 Where in Winston Churchill’s World Crisis is ‘As fine a ship as ever cleft salt water’?
Q1368 Where did the phrase ‘not
a happy bunny’ originate? The earliest
example I have so far found is from 1991 in the
Q1394 ‘Bring me two dozen of claret and call me the day after tomorrow’ – who said that?
Q1422 Poem: ‘Three things in love the foolish will require, / Faith, constancy and passion, but the wise / Only an hour’s happiness desire, / And not to look into uncaring eyes’?
Q1468 Is there a poem about the naming of objects which suggests that, if things had been other otherwise, ‘we would be wearing sandwiches and eating cardigans’?
Q1549 ‘If one needed an argument against democracy one only needs to have a ten minute conversation with a member of the public’ – could this be Churchill? If so, where?
Q1556 Who, when asked how she managed with the cleaning,
said: ‘I just open the doors and blow’?
Q1586 ‘Fly not too near the Sun / Or will his envious
beams / Pluck out the feathers from the soft’ning wax
/ And thou shalt fall / Into the blue depths ... / O Icarus, my son,
my son!’ – source?
Q1700
Origin of the phrase ‘break for the border’, apart that is from it being used
as the name of bars in the
Q1748 Which 1940s / 50s film
noir begins: ‘It was hot. The only kind
of hot you can get in
Q1776 Who said: ‘Man took a huge step forwards when he invented the wheel, and a huge step backwards when he invented the ball’?
Q1778 What is this: ‘She knew what Reggie did, and she that Reggie went; the only thing she didn’t know, was just what Regiment’?
Q1837 Has anyone else heard this: ‘Never trust a woman who wears ankle socks nor a man who carries a zipped-up Bible’?
Q1846 The epigraph to Thomas Harris’s
Q1915 ‘Gone like the dew from the petal of a rose’ – as quoted by P.G. Wodehouse?
Q1916 ‘Half god, half prattling mischievous child’ – as quoted by P.G. Wodehouse?
Q1976 What is ‘’Arry’s At Was Anging On the Atstand In the All’ – a poem or song? A source, please.
Q2072 Where did Neil Simon say, ‘If it’s old and you like it, it won’t be there in the morning’?
Q2085 In Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey (1958), one character quotes, ‘Poor little Josephine, the tragedy queen, hasn’t life been hard on her’ and then sings, ‘Little Josephine, you’re a big girl now’. Are these lines from a song? Shortly afterwards another character sings, ‘Who’s got a bun in the oven? Who’s got a cake in the stove?’ Is this from an actual song and if so, which?
Q2136 Sources for two quotes from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 movie Le Petit Soldat: ‘Il faut savoir frayer son chemin avec un poignard [one must be able to carve out one’s path with a dagger]’ – possibly Lenin – and ‘Avec le remords commence la liberté [with remorse begins liberty]’?
Q2170 Did John Maynard Keynes say anything like this: ‘Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone’?
Q2186 Any thoughts on the origin and use of ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’ (first citation found in a 1954 novel) or ‘Trust us, we’re doctors’ (in use by 1993)?
Q2216 ‘Oh, for the grey, grey skies of
Q2344 Where in George Orwell does he comment on the
symbolism of Hitler and Stalin’s
Q2487 Who said: ‘A revolutionary must always have clean fingernails’?
Q2571 The expression ‘pipe isn’t fooling pussy’ occurs in Alan Bennett’s film An Englishman Abroad (1983). Presumably it refers to sex, but was it an
established coinage?
Q2649 A source for: ‘[the English]
a military, but not a warlike people’?
Q2663
Who said words to this effect: ‘The art of
government is to let the people think they’re running the country whilst
ensuring they don’t’?
Q2671
When F.E. Smith made his famous maiden speech in the House of Commons on
12 March 1906 he described the Liberal Party thus: ‘I should say they were
begotten by Chinese Slavery out of Passive Resistance, [and then by his own
account but not in Hansard added] by a
rogue sire out of a dam that roared.’
Is this last phrase a quotation?
Q2691 A source, please, for Winston Churchill’s use of the phrase ‘left and
right’ = slang for ‘fight’ (or possibly ‘right and left’ for a couple of
punches)? I believe it was in connection
with the celebrated murder of Lord
Q2783
‘Learning to swim won’t give you control over the
ocean, but you will be able to control where you are going’ – said who?
Q2800
P.G. Wodehouse more than once uses the expression ‘sleep poured over me
in a healing wave’ – where is this from?
‘Sleep which does something which has slipped my mind to the something sleave of care poured over me in a healing wave’ – The
Code of the Woosters, Chap. 14 (1938) – last line
of book; ‘It wasn’t long before sleep poured over me in a healing wave, as the
expression is’ – Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, Chap. 6 (1974).
Q2912
‘The meaning of life is that it stops’ is
usually attributed to Kafka – but is there any proof of this?
Q2914
‘Smile, they said, life could be worse. So I did.
And it was’ – I have this by 1980 but have also been told that it is
remembered from 1947. Any
views on its origin?
Q2946
Origin and date of the saying ‘to piss in somebody’s soup’, meaning to
queer their pitch. I’ve known it since
1967.
Q2972
Text, please, or whereabouts of Paul Jennings’s
piece on ‘presque vu’, ‘jamais vu’, etc?
Q3001
A source for: ‘ ... but there’s hot buttered
crumpets / For flourish of trumpets / Who’d had no excitement at all’?
Q3019
Who said, at the time of the English Civil War:
‘I follow Jesus Christ and no man else’?
Q3068 Thoughts, please, on the origin and date of the format phrase ‘a bit like
Q3076 ‘Political genius consisted in the ability to hear the distant hoofbeat of the horse of history’ –
Q3077 Origins of the expression ‘my new best friend’? It is on the web by April 1991 and was being
abbreviated to ‘my new BF’ by September 1993.
Q3078 Is there a parody of W.E. Henley’s What have I done for you, /
Posted 25 October
2004
Q3095 Who said ‘The existence of sex proves that God has a sense of
humour’? Graham Greene
perhaps? Rousseau?
Posted 8 November
2004
Q3116 What was the context when John Wilmot, Earl of
Q3127 Did anyone in particular say, ‘I wouldn’t
want to go into politics because I want to remain popular’?
Posted 15 November
2004
Q3143 Who spoke of ‘the sharp elbows of the middle classes’ (propelling them to
the head of the queue) and if it was R.H. Tawney, the
economic historian, a source please?
Posted 25 November
2004
Q3152 ‘’Tis more blessed to ask forgiveness than to
ask for permission’ is a saying popular in military and legal circles, for
obvious reasons. Might it also be a
Jesuit credo?
Q3160 Can anyone sort this one out: ‘Sleep [or something] is the little prince
that steals the time [or truth]’?
Q3166 A complete text for this doggerel: ‘Then Mr
Gladstone arose and the house gave a cheer / And this was his answer, quite
lucid and clear, / Preserve a calm and dignified manner ... From ribald
speculation discontinue, / From critical enquiry pray refrain / ... In other words, wait and see’?
Q3168 ‘Never rub another man’s rhubarb’ is quoted by The Joker (Jack Nicholson) in
the first Batman movie – did it exist
before this?
Q3169 Who described critics as: ‘Scribblers, specks of dandruff on the scalp of
humanity’?
Q3172 Of which children’s poem are these the last lines: ‘He didn’t cry, elves
can’t shed tears, / But he hated cake for years and years’?
Posted 14 December
2004
Q3196 Is this from a patriotic song: ‘Down the road of freedom, who will march
with me / Who will join the army of love and liberty’?
Posted 3 January
2005
Q3205 Origin of ‘when hardy comes to hardy’ or ‘when Hardy comes to Hardy’, meaning
the same as ‘when push comes to shove’?
Q3207 How much use does the expression ‘keep it in the family’ get? It was the title of a British TV sitcom in
1980-3.
Posted 6 January
2005
Q3212 A source for: ‘After dinner I go for my rest. / I’d rather be playing,
but mother knows best’?
Posted 28 January
2005
Q3238 When and how did Charles
Darwin get linked to ‘It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the
most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change’ – when it does not
appear to be in his main books?
Posted 1 March
2005
Q3254 Where does the phrase ‘the dreaming shore’ occur in the works of W.B.
Yeats? It may not be in his poems and
plays but in his letters or prose.
Olivia Manning used it as the title of a travel book about
Posted 14 April
2005
Q3261 Spike Milligan is usually credited with the line ‘Money can’t buy you
friends but you get a better class of enemy’ in his novel Puckoon
(1963). Now, however, the line has been
found earlier in the BBC radio show Life With the
Lyons (1957). Are there any other
instances of the line being used pre-Spike?
Posted 19 April
2005
Q3274 Who said: ‘The thing that will keep us in power is the short memory of the
people’?
Q3275 Meaning and usage of this (possibly Irish) reply to the cry that it’s not
fair: ‘No, it’s foxy in the toe’?
Posted 18 May 2005
Q3296 Who was the English
aristocrat who complained: ‘The last time I played in a village [cricket]
match, I was given LBW first ball. That
sort of umpiring should be looked into’?
Q3297 Has anyone else heard of
the expression (re punctuality), ‘If you’re on time, you’re late’?
Q3300 Has anyone else heard
this expression for someone who is a bit slow on the uptake: ‘He don’t know
it’s dark till the lamp is lit’?
Q3305 Rather than say ‘Don’t be hasty’, some people say, ‘Stay thy hand, Lord
Buckingham.’ This doesn’t appear to be
from Shakespeare unless it is a conflation of phrases from King Henry VI, Parts 1 & 2?
Q3308 Origin and use of the saying, ‘Easy, Tiger!’ to calm the passions?
Q3314 What could be the origin of saying about any
event of note that it happened ‘on the twenty-fourth of July’?
Q3320 ‘He was on the good ship Judas Iscariot with a deck cargo of sarcophagi’ –
what is this?
Q3321 ‘Life is too terrible to be taken seriously’ – who said this? In a Georges Feydeau farce, perhaps?
Q3323 Has anyone else heard of ‘Rogues, Thieves, Mountebanks and Banjo-Players’
as an abusive description?
Q3325 Origin of American phrase ‘a bedroom voice in a truck driver’s body’ – was it
first said about Yves Montand (Time Magazine, 3 November 1961)?
Q3329 ‘That the office shall do for the man ... that the man shall do for the
office’ – source (19th century)?
Q3337 ‘No one ever made a success in the world without a large bottom’ – where
did the geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) say this?
Posted 19 May 2005
Q3339 If he did, where did
Aristotle say: ‘It is not possible to state simply that which in itself is not
simple’?
Posted 1 June 2005
Q3341 Did one of the ‘fathers
of geology’ (Hutton or Sir Charle Lyell)
say s.t.t.e.: ‘Geologists should be born with gills’?
Q3344 Who said, ‘No man was
ever born who did not have a secret sorrow’?
Q3345 Where do these lines come
from (known by 1945): ‘The Caspian Sea shimmered, / The Kazak tents shone / For
a moment in
Q3346 Is anyone familiar with
the child’s expression ‘Poo tinks
and yellow teddybears’ for when something is smelly?
Q3347
‘Nancy jumped from here to France, here to France, here to France’ sung
to the tune of Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain
King’ – how does it go on?
Q3349 ‘If you think you can, or
you think you can’t, then you will always be right’ – how did this come to be
attributed to Henry Ford? In other words, a proper source, please.
Q3350 Has ‘It is better to
listen with your ears than with your mouth’ been attributed to anyone in
particular?
Q3351 A saying along these
lines: ‘Doctors think they’re Gods – Psychiatrists know they are’?
Q3353 Who described a British
military intervention (
Posted 30 June 2005
Q3357 A source for: ‘I am
aged now and weary / Life for me has lost its charm / Youth and all its joys
hath passed me / Cruel winds of anguish blast me’?
Q3362 ‘Catch at the Going. Kiss the tremulous
Going / Lonely it wanders to the everlasting Gone / What
profits knowledge? Since our piteous
little knowing / Leaves only memory to lean upon’ – does anyone recognize this?
Q3363 Was ‘flaming June’ an expression before Lord Leighton used it as the title
of a painting (in about 1895)?
Q3365 What is the poem (known by the 1950s) that describes a hot summer’s day and
includes such words as ‘butter ran’, ‘cats slept’ and ‘dogs barked’?
Posted 20 July 2005
Q3384 What is the poem about an
ageing former soldier who is afraid to die because his former comrades in arms
were killed while he remained alive?
Posted 6 September 2005
Q3391 Does anyone else know this
fruity compliment: ‘Your kindness and generosity is only exceeded by your
personal charm and beauty which nature hath so lavishly bestowed upon thee
in all its bounteous glory’?
Q3392 Has anyone pointed out
that when Tennyson wrote ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new ... / Ring out the
false, ring in the true’ in In Memoriam,
he was quoting from bell ringers’ rules dating from 1789?
Q3394 What was the occasion when
Frank Sinatra, in reply to a question like ‘Did they bring you in by
helicopter?’ replied, ‘Yes, they stole my elephant’?
Q3407 Of whom was it said that
something in his life was ‘nobly born’?
Q3408 Apart from being spoken in
the Chameleons’ track ‘Fall Down’, where does this come from: ‘In his Autumn
before the Winter Comes Man’s last mad surge of youth’?
Q3409 Examples of ‘We can’t go on meeting like this’ – from films, wherever?
Posted 28 September 2005
Q3413 ‘Why must I forsake the
blast?’ What is this and what does it
refer to – the blast of war?
Q3415 Who said, ‘Incompetence
is one of the worst forms of corruption’ – General Grant and the film Electra
Glide in Blue have been suggested?
Q3416 ‘Come hither you cockeyed
lobster, king of slops!’ – what is this? Possibly Irish. The King of Slops was Louis XVIII of
Q3422 Was it Lord Rothschild
who said (around 1979), ‘Professor is the most dangerous word in the English
language’?
Q3424 ‘Women, as some witty
Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and
always prevent us from carrying them out’ comes from Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Chap. 6. Who was the
‘witty Frenchman’?
Q3425 What is the poem that
starts with something like ‘During December’s dismal days ... ’?
Q3429 In his 1966 ‘Meditations
on Basic Baroque’, Kenneth Tynan quotes de Maupassant
as having said: ‘The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms under
the shadow of cosmic boredom’. What is
the French original?
Q3430 Is this from a poem:
‘One afternoon in mid-September / November? / December? / When snow / sun? lies late remembered on the leaf’?
Posted 19 October 2005
Q3437 Text of Irish poem ‘How the buttercups came to be in the meadow’ which
includes, ‘Just where the rainbow touches the earth ... ’?
Q3449 Which (British) radio comedian would end a description of some trouble he’d
got into with the phrase, ‘in the ensuing fracas ... ’? He had a posh voice.
Q3450 Where do these lines come from: ‘When daughters of vicars / Wore grey
cami-knickers ... ’?
Q3455 Who said something to this effect: that it is important to die with dignity
when that’s all that is left?
Q3456 In a Private Eye interview with God, He said He was misquoted in
his most famous work (the Bible). On what subject? And
when did this appear – perhaps about 1970?
Q3457 ‘Life is full of solutions but only fools find problems’ – said who?
Q3458 In which film of the late 50s/early 60s does a child say to his austere
Scots father, ‘Can I have a doggy, Daddy?’
Q3460 Who said, ‘When a man sits down to write the story of his life, he writes
another’?
Posted 3 November
2005
Q3470 ‘Mix the substances of the heavens and the earth, then throughout life you
will have independence and happiness’ – Hermes Trismegistus?
Q3473 Whence this on the war memorial at Bosham,
Q3476 Was it G.K. Chesterton who said, ‘The English have only one religion –
anti-Catholicism – and its religious celebration is Guy Fawkes’?
Posted 17 November
2005
Q3509 Is there a poem, presumably on death, that goes: ‘One by one they’ve
crossed the border, / One by one they’re heading home’?
Posted 2 December
2005
Q3522 ‘There they were building ships and the man lay dying’ – what is this?
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