“One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.”

Quoted in Time Magazine (New York, 15 August 1960) from an an interview with Glenna Syse of the Chicago Sun-Times
Letters and interviews

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough." by James Thurber?
James Thurber photo
James Thurber 90
American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright 1894–1961

Related quotes

Herb Caen photo

“Martinis are like breasts, one isn't enough, and three is too many.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Cockburn, Alexander. "Breasts, Martinis and Hitchens". http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/05/06/breasts-martinis-and-hitchens/ Counterpunch.org, May 6, 2003.
Attributed

Anton Chekhov photo

“Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says.
No, Olivia, just one."
How about four?"
Two."
Three."
Oh, all right, three. But that's it!”

Ian Falconer (1959) American illustrator and writer, costume and set designer

Source: Olivia

Martin Luther photo

“One Book is enough, but a thousand books is not too many!”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation
William Faulkner photo

“There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I don’t want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

“How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed.”

Auberon Herbert (1838–1906) British politician

The Contemporary Review
Context: AHow, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. Rights are not things which grow by using the multiplication table. here are two men. If there are such things as rights, these two men must evidently start with equal rights. How shall you, then, by multiplying one of the two, even a thousand times over, give him larger rights than the other, since each new unit that appears only brings with him his own rights; or how, by multiplying one of the units up to the point of exhausting the powers of the said multiplication table, shall you take from the other the rights with which he started?

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5037. Three are too many to keep a Secret, and too few to be merry.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Sarah Dessen photo
Andrew Clements photo
Joseph Stalin photo

“For some people, four walls are three too many.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

This seems to have originated with the Spanish military leader Juan Domingo de Monteverde, who, in Francisco de Miranda, a Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (2003) by Karen Racine, p. 239, is quoted as having said: "four walls are three too many for a prison — you only need one for an execution."
Misattributed

Related topics