“Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen. [Satirically. ] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
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Oscar Wilde 812
Irish writer and poet 1854–1900Related quotes
“I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.”
Unidentified fragment 545 K (K = T. Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, 3 vols. (Leipzig 1880/8)), as translated in Menander: The Principal Fragments (1921) by Francis Greenleaf Allinson.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
§ 217
Source: Philosophical Investigations (1953)
“We believe that failing to call a spade a spade is not scientific.”
Source: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 50
“These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade.”
39 Philip
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders
“Sometimes a person has to point fingers, disclose double standards, call a spade a spade.”
Comment by Leahy on Douglas MacArthur's return to the United States after being relieved of command in Korea by President Harry S. Truman, in a 20 April 1951 letter to MacArthur's nephew Douglas MacArthur II. As quoted by Henry H. Adams in Witness to Power: The Life of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (1985), p. 342
1950s
“I don't say so, but my spade tells me so.”
B.B. Lal's reply to his critics (traditional Hindus). As related and quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2012). The argumentative Hindu. New Delhi : Aditya Prakashan. Chapter: Ayodhya’s three history debates.
In the 1970s, Prof. B.B. Lal's excavation campaign “Archaeology of the Ramayana sites” [Lal 2008:15-28] found a common material culture at Ayodhya, Chitrakuta and other Ramayana sites all datable to a common period. It earned him the wrath of an audience of traditional Hindu godmen, who tend to place the Ramayana events at a far greater time-depth.