
“AZRAEL:
No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater… than central air.”
“AZRAEL:
No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater… than central air.”
Response to a journalist when asked what is most likely to blow governments off course.
The quote is also given as "Events, my dear boy, events", with the word "my", but it may never have been uttered at all.
[What they didn't say: a book of misquotations, Knowles, Elizabeth M., Oxford University Press, 2006, vi, 33]
Disputed
Letter to George Bernard Shaw (1 November 1912) published in Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1952), p. 52; this was later used in the play Dear Liar : A Biography in Two Acts (1960) by Jerome Kilty, an adaptation of the correspondence between Shaw and Campbell.
Source: Attributed from postum publications, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 72.
"Printing and Paper Making" in The Common School Journal Vol. V, No. 3 (1 February 1843)
Context: Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing, papermaking, and so forth. … All children will work better if pleased with their tools; and there are no tools more ingeniously wrought, or more potent than those which belong to the art of the printer. Dynasties and governments used to be attacked and defended by arms; now the attack and the defence are mainly carried on by types. To sustain any scheme of state policy, to uphold one administration or to demolish another, types, not soldiers, are brought into line. Hostile parties, and sometimes hostile nations, instead of fitting out martial or naval expeditions, establish printing presses, and discharge pamphlets or octavoes at each other, instead of cannon balls. The poniard and the stiletto were once the resource of a murderous spirit; now the vengeance, which formerly would assassinate in the dark, libels character, in the light of day, through the medium of the press.
But through this instrumentality good can be wrought as well as evil. Knowledge can be acquired, diffused, perpetuated. An invisible, inaudible, intangible thought in the silent chambers of the mind, breaks away from its confinement, becomes imbodied in a sign, is multiplied by myriads, traverses the earth, and goes resounding down to the latest posterity.
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“All boys ought to be drownded at birth.”
Gosling, the school porter.
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature: "Billy Bunter" (pages 62-4)
“You're a smart boy. Or if you're not, you ought to be.”
Source: Boneshaker (2009), p. 327