De Profundis (1897)
Essays and reviews, Clive James On Television (1991)
“A sense of humour is a sense of proportion.”
Sand and Foam (1926)
“Basically, the Germans came to us and said, "We don't have a sense of humour."”
Answering the question "Why did you do two episodes in German?" on an HBO March 1998 Python reunion special.
“I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.”
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)
“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”
“They won’t put up a statue to me. No, no, no. Nobody’s got that sense of humour.”
Source: From the documentary Robert Muldoon: The Grim Face of Power, 1994
Context: Responding to a journalist while attending the unveiling of a statue of Sir Keith Holyoake.
“Design is really a special case of problem solving.”
Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 198; Cited in: Eddie Norman, Urry (1995) Advanced design and technology. p. 65-66.
Context: Design is really a special case of problem solving. One wants to bring about a desired state of affairs. Occasionally one wants to remedy some fault but more usually one wants to bring about something new. For that reason design is more open ended than problem solving. It requires more creativity. It is not so much a matter of linking up a clearly defined objective with a clearly defined starting position (as in problem solving) but more a matter of starting out from a general position in the direction of a general objective
Source: Speech in the Royal Albert Hall, London, in support of the aims of the Disarmament Conference in Geneva (11 July 1931), quoted in The Times (13 July 1931), p. 14
