Quotes about grease (37 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

God , Religion , Game , Idea

“Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 21; on the state of the kitchen at the newly opened Auberge.

World , Lying

“I proposed to remedy this defect by employing wax, tallow, or other grease, to lubricate and keep the piston tight. It next occurred to me”

James Watt (1736–1819) British engineer

"Notes on Professor Robison's Dissertation on Steam-engines" (1769)
Context: In Newcomen's engine, the piston is kept tight by water, which could not be applicable in this new method; as, if any of it entered into a partially-exhausted and hot cylinder, it would boil, and prevent the production of a vacuum, and would also cool the cylinder by its evaporation during the descent of the piston. I proposed to remedy this defect by employing wax, tallow, or other grease, to lubricate and keep the piston tight. It next occurred to me, that the mouth of the cylinder being open, the air which entered to act on the piston would cool the cylinder, and condense some steam on again filling it. I therefore proposed to put an air-tight cover upon the cylinder, with a hole and stuffing-box for the piston-rod to slide through, and to admit steam above the piston to act upon it, instead of the atmosphere.... There still remained another source of the destruction of steam, the cooling of the cylinder by the external air, which would produce an internal condensation whenever steam entered it, and which would be repeated every stroke; this I proposed to remedy by an external cylinder, containing steam, surrounded by another of wood, or of some other substance which would conduct heat slowly.

“Oh, I hate the thought of all those costumes and grease paint! When I think that characters like Kundry will now have to be dressed up, those dreadful artists' balls immediately spring into my mind. Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theatre!”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

23 September 1878
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)

Hate , Feeling , Spring , Thinking

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

Food , Dead

“In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

Lie

“Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it…. Someone just ripped off my eyelids.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Girl , Training

“Now, I'm not very vain. If I'd ever been, making my living covered in various grease and dirt mixtures would have cured me quickly. Still, I wasn't up to facing two sexy men when I had one eye swollen mostly shut and half of my face black and blue.”

Patricia Briggs book Blood Bound

Source: Blood Bound

Men

“My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 5

Age , Family , Faith , Business

“Those that be washen wyll not take scabbe after (if they haue sufficient meate); for that is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease hym in the mouthe with good meate.”

Anthony Fitzherbert (1470–1538) English judge, scholar and legal author

Source: The book of the husbandry. (1523/1882), p. 47.

“You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell.”

John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

Source: Of Mice and Men (1937), Ch. 6, p. 101

Hell

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money , People , Sadness , Angels

“17. Wednesday. A fine morning. Proceeded on my journey towards Braintree. Stopped to see Mr. Haven, of Dedham, who told me, very civilly, he supposed I took my faith on trust from Dr. Mayhew, and added, that he believed the doctrine of satisfaction of Jesus Christ to be essential to Christianity, and that he would not believe this satisfaction unless he believed the Divinity of Christ. Mr. Balch was there too, and observed, he would not be a Christian if he did not believe mysteries of the gospel; that he could bear with an Arminian, but when, Dr. Mayhew they denied the Divinity and satisfaction of Christ, he had no more to do with them; that he knew to make of Dr. Mayhew's two discourses upon the expected of all things. They gave him an idea of a cart whose wanted greasing; it rumbled on in a hoarse, rough manner; there was a good deal of ingenious talk in them, but it was thrown together in a jumbled, confused order. He believed the Doctor wrote them in a great panic. He added further that Arminians, however stiffly they maintain their opinions in health, always, he takes notice, retract when they come to die, and choose to die Calvinists. Set out for Braintree, and arrived about sunset.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Entry for 17 February 1756 in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams vol. 2, 10-1
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Health , Faith , Idea , Christ

“Take care for purity in the paint and not so stinky thick of grease, thin, thin, thin! And just on the light [parts in the painting] here and there a small push of thick [paint].... thick house-interiors are unpleasant - long drawing before you start and arrange pleasantly together all things before you start to paint - if the money does not bother you, it is always useful to visit Rott. [Rotterdam].”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls' brief, in het Nederlands): Zorg voor zuiverheid in de verf en niet zoo stinkerig dik van smeerderij, dun, dun, dun, en zo op het licht hier en daar een zetje dik[ke verf].. ..dikke binnenhuizen zijn onaangenaam - lang teekenen voor je begint en het prettig bij elkaar arrangeren voor gij aan het verwen gaat - als het geld u niet begroot, is het altijd nuttig om eens naar Rott. [Rotterdam!?] te gaan.
Quote of a letter by Jozef Israels to painter David de la Mar, 1867; as cited in Mythen van het Atelier, ed. Mayken Jonkman & Eva Geudeker; d'jonge Hond, Zwolle/The Hague, 2010 – ISBN 9789089102065 ( source online http://delamar.bntours.nl/!mad1832-bronnen.html)
Israels' painting technique did develop only rather slowly. In 1867 he still gave this rather traditional academic advice to the young painter nl:David de la Mar
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1840 - 1870

Money , Light , Parting , Drawing

“Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!”

Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician

This is from Pickings from the Porfolio of the Reporter of the New Orleans "Picayune" (1846) by Dennis Corcoran; it seems to have become attributed to Crockett in The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American Subjects (1978) by Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, p. 206
Misattributed

Chance

“What they're trying to do in medicine today is find a pill to cover up every symptom of wrongful living and eating. So, to eat the normal American diet, what you have to do is take an antacid, a laxative, and then something to lower the uric acid, the cholesterol, the blood sugar, and the blood pressure. Then you have to take a diet pill because of the excess weight you gain because your normal appetite is confronted with calorie-concentrated foods. And then you have to go and wash the grease off your skin.
Of course, it doesn't even begin to compensate for what you're doing to your body, but that's the way we look at the problem. Instead of dealing with the cause and supporting the body the way it's supposed to be supported, we try to cover up disasters.”

John A. McDougall (1947) American physician

Quoted in “John McDougall” by Andis Robeznieks, in Vegetarian Times (April 1986), p. 31 https://books.google.it/books?id=gQcAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA31.

Food , Way , Support , Problem

“Most business executives accept that bribes and grease money are costs of doing business in "soft "states.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Money , Business

“Above all, it is necessary to recognize that knowledge cannot be pumped into human beings the way grease is forced into a machine. The individual may learn; he is not taught.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 211 (p. 289 in 2006 edition)

Way , Knowledge , Learning

“Some people would rather give the appearance of feeling well by having a face-lift, exercising violently, or dieting severely—but they don't solve the problem; they only disguise it. If they ate properly, they wouldn't have to strain to seem fit; they would be fit. The simplest and most natural way usually turns out to be the easiest. Consider nursing, for instance. It's obviously the most natural way to nourish a baby, but it's also the easiest; you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night and fix bottles. If you're a vegetarian, you don't have to cook food in a smelly, greasy kitchen, or clean a lot of pots and pans with the rancid grease on them. Ugh! Though it may seem easier to take a slab of dead flesh and toss it in a broiler, it's much more interesting to do something creative with vegetables. So that my children don't have to snack on sweets or bowls of cereal—it's no better than sawdust, you know—I set out platters of avocadoes, pineapples, papayas, bananas, almonds, dried figs and prunes. … I serve organic apple juice in place of milk. I have the most beautiful golden honey for the herb tea—and so, you see, no one need feel deprived on a vegetarian diet.”

Cloris Leachman (1926) American actress

Interview in The Vegetarians https://books.google.it/books?id=vK_uAAAAMAAJ by Rynn Berry (Autumn Press, 1979), p. 20.

Children , People , Food , Beauty

“3179. Let him fry in his own Grease.”

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

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

“No government functions without the grease of corruption.”

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) Mexican writer

La Silla del Águila (The Eagle's Throne) (2003)

“I'm standing in line. I got a first class ticket. And I get up to the front of the line and there isn't anybody there. It's just a kiosk with a computer terminal. And I'm not good at computers. And I don't wanna touch this thing, 'cause it's got grease and dirt and what I only pray to Jesus is meringue.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

Behavioral Problems

“And what (else} did we discover? We discovered that it was exceedingly profitable to get garbage from large parts of the town; that garbage was rich in grease and in sugar. And we took it to the reduction plant and we turned that grease into a very acceptable and delightful non-odorous product which you a little later bought in the form of soap.
Another thing, it seems to me, is a by-product of this catholic curiosity, that is the ability to loaf. You can't be an administrator, a good successful administrator, and not know how to loaf. Because if you are industrious all the time and tend to your job, there is always more work than you can possibly do in a day, and if you tend to that job all the time you will be going right on in a routine, you will become more ans more specialized, you will become more and more analytical, you will become more and more interested in what you are particularly charged with doing, and progressively less and less generalized in your outlook, less and less interested in what the other fellow is doing. And the only way you can compensate for that, of course, is to loaf, to loaf whole-heartedly whenever and wherever possible, and with whomever, because the only way that you can find out what are the questions in the minds of these people you have got to loaf with them to find out the truth about how they feel.
Now, of course, you can't loaf with all the individuals, but you have to loaf with a great many of them, and you have to know how to do it, and you know you won't like to do it unless you have a catholic curiosity, not only about things that I've been talking about, but about persons.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: "What Is an Administrator?" 1936, p. 12; As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 658

People , Truth , Way , Feeling

“He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 12

Secret

“The wheel that squeaks the loudest
Is the one that gets the grease.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

The Kicker

“We sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in their silos. Even now, we're standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive because we've declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies, more moral, more civilized. Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on, to grab this land from whomever, and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most great nation-states, which feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business, and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry, up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.”

Paul Harvey (1918–2009) American broadcaster

Commenting on historical military and social policies, during his ABC News broadcast (23 June 2005); quoted in "Agression Dominates the Airwaves" by Saul Landau, at Transnational Institute (19 July 2005) http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=1859&username=guest@tni.org&password=9999&publish=Y.

Men , Way , Feeling , Business

“More and more it seemed to Ed that there was a vicious downside of American life, a greased skid of opportunism, cut corners, easy drugs, easy sex, a morality that grew cloudier each year.”

Stephen King book Apt Pupil

Different Seasons (1982), Apt Pupil

Life , Sex

“A man's reputashun iz something like hiz coat, thare iz certain kemikals that will take the stains and grease spots out ov it, but it alwus haz a second-handed kind ov a look, and generally smells strong ov the kemikals.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Strong

“On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Quoted by Otto Stern, a colleague of Einstein in Zurich from 1912 to 1914, in a 1962 oral history interview http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4904.html with Thomas S. Kuhn
Attributed in posthumous publications

“She frieth in her owne grease.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Stop, you idiot!" I bawled at her. Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of gray flannel shaping itself to the calf of each gray wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped forward. Sweat greased the gun in my hand. When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat. "Adieu!" she said softly.
And I put a bullet in the calf of her leg. She sat down--plump! Utter surprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain. I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.
"You ought to have known I'd do it!”

Dashiell Hammett book The Gutting of Couffignal

My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger's in my ears. "Didn't I steal a crutch from a cripple?"
final lines, The Gutting of Couffignal (published in Black Mask, December 1925)
Short Stories

Pain

“There is a story (not sure if the details are true but the concept sure is) of General Black Jack Pershing fighting the Muslim terrorists in the Philippines in the 1890's. He knew the Muslims were “terrorized” by the idea that contact with pig blood or fat would doom them to hell forever so he had all his soldiers dip their bullets in pig blood. Hmmm? If I was a soldier in one of those countries I would let them THINK I had hollow points packed with pig's blood! Maybe all of us should pour bacon grease around our property and dip our bullets and knives in pig blood or fat! Hmmm? Cheap protection.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 106

Idea , Hell , Thinking , Fight

“It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

"The BBC was doing its job - bring back Gilligan", Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2004, p. 21.
Reaction to the Hutton Report.
2000s, 2004

“Luke had to use all his willpower to keep from drinking the whole sixteen-ounce bottle of water at a single go. He left a quarter of it, set it down, then snatched it up again and screwed on the cap. He thought if the train took a sudden yaw and it spilled, he would go insane. He gobbled the sausage biscuit in five snatching bites and chased it with another big swallow of water. He licked the grease from his palm, then took the water and the Hostess pie and crept back into his nest. For the first time since riding down the river in the S. S. Pokey and looking up at the stars, he felt that his life might be worth living. And although he did not exactly believe in God, having found the evidence against just slightly stronger than the evidence for, he prayed anyway, but not for himself. He prayed for the highly hypothetical higher power to bless the man who had called him outlaw and thrown that brown bag into the boxcar.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: The Institute (2019), p. 348

God , Time , Drink , Star

“When I think of soul I think of grease ’cause ain’t nothin’ no good without the grease.”

Tina Turner (1939) singer, dancer, actress, and author

Interlude to Respect, live at Basin Street West, San Francisco, 22 February 1969, Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT4PpnoPPqk&feature=youtu.be&t=420 on YouTube

Soul , Thinking

“The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

'Greased piglet' Boris Johnson could pass deal says David Cameron https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/17/greased-piglet-boris-johnson-could-pass-deal-says-david-cameron Guardian (17 October 2019}
2010s, 2019

People