Quotes about hat
page 3

Vladimir Mayakovsky photo

“Hey, you!
Heaven!
Off with your hat!
I am coming!

Not a sound.

The universe sleeps,
its huge paw curled
upon a star-infested ear.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor

Page 109.
The Cloud in Trousers (1915)

Roger Ebert photo
Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch photo

“When it is storming and raining, thundering and lightening I am in my element; nature must be seen in action. Then outside, I put on my jacket, put my feet in clogs, put on a hat and start on a march. When the showers settle down, with charcoal or black chalk [I] make a scribble, to keep a firm grip on what one sees. When working out, hue and color come smoothly back into the memory.”

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (1824–1903) Dutch painter of the Hague School (1824-1903)

version in original Dutch / citaat van J. H. Weissenbruch, in het Nederlands: Als het stormt en regent, als het dondert en bliksemt ben ik in mijn element; de natuur moet men in werking zien. Dan buiten, trek ik mijn jekker aan, steek mijn voeten in klompen, zet een soort hoed op en ga op marsch. Als de buien bedaren, met houtskool of zwart krijt een krabbel gemaakt om vast te houden wat je ziet. Bij het uitwerken komen toon en kleur vanzelf in de herinnering.
Source: J. H. Weissenbruch', (n.d.), pp. 29-30

Francis Escudero photo

“Humble but not humbled in defeat. Manny was, is, and will always be the better man vs Floyd. My hats off to Manny!”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Francis Escudero Twitter feed: @SayChiz (12:58 p.m. 2015 May 3).
2015, Twitter Feed

George Washington Plunkitt photo
Colin Moulding photo

“Yes, I weeping, a teardrop attack
I give emotion at the drop of a hat
When I remember days at school
I remember many things, but
Most of all, I remember the sun”

Colin Moulding (1955) English bassist, songwriter and vocalist

"I Remember The Sun"
The Big Express (1984)

Henry James photo
André Maurois photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo

“Referring to a professor aboard ship: This passenger — the first and only one we had had, except to go from port to port on the coast — was no one else than a gentleman whom I had known in my smoother days, and the last person I should have expected to see on the coast of California — Professor Nuttall of Cambridge. I had left him quietly seated in the chair of the Botany and Ornithology Department at Harvard University, and the next I saw of him, he was strolling about San Diego beach, in a sailors' pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells… I was often amused to see the sailors puzzled to know what to make of him, and to hear their conjectures about him and his business… The Pilgrim's crew called Mr. Nuttall "Old Curious," from his zeal for curiosities; and some of them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse himself this way. Why else would (he)… come to such a place as California to pick up shells and stones, they could not understand. One of them, however, who had seen something more of the world ashore said, "Oh, 'vast there!… I've seen them colleges and know the ropes. They keep all such things for cur'osities, and study 'em, and have men a purpose to go and get 'em… He'll carry all these things to the college, and if they are better than any that they have had before, he'll be head of the college. Then, by and by, somebody else will go after some more, and if they beat him he'll have to go again, or else give up his berth. That's the way they do it. This old covery knows the ropes. He has worked a traverse over 'em, and come 'way out here where nobody's ever been afore, and where they'll never think of coming."”

This explanation satisfied Jack; and as it raised Mr. Nuttall's credit, and was near enough to the truth for common purposes, I did not disturb it.
Source: Two Years Before the Mast (1840), p. 267

Fred Dibnah photo

“The thing is nowadays, you'll have 20 men working, yet 60 men telling them 'You can't do that, you ain't got a tin hat on'.”

Fred Dibnah (1938–2004) English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering

Unsourced

River Phoenix photo
Edward Lear photo

“On a little heap of Barley
Died my aged uncle Arly,
And they buried him one night;—
Close beside the leafy thicket;—
There, his hat and Railway-Ticket;—
There, his ever-faithful Cricket;”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

But his shoes were far too tight.
Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/pw/arly.html, st. 7 (1895).

Alan Ayckbourn photo
Carlo Carrà photo

“The idea for this picture came to me one winter's night as I was leaving La Scala. In the foreground there is a snow sweeper with a few couples, men in top hats and elegant ladies. I think that this canvas, which is totally unknown in Italy, is one of the paintings where I best represented the concept that I had the time about my art.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Source: 1940's, La mia Vita (1945), Carlo Carrà; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger (2008), p. 154 - Carrà is refering in this quote to his painting 'Uscita dal teatro' ('Leaving the theater'), he made in 1909

Kate Bush photo

“We raise our hats to the strange phenomena.
Soul-birds of a feather flock together.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Samuel Johnson photo
Michael Ende photo

“You were compelled to?' he repeated. 'You mean you weren't sufficiently powerful to resist?'
'In order to seize power,' replied the dictator, 'I had to take it from those that had it, and in order to keep it I had to employ it against those that sought to deprive me of it.'
The chef's hat gave a nod. 'An old, old story. It has been repeated a thousand times, but no one believes it. That's why it will be repeated a thousand times more.'
The dictator felt suddenly exhausted. He would gladly have sat down to rest, but the old man and the children walked on and he followed them.
'What about you?' he blurted out, when he had caught the old man up. 'What do you know of power? Do you seriously believe that anything great can be achieved on earth without it?'
'I?' said the old man. 'I cannot tell great from small.'
'I wanted power so that I could give the world justice,' bellowed the dictator, and blood began to trickle afresh from the wound in his forehead, 'but to get it I had to commit injustice, like anyone who seeks power. I wanted to end oppression, but to do so I had to imprison and execute those who opposed me - I became an oppressor despite myself. To abolish violence we must use it, to eliminate human misery we must inflict it, to render war impossible we must wage it, to save the world we must destroy it. Such is the true nature of power.'
Chest heaving, he had once more barred the old man's path with his pistol ready.'
'Yet you love it still,' the old man said softly.
'Power is the supreme virture!' The dictator's voice quavered and broke. 'But its sole shortcoming is sufficient to spoil the whole: it can never be absolute - that's what makes it so insatiable. The only true form of power is omnipotence, which can never be attained, hence my disenchantment with it. Power has cheated me.'
'And so,' said the old man, 'you have become the very person you set out to fight. It happens again and again. That is why you cannot die.'
The dictator slowly lowered his gun. 'Yes,' he said, 'you're right. What's to be done?'
'Do you know the legend of the Happy Monarch?' asked the old man.

'When the Happy Monarch came to build the huge, mysterious palace whose planning alone had occupied ten whole years of his life, and to which marvelling crowds made pilgrimage long before its completion, he did something strange. No one will ever know for sure what made him do it, whether wisdom or self-hatred, but the night after the foundation stone had been laid, when the site was dark and deserted, he went there in secret and buried a termites' nest in a pit beneath the foundation stone itself. Many decades later - almost a life time had elapsed, and the many vicissitudes of his turbulent reign had long since banished all thought of the termites from his mind - when the unique building was finished at last and he, its architect and author, first set foot on the battlements of the topmost tower, the termites, too, completed their unseen work. We have no record of any last words that might shed light on his motives, because he and all his courtiers were buried in the dust and rubble of the fallen palace, but long-enduring legend has it that, when his almost unmarked body was finally unearthed, his face wore a happy smile.”

Michael Ende (1929–1995) German author

"Mirror in the Mirror", page 193

Jay Leiderman photo
Russell Brand photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Tom Baker photo
G. K. Chesterton photo
Robin Lane Fox photo
Tom Lehrer photo
Hamid Karzai photo

“On my graduation there was a party by the junior students, and I was given a hair brush as a gift — if I take off my hat, you know what I mean.”

Hamid Karzai (1957) President of Afghanistan

laughter
Commencement Address to Boston University Class of 2005 http://www.bu.edu/news/2005/05/22/transcript-of-president-hamid-karzais-commencement-address/ (May 22, 2005)
2005

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

Colette photo

“As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

“The South of France”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

“So Britain’s monarch once uncovered sat,
While Bradshaw bullied in a broad-brimmed hat.”

James Bramston (1694–1744) British writer

Man of Taste (1733).

Edward Lear photo

“On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

The Quangle Wangle's Hat http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/quangle.html, st. 1 (1877).

Cormac McCarthy photo

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“The hat is the ultimum moriens of "respectability."”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

"Ultimum moriens," the Autocrat explains, "is old Italian [i.e. Latin], and signifies last thing to die."
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

John Frusciante photo
Michael Chabon photo
Phil Brown (footballer) photo

“Dean Marney has also thrown his hat into the ring after Saturday. The more hats there are in the ring, the harder my job is”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

06-Mar-2007, Hull City OWS
It's tough maintaining discipline with all this hat-throwing going on.

Martin Amis photo
Craig Ferguson photo

“Kids: If a bear is wearing a ranger hat, it's because he ate the ranger!”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

On Smokey Bear
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–2014)

John Greenleaf Whittier photo
Stanley A. McChrystal photo

“Is it a cosmic law, d'you think, that conceited men's hats are always too small?”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

7. "The Old-fashioned Apache"
Trent Intervenes (1938)

Annie Dillard photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Jane Austen photo
Learned Hand photo

“[W]hat seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

U.S. v. Kirschenblatt, 16 F.2d 202, 203 (2d Cir. 1926).
Judicial opinions

Ben Croshaw photo
Phil Brown (footballer) photo

“Nick has thrown his hat into the ring and I've had a long chat with him”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

05-Mar-2007, Hull City OWS
Phil won't stand for any of this hat-throwing nonsense.

Thierry Henry photo

“When it's his day, Thierry can score a hat-trick with ease. He's amazing.”

Thierry Henry (1977) French association football player

Robert Pires Arsenal's Homepage of Sky Sports http://home.skysports.com/club.asp?clid=3&cpid=8 (25 May]] [[2006)
About

William J. Locke photo
Anu Garg photo
Nas photo

“Now all these new cats with they hats flipped backwards
fingers intertwined in sum gang sign madness
I got an exam lets if you pass it
Now who can quote a Daddy Kane line the fastest?”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

Carry on Tradition
On Albums, Hip Hop Is Dead (2006)

William Burges photo
George William Curtis photo
Charles Krauthammer photo

“I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, May 30, 2008, "Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment" http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer053008.php3 at jewishworldreview.com.
Krauthammer’s column of February 20, 2014, published in The Washington Post under the title “The Myth of ‘Settled Science” http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-myth-of-settled-science/2014/02/20/c1f8d994-9a75-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html, begins with almost the same words.
2000s, 2008

Pricasso photo

“Without a hint of shyness, and standing totally in the nude except for a large silver top hat, he took out his "brush" and began sketching portraits of those brave enough to be his subjects.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Lee Rondganger, Artist with unusual technique a Sexpo hit, The Star, South Africa, 28 September 2007, 2, Independent Online]
About

Tori Amos photo

“I have got my rape hat on, honey, but I always could accessorize.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

"Talula".
Songs

Gyles Brandreth photo
Herbert Beerbohm Tree photo
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford photo

“A little apish hat, couched fast to the pate, like an oyster;
French cambric ruffs, deep with a witness, starched to the purpose:
Delicate in speech; quaint in array; conceited in all points;
In courtly guiles, a passing singular odd man.”

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era

Source: About, Lines attributed to Gabriel Harvey by Thomas Nashe, said to have been written to ridicule Oxford.

George Gissing photo

“Women, he held, had never been treated with elementary justice. To worship them was no less unfair than to hold them in contempt. The honest man, in our day, should regard a woman without the least bias of sexual prejudice; should view her simply as a fellow-being, who, according to circumstances, might or not be on his own plane. Away with all empty show and form, those relics of barbarism known as chivalry! He wished to discontinue even the habit of hat-doffing in female presence. Was not civility preserved between man and man without such idle form? Why not, then, between man and woman? Unable, as yet, to go the entire length of his principles in every-day life, he endeavoured, at all events, to cultivate in his intercourse with women a frankness of speech, a directness of bearing, beyond the usual. He shook hands as with one of his own sex, spine uncrooked; he greeted them with level voice, not as one who addresses a thing afraid of sound. To a girl or matron whom he liked, he said, in tone if not in phrase, "Let us be comrades." In his opinion this tended notably to the purifying of the social atmosphere. It was the introduction of simple honesty into relations commonly marked — and corrupted — by every form of disingenuousness. Moreover, it was the great first step to that reconstruction of society at large which every thinker saw to be imperative and imminent.
But Constance Bride knew nothing of this, and in her ignorance could not but misinterpret the young man's demeanor. She felt it to be brusque; she imagined it to imply a purposed oblivion of things in the past.”

George Gissing (1857–1903) English novelist

Source: Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), Ch. II

“What language did these Macedones speak? The name itself is Greek in root and in ethnic termination. It probably means highlanders, and it is comparable to Greek tribal names such as `Orestai' and `Oreitai', meaning 'mountain-men'. A reputedly earlier variant, `Maketai', has the same root, which means `high', as in the Greek adjective makednos or the noun mekos. The genealogy of eponymous ancestors which Hesiod recorded […] has a bearing on the question of Greek speech. First, Hesiod made Macedon a brother of Magnes; as we know from inscriptions that the Magnetes spoke the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, we have a predisposition to suppose that the Macedones spoke the Aeolic dialect. Secondly, Hesiod made Macedon and Magnes first cousins of Hellen's three sons - Dorus, Xouthus, and Aeolus-who were the founders of three dialects of Greek speech, namely Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century, that the Macedones were a Greek speaking people. The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute-paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the `yauna takabara', which meant `Greeks wearing the hat'. There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of Greek. Finally, in the latter part of the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiod's genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants firmly into the Aeolic branch of the Greek-speaking family. Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be accepted as conclusive.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Macedonian State" p.12-13)

Stanley Holloway photo
Farhad Manjoo photo
Morrissey photo

“I once bought a Manchester United hat, which I think was 12 shillings, and somebody ran up behind me and pulled it off and just ran ahead. I thought, 'It's a very cruel world, I'm not prepared for this.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

And I decided to get my revenge on society.
from "Stop me if you've heard this one before", interview by Len Brown in NME (2h February 1988)
In interviews etc., About himself and his work

Allen C. Guelzo photo
David Lloyd George photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Jane Austen photo

“Next week I shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1798-10-27) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American Communists, he kept on collaborating with them, particularly in view of their apparent approval or indifference to what was happening in the Soviet Union. […] Brecht shrugged his shoulders and kept on making invidious remarks about the American Communist Party and asserted that only the Soviet Union and its Communist Party mattered. […] But I argued… it was the Kremlin and above all Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the opposition and their dependents. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him. 'What are you saying?' I asked. He calmly repeated himself, 'The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' […] I was stunned by his words. 'Why? Why?' I exclaimed. All he did was smile at me in a nervous sort of way. I waited, but he said nothing after I repeated my question. I got up, went into the next room, and fetched his hat and coat. When I returned, he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose, and with a sickly smile took his hat and coat and left. Neither of us said a word. I never saw him again.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

André Derain photo
Dylan Moran photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“As with my hat upon my head
I walk'd along the Strand,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

George Steevens, 310
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Johnsoniana

Dylan Moran photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Thomas Hughes photo

“The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, After You With The Pistol (1979), Ch. 7.

Robert Mitchum photo
Joseph Beuys photo
Statius photo

“Atlas' grandson obeys his sire's words and hastily thereupon binds the winged sandals on to his ankles and with his wide hat covers his locks and tempers the stars. Then he thrusts the wand in his right hand; with this he was wont to banish sweet slumber or recall it, with this to enter black Tartarus and give life to bloodless phantoms. Down he leapt and shivered as the thin air received him. No pause; he takes swift and lofty flight through the void and traces a vast arc across the clouds.”
Paret Atlantiades dictis genitoris et inde summa pedum propere plantaribus inligat alis obnubitque comas et temperat astra galero. tum dextrae uirgam inseruit, qua pellere dulces aut suadere iterum somnos, qua nigra subire Tartara et exangues animare adsueuerat umbras. desiluit, tenuique exceptus inhorruit aura. nec mora, sublimes raptim per inane volatus carpit et ingenti designat nubila gyro.

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 303

H. G. Wells photo
Sid Vicious photo

“The band broke up because I couldn't bear Rotten anymore because he was an embarrassment with his silly hats and his, like, shabby, dirty, nasty looking appearance.”

Sid Vicious (1957–1979) English bassist and vocalist

On leaving the Sex Pistols; reported in Julien Temple, The Filth and the Fury: The Sex Pistols (2000), p. 207.

Fred Astaire photo

“Astaire really sweat - he toiled. He was a humorless Teutonic man, the opposite of his debonair image in top hat and tails. I liked him because he was an entertainer and an artist. There's a distinction between them. An artist is concerned only with what is acceptable to himself, where an entertainer strives to please the public. Astaire did both. Louis Armstrong was another one.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Artie Shaw on his collaboration with Astaire in Second Chorus (1940) as interviewed in Fantle, Dave and Johnson, Tom. Reel to Real. Badger Books LLC, 2004, p. 304. ISBN 1932542043.

Dashiell Hammett photo
Andrew Marr photo

“In history, the arrival of a small man in a big hat is rarely good news.”

Andrew Marr (1959) British journalist

Andrew Marr's History of the World, Episode VI, Revolution (28 October 2012)

Daniel Tosh photo
Harold Lloyd photo
George Galloway photo

“We did not suspend our democracy in our darkest hours why are we suspending it now? the fawning over Thatcher had gone too far. We have had enough of this, It has gone on too long and it has gone too far. This put the tin hat on it the idea that we should suspend a vital part of our democratic process for a party political and private funeral, Mr Churchill didn’t ask for Parliament to be silenced, for confrontations across the House to be forbidden. When our soldiers were being laid waste in the Norway debate, the House of Commons perhaps rose to its finest 20th Century moment. Nobody said: ‘Our armed forces have suffered a disaster, the House of Commons cannot meet, the clash of ideas cannot be heard, we must muffle the drums and silence ourselves The so-called Beast of Bolsover said the argument was about class and that it was "one rule for those at the top and another for those at the bottom. We are here talking about the thing that we sometimes suggest has gone away class, That's what it is, it's about class. It's about the fact that people out there have to live their lives in a different way and there's one rule for those at the top and there's another for those at the bottom. It's never changed, I wish it had, but it hasn't. So when I heard about the chain of events it seemed to grow like topseed - first of all there was going to be some sort of ceremonial funeral, and then the next thing you (Mr Speaker) tell us that the chimes of Big Ben are going to stop and then we hear about the fact that we are going to abandon Prime Minister's question time, I mean, what's it all about? That's why the people out there are angry, a lot of them.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/margaret-thatcher-fawning-gone-far-1836314 George Galloway blasts cancellation of PMQs for Margret Thatchers funeral 16 April, 2013

Mahatma Gandhi photo
Hermann Rauschning photo
Samuel T. Cohen photo
John Fante photo
Raymond Chandler photo
Frederick IV of Naples photo

“It seems to me that the Pope's son, the Cardinal, is not in a condition for me to give him my daughter to wife. Make a cardinal who can marry and take off the hat, and then I will give him my daughter.”

Frederick IV of Naples (1451–1504) King of Naples

Dated 1498 or earlier. Quoted in Sarah Bradford, Cesare Borgia / His Life and Times (1976, George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited. London. Reprinted 1981. ISBN 0-297-77124-8), p. 72