Sir Quotes - page 34
... they said, "Sir, we want to tell you a joke." I said, "You don't have time to tell me a joke." They said, "Oh, you gotta hear this one." So I came in, they shut the door, and they said, "Here's"- I said, "What's the joke?" I said, "What's the joke?" They said, "9/11. Saddam Hussein. If he didn't do it, too bad. He should've! Because we're gonna get him anyway." I said, "But that's not funny." I said, "That's not very funny." They said, "It sure isn't."
Saddam Hussein
I breakfasted this morning with Sir Humphry Davy, of whom we have heard so much in America. He is now about thirty-three, but with all the freshness and bloom of five-and-twenty, and one of the handsomest men I have seen in England. He has a great deal of vivacity,-talks rapidly, though with great precision, and is so much interested in conversation, that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience, and keeps him in constant motion.
Humphry Davy
After breakfast Sir Humphry took me to the Royal Institution, where he used to lecture before he married a woman of fortune and fashion, and where he still goes every day to perform chemical experiments for purposes of research. He showed me the library and model-room, his own laboratory and famous galvanic troughs, and at two o'clock took me to a lecture there, by Sir James Smith, on botany,-very good and very dull.
Humphry Davy
It is said that I ought to have taken the risks and stopped the carnage. Let me confess that there were, and still are, moments when I am of the same opinion. But let those who are inclined to condemn me and the War Cabinet for not taking the hazard, weigh carefully and fairly the conditions at that time. Passchendaele could not have been stopped without dismissing Sir Douglas Haig. Sir William Robertson would have resigned. Had both disappeared without any preliminary fuss which would have rattled the Army, there would have been a sense of relief amongst all the fighting men from one end of the line to the other. But I could not have done it without the assent of the Cabinet.
David Lloyd George
The right hon. Gentleman has argued, that the adoption of the plan proposed by the Government would confer advantage on the consumer, would increase the revenue, and would give increased scope to the industry of the manufacturer. We, Sir, argue, that with an amount of benefit to the revenue altogether inconsiderable, with a slight, nay an imperceptible relief to the consumer, and with detriment to the sure interests of the British manufacturer, you are asked to abandon what is nothing less than a great principle of humanity, that has received the most solemn sanction of the Legislature, the principle of hostility to the slave-trade and to slavery.
William Ewart Gladstone
You know why that's my favorite hit? Well, they say that the only other two players who ever hit one over there were Ruth and Gehrig. But now they have to say "only Ruth, Gehrig and Williams ever hit one over there.' Yes sir, that's putting the old string bean in some pretty fast company when they say that.
Ted Williams
Guru: Today I will discourse upon the violence in astronomy.
Disciple: Revered Sir! Will you be describing the violent phenomenon in the Universe?
Guru: Yes, and I will also dwell upon the controversies amongst the astronomers about what these events imply – controversies which are no less violent than the phenomena themselves.
Jayant Narlikar
Sir, the hon. Gentleman has stated here very emphatically, what he has more than once stated at the conferences of the Anti-Corn-law League, that he holds me individually-[Great excitement]-individually responsible for the distress and suffering of the country; that he holds me personally responsible; but be the consequences of those insinuations what they may, never will I be influenced by menaces either in this House or out of this House, to adopt a course which I consider-[The rest of the sentence was lost in shouts from various parts of the House.].
Robert Peel
Sir, if I look to the prerogative of the Crown-if I look to the position of the Church-if I look to the influence of the aristocracy-I cannot charge myself with having taken any course inconsistent with Conservative principles, calculated to endanger the privileges of any branch of the Legislature, or of any institutions of the country. My earnest wish has been, during my tenure of power, to impress the people of this country with a belief that the Legislature was animated by a sincere desire to frame its legislation upon the principles of equity and justice. I have a strong belief that the greatest object which we or any other Government can contemplate should be to elevate the social condition of that class of the people with whom we are brought into no direct relationship by the exercise of the elective franchise.
Robert Peel
In 1626 Bacon succumbed to the results of his ill timed experiment in preserving chickens with snow... The Bacon manuscripts were sent to [Sir William] Boswell's residence at the Hague, and there lay until Boswell, who died in 1647, confided them to the editorial care of Isaac Gruter who... published them all together in 1653. Among the papers which thus came into his hands, Gruter found the two manuscripts of William Gilbert, of Colchester, which William Gilbert, of Melford, had prepared, and these he edited and issued... in 1651.
William Gilbert (astronomer)
This eminent painter, whose contempt for the follies of mankind kept pace with his acute observation of them, was so disgusted at the blind preference paid to his powers of portraiture that for many years of his residence at Bath he regularly shut up all his landscapes in the back apartments of his house, to which no common visitors were admitted. The landscape that first found its way into any collection was purchased of him by the late Henry Hoare, Esq., of Stourhead, on a friend's recommendation! and so little even then was the merit of Gainsborough duly estimated that Mr. Bampfylde, a dilettante in painting, being on a visit to Stourhead, offered to mend Gainsborough's sheep by repainting them, and was allowed to do so. They have been restored to their original deficiencies by the taste and good sense of the present possessor of that beautiful place [Sir Richard Colt Hoare ].
Thomas Gainsborough
In a letter to Sir John Hall, he says that he was become very fond of studying the surface of the earth, and was looking with anxious curiosity into every pit, or ditch, or bed of a river that fell in his way; "and that if he did not always avoid the fate of Thales, his misfortune was certainly not owing to the same cause." This letter is from Yarmouth; it has no date, but it is plain from circumstances that it must have been written in 1753.
James Hutton
Sir, a wise Government in its home policy considers the reasonable wants of the people; in its foreign policy, it is prepared to resist the unjust demands and the unreasonable views of foreign powers. The present Government inverts this method; it is all resistance at home, all concession abroad.
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
The Illustrated Review... to which we are indebted for the preceding statements, remarks that, since the death of Sir John Herschel... Sir George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, is the admitted master of the sublime science. There are other eminent English astronomers-as John Hinde, the discoverer of many asteroids, and John Adams, also a Cambridge Senior Wrangler and the rival of Urban Leverrier, who groped his way by mathematical calculation to the discovery of the hitherto unknown planet Neptune. If incidents as brilliant and remarkable as these are wanting in the history of Sir George Airy, his claims to respect are equally valuable, solid, and enduring.
George Biddell Airy
Sir, I believe that if the House adopts this Motion...[t]hey will say, "Here is a Power that has been formerly great in arms, whose armies have gained victories in remote regions, whose fleets have floated triumphantly over every ocean... this people are now overcome by the love of gain. They fear the expenses and the efforts which may be necessary to protect their countrymen, and they abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians-a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." I say foreign nations would feel that England has descended from that high station which hitherto she has occupied, at the beck of some of the basest, the meanest, and the most degraded beings in the civilized world.
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Sir George Airy has been repeatedly called into council on matters of grave difficulty by the government. He was chairman of the royal commission empowered to supervise... contriving new standards of length and of weight... He was consulted... in respect to the bewildering disturbance of the magnetic compass in iron-built ships of war. Thereupon he contrived an ingenious system of mechanical construction, through a combination of magnets and iron. ...and the system was generally adopted. He conducted the astronomical observations necessary to the drawing of the boundary-line now traceable on the map of the New World between the Canadas and the United States. During the battle of the gauges in the railway world Sir George Airy strenuously advocated the narrow gauge...
George Biddell Airy
