Retort Quotes
[Y]et when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: "Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won't you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?" they scowl at us. We say, "Only a ha'penny, just a copper". They retort, "You thieves!" And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who, at the risk of life, create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.
David Lloyd George
So we beat the Croations at football and I was there yelling "Ah, you Crotes!" and this guy says "It's cro-at; learn to speak English." So I was about to retort when he said "Hang on, you're Omid Djalili! You're good! I said "Aww thanks." He says "What are you going to do next?" I said "I'm in a pantomime of Wind in the Willows. I play the TO-AD, OF TO-AD HALL! I get in my BO-AT! And it sinks because it can't FLO-AT! And when I get out of the river, I'm wet and cold so I put on my CO-AT! And I can't get in my house because it's full of ferrets and STO-ATS!"
Omid Djalili
I worked to live and to make a living for my own; as long as neither myself nor my own suffered too much, I remained that which you call honest. Then work got scarce and with unemployment came hunger. It was then that that great law of nature, that imperious voice that allows no retort: the instinct of survival, pushed me to commit some of the crimes and offences that you accuse me of and that I recognise being the author of.
Ravachol
Questions at home and school should be decided in the light of the future. It is a process of toughening, but not the sort of false physical thing that we have called toughening. Our boys and girls ought to know that the bully type, the false "tough," has been the first to break down under the actual fire of battle. The quiet, the calm, the determined have made the best soldiers. Why? Obviously the bully is insecure in himself- he blusters to muster his own courage. Children ought to know that. They ought to be taught to retort to the bully, "You're a coward or you wouldn't make such a noise about being brave. The really brave man simply acts brave- he doesn't have to talk about it."
Pearl S. Buck
Upon my enquiring as to what he feared most of the future, he answered: "Destitution. Destitution of finances, destitution of mind, destitution of love. The inability to retort. The need of possessing one's opposite in years, sex, and texture of the skin; and the knowledge that by this need one has been made repugnant. The replacing of independence by solitude.”.
Kenneth Burke
To Namier it had seemed obvious that political theories act as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour. If we are looking for explanations of political action, he maintained, we must seek them at the level of ‘the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality'. For critics of Namier such as Sir Herbert Butterfield, the only possible retort seemed to be to go back to a famous dictum of Lord Acton's to the effect that ideas are often the causes rather than the effects of public events. But this response duly incurred the scorn of Namier and his followers for the alleged naiveté of supposing that political actions are ever genuinely motivated by the principles used to rationalise them.
Quentin Skinner
Can you nominate in order now the degrees of the lie I will name you the degrees. The first, the Retort Courteous the second, the Quip Modest the third, the Reply Churlish the fourth, the Reproof Valiant the fifth the Countercheck Quarrelsome the sixth, the Lie with Circumstance the seventh, the Lie Direct. All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct and you may avoid that too, with an If.... Your If is the only peace-maker much virtue in If.
William Shakespeare
To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.
Miguel de Unamuno
But now at thirty years my hair is gray––
(I wonder what it will be like at forty?
I thought of a peruke the other day)
My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I
Have squander'd my whole summer while 'twas May,
And feel no more the spirit to retort; I
Have spent my life, both interest and principal,
And deem not, what I deem'd my soul invincible.
Lord Byron
