Takedowns, gratuitous quips & bons mots

Cyrano de Bergerac - Il y a beaucoup de gens dont la facilité de parler ne vient que de l'impuissance de se taire.

Mel Brooks (in The 2,000 Year Old Man (and sequels)) - To me, tragedy is if I'll cut my finger, that's tragedy... Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

François-René de Chateaubriand (in Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe) - Il y a des temps où l’on ne doit dépenser le mépris qu’avec économie, à cause du grand nombre de nécessiteux.

Sir Winston Churchill - When the Labour Party politician Bessie Braddock told him, that he was drunk, he famously replied, "I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."

Georges Clemenceau - Les fonctionnaires sont un peu comme les livres d’une bibliothèque : ce sont les plus haut placés qui servent le moins. 

Noel Coward - Never trust a man with short legs… his brain’s too near his bottom.

Anthony Daniels (2021) - The influence exerted by an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to the quality of his ideas, and there is a certain kind of erudition which, allied to a talent for polysyllabic obfuscation, is not incompatible with extreme shallowness. I make these remarks with Herbert Marcuse (1897–1979) in mind.

Abba Eban - His ignorance is encyclopedic.

The Economist - The idea has a certain simple charm.  But complicated reality intrudes.

Gustave Flaubert (in Madame Bovary) - [Sa] conversation (...) était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient.

De Gaulle à propos de Raymond Aron : Ce personnage qui est journaliste au Collège de France et professeur au Figaro.

Sacha Guitry - Si ceux qui disent du mal de moi savaient exactement ce que je pense d'eux, ils en diraient bien davantage.

Heinrich Heine - Quand ce sera la fin du monde, j’irai en Hollande, car tout y a lieu vingt ans plus tard.

Nick Helm - I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Christopher Hitchens - Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Proverbe japonais - Un singe tombé de l'arbre reste un singe.

Alfred Jarry - En Pologne, c'est-à-dire nulle part.

Ann Killion‏ - I like crying babies on airplanes. I feel they are speaking for all of us.

Milan Kundera - "I think therefore I am" is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothache.

François de La Rochefoucauld - Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes, pour se consoler de n'être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples. English: Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.

Hervé Le Tellier (in La disparition de Perek, 2022) - On fait toujours plaisir aux gens en leur rendant visite. Si c'est pas en arrivant, c'est en repartant.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec (in Nouvelles Pensées échevelées, 1964) - Il y a en lui un vide immense rempli jusqu’au bord d’érudition.

Oscar Levant - I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.

Sam Levinson - Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children.

Mary Wilson Little (in A Paragrapher's Reveries, 1904) - Almost anything can be preserved in alcohol, except health, happiness and money.

Groucho Marx - I never forget a face, but in your case I’d be glad to make an exception.

Margaret McMillan - Nietzsche, who became a professor in Basle at the remarkably young age of twenty-four, was brilliant, complicated, and sure that he was right. What he was being right about is difficult if not impossible to pin down since he wrote copiously and frequently contradicted himself. What drove him on was a conviction that Western civilisation had gone badly wrong, indeed had been going wrong for the past two millennia.

Bob Monkhouse - They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.

George Orwell (last words written in his notebook) - At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Dorothy Parker - If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.

Dorothy Parker (when challenged to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence) - You may lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.

Cecil Roth - [He] was greatly in favour of a peaceful solution to disputes, but only after he had exhausted every other possibility first.

Álvaro de Rújula (particle physicist, about cosmologists) - Never in doubt, but seldom right.

Thomas Sowell - Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.

Talleyrand - Les femmes pardonnent parfois à celui qui brusque l’occasion, mais jamais à celui qui la manque.

Bruno Tertrais - Être confit dans l’aigreur est le destin des cornichons.

Dylan Thomas - Someone here is boring me. I think it’s me.

Traditional - Youth is wasted on the young. (Also attributed to George Bernard Shaw as: "Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world — and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!").

Traditional - In every relationship, there’s one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a raccoon on meth.

Traditionnel - Un Galicien est quelqu'un qu'on rencontre dans l'escalier et dont on ne sait pas s'il monte ou s'il descend. Spanish original : Cuando te encuentras a un gallego en la escalera no sabes si sube o si baja.

Traditionnel - A force de vouloir rentrer dans le moule, on finit par ressembler à une tarte.

Edward Tufte - Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Mark Twain - Scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.

Yiddish curse - All his teeth should fall out, except one, to make him suffer. (Original: Ale tseyn zoln bay im aroysfaln, not eyner zol im blaybn oyf tsonveytung).

Yiddish proverb - When a clever man makes a mistake, does he make a mistake! (Original: Az der kluger failt, failt er veit!)

Yiddish proverb - You can recognize a donkey by his long ears, a fool by his long tongue. (Original: An aizel derkent men bei di langeh oi'eren, a nar bei der langer tsung.)