Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.

The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere, he said. Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.

While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters."

Was anyone hurt? No one I am thankful to say, said Mrs. Beaver, except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court.

You see my adjutant made rather a silly mistake. He hadn't had much truck with boots before and the silly fellow thought they were extra rations. My men ate the whole bag of tricks last night.

We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim. . . Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. Rats, he said; stinking curs. They are all running away.

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.

I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief

And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.