Mark Forsyth Quotes

Basically, Plato thought that if you can trust a fellow when he’s drunk, you can trust him anywhere.

Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology they were able to create vast explosions,

Oscar Wilde said that “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,” and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads.

The Three Musketeers had a cry of 'All for one and one for all'. The symmetry makes it memorable but also reflects the reciprocity. It is that great human symmetry: the deal.

The sins of a society are revealed in its pieties.

But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour.

The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. it is easy to write that black is white, that up is down and that good is evil. It's as easy as typing, and as difficult. I can't do it, and I just did. But by breaking the laws of the universe, the true paradox lifts us out of it. The true paradox is, necessarily, a mystical moment, despite the fact that from a writer's point of view it's immensely easy.

Anyway, they invented civilization and it's been downhill ever since.

But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn't make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.

The beauty of merism is that it's absolutely unnecessary. It's words for words' sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me.

There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts.

The point of all this is not so that the copper in question can learn more about your motivations and beliefs. They lack such psychoanalytic curiosity. That's why they're traffic policemen. By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That's also why they're traffic policemen.

Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves’ slang from Queen Anne’s reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk.

ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.

antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses.