Noël Coward Quotes

Lord knows I'm not a fool girl
I really shouldn't care
Lord knows I'm not a school girl
In the flurry of her first affair.

In Bengal,
To move at all
Is seldom if ever done.

Our families have traditions
We've heard of a thousand times
Our ancestors were unequivocally right.
They frequently went on missions
To rather peculiar climes
To lead the wretched heathen to the light.
Though some of them got beaten up and some of them stampeded
And quite a lot were eaten up - a few of them succeeded.
On one of these expeditions
An uncle we thought a bore
Turned out to be more spirited than ever he'd been before.<p>Poor Uncle Harry
Wanted to be a missionary
So he took a ship and sailed away.
This visionary
Hotly pursued by dear Aunt Mary
Found a South Sea isle on which to stay.
The natives greeted them kindly,
And invited them to dine
On yams and clams and human hams and vintage coconut wine
The taste of which was filthy
But the after-effects divine.

Your motivation is your pay packet on Friday. Now get on with it.

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington
Don't put your daughter on the stage
The profession is overcrowded
And the struggle's pretty tough
And admitting the fact she's burning to act
That isn't quite enough
She's a big girl and though her teeth are fairly good
She's not the type I ever would be eager to engage
I repeat, Mrs. Worthington, sweet Mrs. Worthington
Don't put your daughter on the stage.

[On the phone] My dear Jim's dead...No dear, he jumped off Waterloo Bridge - Yes, the one next to Charing Cross - No, no, no that's Blackfriars.

People are wrong when they say that the opera isn't what it used to be. It is what it used to be — that's what's wrong with it!

It seems such a shame
When the English claim
The Earth,
That they give rise
To such hilarity
And mirth.

In Hong Kong
They strike a gong
And fire off a noonday gun
To reprimand
Each inmate
Who's in late.

Charles: Anything interesting in The Times?
Ruth: Don't be silly, Charles.

Will it ever cloy
This odd diversity of misery and joy
I'm feeling quite insane and young again
And all because I'm mad about the boy

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

The Battle of Britain was twenty-three years ago and the world has forgotten it. Those young men, so many of whom I knew, flew up into the air and died for us and all we believed in... What did they die for? I suppose for themselves and what they believed was England. It was England then – for a few brave months... The peace we are enduring is not worth their deaths. England has become a third-rate power, economically and morally. We are vulgarised by American values. America, which didn't even know war on its own ground, is now dictating our policies and patronising our values. I came away from that gentle, touching, tatty little party with a heavy and sad heart. The England those boys died for has disappeared. Our history, except for stupid, squalid social scandals, is over... We are now beset by the 'clever ones', all the cheap frightened people who can see nothing but defeat and who have no pride, no knowledge of the past, no reverence for our lovely heritage... I despise the young, who see no quality in our great past and who spit, with phoney, left-wing disdain, on all that we, as a race, have contributed to the living world... I say a grateful goodbye to those foolish, gallant young men who made it possible for me to be alive today to write these sentimental words.

Gary: You ought never to have joined the Athenaeum Club, Henry: it was disastrous.
Henry: I really don’t see why.
Gary: It’s made you pompous.
Henry: It can’t have. I’ve always been too frightened to go into it.

In Rangoon
The heat of noon
Is just what the natives shun,
They put their Scotch
Or Rye down
And lie down.