Randolph Bedford Quotes

Bedford could be one of the rudest of men when he chose to exercise his wit at the expense of others. He happened to be a guest at a party given by a lady of some social pretensions. There arrived to it a husband and wife—the wife, big dominant, and masculine, the husband, small, meek, and submissive. Of them, the hostess said to Bedford, ‘Mr Bedford, I want to introduce you to my friends, Mr and Mrs So-and-so.’ Said Bedford, bowing to the couple, ‘Pleased to meet you. Which is which?’

I read the other day that Hindenberg, waiting to see whether Hitler would secure leadership or not, said, ‘We will see how the cat will jump, with God’s help.’ I presume he meant that God would help him to vision, and not the cat to acrobatics; but one can see how the name of God becomes formula—to be used in every emergency, if only to give the emergency respectability. Hindenberg used the formula in everything. Eighteen months before the war ended, he and Ludendorf knew that they must fail; yet to save face they kept on losing two hundred thousand men a month, and ‘trusting in God.’

Big Money is always on the Lord's side.

He just missed a seat in the Senate; and was sorry because he said he wanted to do a bit for Australia that had done so much for him. And he excused defeat by, ‘I’m that unlucky that if it rained soup, everybody else would have a spoon and I'd be left with a fork.’

To-day, a Minister receiving a deputation personally promises ‘consideration of Cabinet’, in a tone that makes the deputation believe it has succeeded. To the wise the old rule persists. If a Government says ‘Yes’, it means ‘Perhaps’; and if it says ‘Perhaps’, it means ‘No’.

Politics in Australia, as in the rest of the world, are becoming duller and soberer, as the world itself becomes temperate in the use of strong waters. I don’t know the political calibre of the three-bottle men; but it is established, in any constructional thought or action, that, if the man who drinks does silly things sometimes, the teetotaller rarely does anything. Not that the drinking of liquor can make a man clever, but that the instinctive teetotaller lacks genius, although I have known one case of a teetotaller genius. Abraham Lincoln, replying to a puritan critic who said that General Grant drank whisky, wished that he had more whisky-drinking generals if whisky made General Grant do the things he did.

Australia has a word for the s, a word that should be used the world over to describe a killjoy, and that word is ''.

At the age of five I had begun an association with Temperance Societies; which ended at the age of sixteen—when I discovered the goodness of beer.

As salt as Lot's wife.

It is not without design that the monkey with the rainbow stern climbs high. It is the advertisement of his sex appeal, and he doesn't climb far unless there is an audience.