I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn’t know the difference between being solemn and being serious. - John Cleese

When I was teaching, the headmaster told me "You know, the sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it."

If you can't control your own emotions, you're forced to control other people's behaviour. That's why the touchiest, most oversensitive and easily upset must not set the standard for the rest of us .

We left the Bentley and Tim at a garage, and Alan and I travelled back to Brussels to hire a much less magnificent vehicle. When we picked Tim up the next morning, he told us that he’d spent the night in his room with a ‘bird’. Intrigued, we questioned him closely, and learned that he had been woken in the middle of the night by a strange, rather alarming noise and that when he had put the light on he had discovered a turkey vomiting on the mantelpiece. He’d thought of complaining but found that his phrase book did not cover this contingency.