Pound quotes

A chieftain to the Highlands bound Cries 'Boatman, do not tarry! And I'll give thee a silver pound To row us o'er the ferry.'

-Thomas Campbell
  'Lord Ullin's Daughter', stanza1.

Can a Man be a Christian on a Pound a Week?

- (James) Keir Hardie
  Title of pamphlet.

Type of a coming nation, In the land of cattle and sheep, Worked on Middleton's station, 'Pound a week and his keep.'

- Henry Hertzberg Lawson
'Middleton's Rouseabout', collected in Colin Roderick (ed) Henry Lawson: Collected Verse (3 vols,1967^9).

My aim all along has been (in Ezra Pound's term) the most drastic desuetization of Scottish life and letters, and, inparticular, thede-Tibetanizationofthe Highlands and Islands, and getting rid of the whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird-wits, lookers-under-beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha'evers, village idiots, policemen, leaders of white-mouse factions and noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, glorified gangsters, and what 'Billy' Phelps calls Medlar Novelists (the medlar being a fruit that becomes rotten before it is ripe),Commercial Calvinists, makers of 'noises like a turnip', and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles o the English Ascendancy, and their infernal women-folk, and all their skunkoil skulduggery.

-Grieve
  Lucky Poet, ch.3,'The Kind of Poetry I  Want'.

But you are dull, nothing comes nimbly from you; you dance like a plumber's daughter and deserve two thousand pound in lead to your marriage, and not in goldsmith's ware.

-Thomas Middleton
  A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (published1630), act1, sc.1.

My uncle was famous for his balanced point of view. At the time of which I am writing (when he was nearly seventy) it had become so balanced, that the act of balancing seemed rather automatic.One had only to offer him an opinion for him to balance it with a counter- opinion of exactly the same weight, as a grocer puts a pound weight against a pound of sugar.

- Sir Stephen Harold Spender
World withinWorld, p.77.

Hard pounding this, gentlemen, let'ssee who will pound longest.

- Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
  At the Battle of Waterloo,18 Jun. Quoted in SirWalter Scott Paul's Letters (1816), letter 8.

Fromnowonthepound abroad isworth14 percentorso less in terms of other currencies. That does not mean, of course, thatthepound here in Britaininyour pocket or purse, or in your bankhas been devalued.

- (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
  National broadcast,19 Nov.The speech gave rise to the well-known phrase,'the pound in your pocket'.