Dozen Quotes
More Dozen Quotes
The Russian colossus...has been underestimated by us...whenever a dozen divisions are destroyed the Russians replace them with another dozen.
franz halder— August 1941, from "The World at War" - Page 129 - by Mark Arnold-Forster - World War, 1939-1945 - 1981
"Never forget you are English, and that one Englishman is more than a match for half a dozen foreigners". "I don't believe in folks making a sort of mystery of themselves. I believe in being neighbourly , I do".
flora thompson— Chapter One - The House
I have heard it said that a man caught between his wife and a Wise One often wishes for a dozen old enemies to fight instead. A man caught between a wife and three Wise Ones, and the wife a Wise One herself, must consider trying to slay Sightblinder.
robert jordan— Aviendha (The Dragon Reborn (15 October 1991))
...can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms?
roman vishniac— Testament to a Lost People
It was amazing to think that in those miles of human habitations there was not probably half a dozen pounds of nails.
Constantinus— 1917 Of Bangkok. The Shadow-Line.
'It is the unofficial forcethe Baker Street irregulars.'As he spoke, there came a swift pattering of naked feet upon the stairs, a clatter of high voices, and in rushed a dozen dirtyand ragged little street Arabs.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle— 1890 The Sign of Four, ch.8.
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
Randall Jarrell— 1953 Poetry and the Age,'The Obscurity of the Poet'.
My friends should drink a dozen of Claret on myTomb.
john keats— 1819 Letter to Benjamin Bailey,14 Aug.
Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
— 1892 Said by Duchess of Berwick. LadyWindermere's Fan, act1.
I cannot write at all, but if I could how could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books? I will not write at all.
john james audubon— Journal entry in Audubon and His Journals (1897), edited by Maria R. Audubon, Vol. I, "The European Journals 1826 - 1829", p. 184
The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred; ...
bernard bailyn— FOREWORD, p. v
Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few – perhaps not half a dozen in all – the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.
frank harris— Bernard Shaw (1931) p. 191.
Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.
patrick nielsen hayden— "Oh No Lev Grossman No", in Making Light (30 August 2009)
Half a dozen slaps the time.
antónio de oliveira salazar— Quoted in The fascist Salazar: Salazar and national-syndicalism: the story of a conflict, 1932-1935 - page 90, of John Medina - Published by Livraria Bertrand, 1978 - 249 pages
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
john steinbeck— Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini
The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.
i. f. stone— The Haunted Fifties (1963)
Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.
stanislaw ulam— Adventures of a Mathematician, Chapter 8: "Los Alamos" (1991, p. 148)
Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. … Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), Ch. 2 : Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.
Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing Torture is positively paid to sing.
hilaire belloc— "On Torture: A Public Singer"
I never have held death in contempt, though in the course of my explorations I have oftentimes felt that to meet one's fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed as compared with death from disease, or from some shabby lowland accident. But the best death, quick and crystal-pure, set so glaringly open before us, is hard enough to face, even though we feel gratefully sure that we have already had happiness enough for a dozen lives.
john muir— Terry Gifford, LLO, page 693
From Carlyle onwards, but especially in the last generation, the British intelligentsia have tended to take their ideas from Europe and have been infected by habits of thought that derive ultimately from Machiavelli.:; All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship.
george orwell— "The English People" (written Spring 1944, published 1947)[2]
We saw a knot of others, about a baker's dozen.
françois rabelais— Chapter 22. (Fifth Book (1564))
How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine.
herbert schiller— Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 70
Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the lecture halls, but far from numerous the young men who genuinely thirst for truth and justice. Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few.
— Albert Einstein, “On Academic Freedom,” Ideas and Opinions (1954)
I am disposed to think that, in point of neatness and beauty, the Grand Chawk could scarcely be surpassed by more than half a dozen streets in England ...the most beautiful city in India
— Observation of a British officer in 1820 when the city was not well maintained, in p.208
Some are soon bagg'd but some reject three dozen. 'Tis fine to see them scattering refusals And wild dismay, o'er every angry cousin (Friends of the party) who begin accusais, Such as "Unless Miss (Blank) meant to have chosen Poor Frederick, why did she accord perusals To his billets? Why waltz with him? Why, I pray, Look yes last night, and yet say No to-day?"
lord byron— Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto XII, Stanza 34.
The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent . it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.
— I. F. Stone, The Haunted Fifties (1963).
...in a volume of dozen lines of Milton, Proper and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator and a chapter from the Sterne are eulogized by a thousand pens-there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and slighting the performance which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them.
— By Jane Austen in pp.20-21 (Northanger Abbey)
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple of them and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
— John Steinbeck, "Conversations with John Steinbeck", edited by Thomas Fensch (1988)
