Dozen Quotes
More Dozen Quotes
"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
It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.
aldo leopold— “September: The Choral Copse”, p. 53
...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)
My friends should drink a dozen of Claret on myTomb.
john keats— 1819 Letter to Benjamin Bailey,14 Aug.
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
s. j. perelman— 1944 Crazy Like a Fox, 'Captain Future, Block That Kick'.
My uncleToby would never offer to answer this byany other kind of argument, than that of whistling half a dozen bars of Lillabullero.
Laurence Sterne— 1759-67 Tristram Shandy, bk.1, ch.21.
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
A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.
john edensor littlewood— "Introduction to A Mathematician's Miscellany", p. 24.
A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.
james a. michener— On the heroines of Tales of the South Pacific (1947) in Commercial Appeal (31 December 1951)
People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.I dont' mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
ogden nash— "The Terrible People"
I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.
s. j. perelman— "Captain Future, Block That Kick!", The Most of S. J. Perelman (1992) p. 71
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
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"
The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful or is it meaningless? It’s been explained to me a dozen times and I still can’t get it right anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or barring that refuse to be a party to it.
samuel r. delany— Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 113)
Mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward.
— Holmes' critique of "single file" thinking foreshadows Fyodor Dostoevsky's attack, in an essay of October 1876, on what he called "the straight-line approach". See Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, Volume 1: 1873–1876 (Northwestern University Press, 1997), pp. 641–57, 721–29.
If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
Randall Jarrell— "The Intellectual in America" (1955), from A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)
Just as I was about to grab the rope ladder, a huge swell lifted the dinghy nearly to La Reunion’s deck level, and at least a dozen smiling French fishermen pulled me aboard.
abby sunderland— p. 187 (Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (Thomas Nelson))
But he could stand up with unabashed brow and repeat with enduring audacity the same words a dozen times over “The prosperity of England depends on the Church of her people.” Had he been asked whether the prosperity which he promised was temporal or spiritual in its nature, not only would he not have answered, but he would not in the least have understood the question.
Anthony Trollope— Ch. 4 (Phineas Redux (1874))
...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
For my part, I spent three years reading the history and literature of the Civil War, with special attention to that of the losing side. The people who emerged were human, all-too-human, but there was still the mystery of the encompassing passion which held them together, and this I have not yet penetrated. But in a dozen various ways I came to recognize myself in the past, which is at least an important piece of self-knowledge.
richard weaver— "Up from Liberalism” Modern Age Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1958-1959), p. 25, col. 2.
Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.
robert charles wilson— p. 59 (Spin (2005))
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)
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
When I was twelve, I helped my Daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement, because some damn fool parked a dozen warheads ninety miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a coupla' hundred warheads off Washington or New York and no-one would know anything about it until it was all over.
— Larry Ferguson, in The Hunt for Red October (1990 film), based on the novel by Tom Clancy.
