Doctors and Psychologists
It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was ‘past keeping the pigs’.
Florence Nightingale
If they do no other good they do at least this, that they prepare their patients early for death, undermining little by little and cutting off their enjoyment of life.
Michel de Montaigne on physicans who prescribe diets
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I find medicine is the best of all trades because whether you do any good or not you still get your money.
Molière
When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it cannot be cured.
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Despite all our toils and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht
Nobody can read Freud without realizing he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert M. Hutchins on Sigmund Freud
Anyone who pays to see a psychiatrist needs their head looking at.
Woody Allen
A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Joey Adams
Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement – they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.
Florence Nightingale
If the human brain were simple enough to understand we’d be too simple to understand it.
Emerson Pugh
I’ve frequently observed that people who believe in a sixth sense are usually deficient in the other five.
Victor Lewis-Smith
A successful parent is one who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis.
Nora Ephron
He was meddling too much in my private life.
Tennessee Williams on why he had given up visiting his psychoanalyst
Actually I loathed the Viennese quack.
Vladimir Nabokov on Sigmund Freud
I’m a fucking doctor.
R.D. Laing’s last reported words after suffering a heart attack in public. As people gathered round the spot someone said ‘Get a doctor.’
Law and Lawyers
The first thing we do, let’s kill all lawyers.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, part 2
Ninety-nine per cent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
Steven Wright
This is a British murder inquiry and some degree of justice must be seen to be more or less done.
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers
The basic test of a decent police force is that it should catch more criminals than it employs.
Robert Mark, ex-Police Commissioner
The majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor people alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France, The Red Lily
The law-courts of England are open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel.
Charles, Lord Darling
Laws are like sausages: if you like them, don’t watch them being made.
Otto von Bismarck
The scandalous part of most scandals is often not the lawbreaking but the law itself.
Michael Kinsley
The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.
Charles Dickens
A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, any more than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.
Jean Kerr
Lawyers, not poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.
Columnist Simon Carr
Richard Ingrams, in the Guardian
A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Robert Maxwell
Laws are like spiders’ webs: if some poor weak creature comes up against them it is caught; but a bigger one can break through and get away.
Solon, an Athenian statesman
When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.
Sydney Smith
I do not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but I believe the gentleman is an attorney.
Samuel Johnson
A qadi [judge] who, when two parties part in peace,
Rekindles their dispute with binding words.
Indifferent to this world and its luxuries, he seems,
But in secret, he wouldn’t say no to camel dung.
Oh, people, pause and hark
To the charming qualities of our qadi,
A homosexual, drunkard, fornicator, and takes bribes,
A tell-tale liar whose judgements follow his whims.
Ibn Ayas on Ibn al-Naqib, the Egyptian Chief Justice, Mameluke era (1250–1517)
My definition of utter waste is a coachload of lawyers going over a cliff, with three empty seats.
Lamar Hunt on the increasing problems of litigation in the American National Football League
PRISONER (in the dock after being sentenced to be hanged): My Lord, spare me: I am a product of my upbringing.
JUDGE: So am I! Send him down.
YOUNG BARRISTER: My lord, my unfortunate client … my lord, my unfortunate client … my lord, my … my …
LORD ELLENBOROUGH: Go on, sir, go on. As far as you have proceeded hitherto, the court is entirely in agreement with you.
Lord Ellenborough
JUDGE: Counselor, are you trying to show contempt for this court?
LAWYER: No, your Honour, I’m trying to conceal it.
Possibly not, m’Lud, but you are much better informed.
F.E. Smith to a judge who failed to understand one of the barrister’s legal speeches. The judge had told Smith: ‘I have listened to you, Mr Smith, but I am none the wiser.’
He lied like an eye-witness.
Russian proverb
George Jeffreys pointed his stick at one of the rebels hauled before him in the famous ‘bloody assizes’ saying: ‘There is a rogue at the end of my cane.’ ‘At which end. My Lord?’ retorted the man.
Anonymous
LORD SANDWICH: You will die either on the gallows, or of the pox.
WILKES: That must depend on whether I embrace your lordship’s principles or your mistress.
John Wilkes; sometimes attributed to Samuel Foote
I have forgotten more law than you ever knew, but allow me to say, I have not forgotten much.
Judge John Maynard, replying to Judge Jeffrey’s assertion that he was so old he had forgotten the law
I can’t take my chauffeur everywhere.
Derek Laud, Conservative candidate, explaining a drink-driving charge
CONVICTED CRIMINAL: As God is my judge – I am innocent.
MR JUSTICE BIRKETT: He isn’t; I am, and you’re not!
Sir Norman Birkett
[It is reported that] after a ten year stand off, Lord Longford is again visiting the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Thank goodness, a nation will sleep more soundly for knowing that, at last, this revolting psychopath is being properly punished.
Simon Heffer
The difference is that we Europeans accept we’ve
all got to die of something or other. Americans think death is a calamity for which you can sue somebody.
Jonathan Miller
From every treetop some wild woods songster will carol his mating song, butterflies will sport in the sunshine, the busy bee will hum happy as it pursues its accustomed vocation. The gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses, and all nature, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, will be glad but you. You won’t be here to enjoy it because I command the sheriff or some other officer of this country to lead you out to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from the knotting bough of a sturdy oak, and let you hang until you are dead. And then, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, I further command that such officer or officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse, that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, copper-coloured, blood-thirsty, throat-cutting, chilli-eating, sheep-herding, murdering son-of-a-bitch.
Transcript from US District Court, New Mexico Territory, 1881, USA v. Gonzales
You are a low-down, depraved son-of-a-bitch. There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them.
US trial judge sentencing Alferd [sic] Packer for cannibalism, 1874
Here comes counsel for the other side.
Sydney Smith as the lawyer Lord Brougham arrived at a performance of The Messiah
Business and Economics
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
George Orwell
Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language we have jargons; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.
Eric Bentley
People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith
An economist is someone who can’t see something working in practice without asking whether it would work in theory.
Walter Wolfgang Heller, advisor to President Kennedy
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
Alfred A. Knopf
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
Laurence J. Peter
Economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.
Paul Samuelson
Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Economic forecasters were invented to make weather forecasters look good.
Irwin Stelzer
Why did nobody notice it?
Queen Elizabeth II to LSE Professor Luis Garicano asking how economists missed the global crash of 2008
Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future.
Sam Goldwyn
Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
Sometimes attributed to Karl Marx
A fool and his money get a lot of publicity.
Al Bernstein
If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you only have to look at those to whom He gives it.
Maurice Baring
There is plenty of affordable housing. It is simply occupied by the wrong people. The problem in New York is not high rents but low income.
John Gilbert III, President, New York Landlords’ Association
It is a social experience for most people. They want to meet the people in the queue.
David Mills, Chief Executive of the Post Office, defending Post Office queues, 2004
Overseas aid is a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
Peter Bauer
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.
Bob Hope
Never take financial advice from anyone in a tie.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Annals of an Abiding Liberal
In any successful enterprise there must be an uneven number of directors and three is too many.
Giovanni Agnelli, founder of Fiat
It’s easy to become a millionaire – start out as a billionaire, then buy an airline.
Richard Branson
The worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it.
Friedrich Hayek
Finding a businessman interested in the arts is like finding chicken shit in the chicken salad.
Alice Neel
Studying the science of yesteryear one comes upon such interesting notions as gravity, electricity, and the roundness of the earth – while an examination of more recent phenomena shows a strong trend towards spray cheese, stretch denim and the Moog synthesizer.
Fran Lebowitz
I am going into space in a vehicle comprising three million parts – each supplied by the lowest bidder.
Anonymous American astronaut
Sport
When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.
Fran Lebowitz
I told him, ‘Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?’ He said ‘Coach, I don’t know and I don’t care.’
Frank Layden
I wanted to have a career in sports when I was young, but I had to give it up. I’m only six feet tall, so I couldn’t play basketball. I’m only 190 pounds, so I couldn’t play football. And I have 20-20 vision, so I couldn’t be a referee.
Jay Leno
It is remarkable that a fist-gnawingly dire England performance still has the power to shock, when in some ways this one had all the exquisite unpredictability of Norman Wisdom approaching a banana skin in the immediate vicinity of a swimming pool … The England shirt is the precise opposite of a superhero costume, turning men with extraordinary abilities into mild-mannered guys next door.
Marina Hyde on the England football team
You can’t see as well as these fucking flowers – and they’re fucking plastic.
John McEnroe to a line judge at the US Open, 1980
A man whose chief ambition is to show his bravery in hunting foxes. A term of reproach used of country gentlemen.
Dr Johnson’s dictionary entry for ‘Foxhunting’
They came to see me bat, not to see you bowl.
W.G. Grace, refusing to leave the crease after being bowled first ball. Attrib.
Which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?
Vic Richardson, the Australian cricket team’s vice-captain, after Douglas Jardine complained that one of the team had called him a ‘Pommy bastard’ on the field
Don’t bother shutting it, son, you won’t be out there long enough.
Fred Trueman, to a new Australian batsman as he closed the gate leaving the Pavilion at Lords
A corpse with pads on.
Ian Wooldridge on Australian cricket captain Bill Lawry
The only fellow I’ve met who fell in love with himself at a young age and has remained faithful ever since.
Dennis Lillee on Geoff Boycott
You have done for Australian cricket what the Boston Strangler did for door-to-door salesmen.
Telegram sent to Geoff Boycott
ROD MARSH: So how’s your wife and my kids?
IAN BOTHAM: The wife’s fine – the kids are retarded.
&n
bsp; Exchange between Australian wicketkeeper Rod Marsh and England all-rounder Ian Botham
MARK WAUGH: Fuck me, look who it is. Mate, what are you doing out here? There’s no way you’re good enough to play for England.
JAMES ORMOND: Maybe not, but at least I’m the best player in my family.
Exchange between Australian cricketer Mark Waugh, whose brother Steve was also in the team, and England newbie James Ormond
Sure, I know where the press room is – I just look for where they throw the dog meat.
Martina Navratilova
Would you like me to bowl a piano and see if you can play that?
Mervyn Hughes to Graham Gooch
If you turn the bat over you’ll get the instructions, mate.
Merv Hughes to Robin Smith
WARNE: I’ve been waiting two years for another chance at you.
CULLINAN: Looks like you spent it eating.
Exchange between Daryll Cullinan and Shane Warne as the former came out to bat.
The only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players (more if they are moderately restless).
Bill Bryson on cricket
An ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.
Woodrow Wilson on golf
Cricket – a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.
Lord Mancroft
This is great. When does it start?
Groucho Marx, watching a cricket match at Lord’s
Oh God, if there be cricket in heaven, let there also be rain.
Alec Douglas Home
If defensive linemen’s IQs were 5 points lower, they’d be geraniums.
Russ Francis on American football
Football is a game for trained apes.
Edward Abbey on American football
I looked in the mirror one day and I said to my wife ‘How many great coaches do you think there are?’ She said ‘One less than you think.’
Joe Paterno
Whoever said, ‘It’s not whether you win or lose that counts’, probably lost.
Martina Navratilova
Most football players are temperamental. That’s 90 per cent temper and 10 per cent mental.
Doug Plank on American football
American football makes Rugby look like a Tupperware party.
Sue Lawley
I’d run over my own mother to win the Super Bowl.