Margot Asquith quotes:

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  • She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.

  • Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

  • The first element of greatness is fundamental humbleness (this should not be confused with servility); the second is freedom from self; the third is intrepid courage, which, taken in its widest interpretation, generally goes with truth; and the fourth-the power of love-although I have put it last, is the rarest.

  • From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.

  • His modesty amounts to deformity.

  • I was born in the country of Hogg and Scott between the Yarrow and the Tweed, in the year 1864.

  • It is easier to influence strong than weak characters in life.

  • He could never see a belt without hitting below it.

  • Stafford Cripps has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.

  • The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.

  • [On Austen Chamberlain:] He is more loyal to his friends than to his convictions.

  • [To Jean Harlow, who repeatedly mispronounced her first name:] No, no, Jean. The t is silent, as in Harlow.

  • Rich men's houses are seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original. It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty.

  • All I can say about my mind is that, like a fire carefully laid by a good housemaid, it is one that any match will light ...

  • I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.

  • Although I am not stupid, the mathematical side of my brain is like dumb notes upon a damaged piano.

  • He has a brilliant mind until he makes it up.

  • [On spiritualism:] I always knew the living talked rot, but it's nothing to the rot the dead talk.

  • He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head.

  • If you have been sunned through and through like an apricot on a wall from your earliest days, you are oversensitive to any withdrawal of heat.

  • It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.

  • Convictions no doubt have to be modified or expanded to meet changing conditions but ... to be a reliable political leader sooner or later your anchors must hold fast where other men's drag.

  • Haunted from my early youth by the transitoriness and pathos of life, I was aware that it is not enough to say "I am doing no harm," I ought to be testing myself daily, and asking myself what I am really achieving.

  • There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.

  • Lloyd George? There is no Lloyd George. There is a marvellous brain; but if you were to shut him in a room and look through the keyhole there would be nobody there.

  • [To her host upon leaving a party:] Don't think it hasn't been charming, because it hasn't.

  • I do not say I was ever what I would call "plain," but I have the sort of face that bores me when I see it on other people.

  • I have always wanted to be a man, if only for the reason that I would like to have gauged the value of my intellect.

  • I have no face, only two profiles clapped together.

  • It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

  • My dear old friend King George V told me he would never have died but for that vile doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn.

  • My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him.

  • My sort of looks are of the kind that bore me when I see them on other people.

  • Rumor is untraceable, incalculable, and infectious.

  • She spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled pig.

  • The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything.

  • the announcement that you are going to tell a good story (and the chuckle that precedes it) is always a dangerous opening.

  • The Bible tells us to forgive our enemies, not our friends

  • The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

  • The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.

  • The spirit is an inward flame; a lamp the world blows upon but never puts out.

  • There are some people that you cannot change, you must either swallow them whole or leave them alone.

  • There is nothing more perplexing in life than to know at what point you should surrender your intellect to your faith.

  • Till I see money spent on the betterment of man instead of on his idleness and destruction, I shall not believe in any perfect form of government ...

  • To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has never had a chance, poor devil, you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.

  • Too much brilliance has its disadvantages, and misplaced wit may raise a laugh, but often beheads a topic of profound interest.

  • Truthfulness with me is hardly a virtue. I cannot discriminate between truths that and those that don't need to be told.

  • What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

  • You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius....

  • If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.

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