Peter Ustinov Quotes - Page 2

Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?

Toronto is a kind of New York operated by the Swiss.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

A diplomat these days is nothing but a head waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally.

The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticient, while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.

And here is the lesson I learned in the army. If you want to do a thing badly, you have to work at it as though you want to do it well.

World Government is not only possible, it is inevitable; and when it comes, it will appeal to patriotism in its truest sense,in its only sense, the patriotism of humans who love their national heritages so deeply that they wish to preserve them in safety for the common good.

I am convinced that it is of primordial importance to learn more every year than the year before. After all, what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn.

Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.

There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.

Generals are fascinating cases of arrested development - after all, at five all of us wanted to be generals.

American democracy is the inalienable right to sit on your front porch, in your pyjamas, drinking a can of beer and shouting out 'Where else is this possible?' Which doesn't seem to me to be freedom, really.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.

The older I get, the more people listen to me - even though I say the same as always.

When I was small, I would refuse to drink when I ate fish because I thought the fish would reconstitute itself in my stomach

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.

Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head.

If history teaches us one thing, than that history teaches us nothing.

Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.

I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.

Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.

I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.