Richard Armour Quotes

That money talks, I'll not deny, I heard it once: it said, 'goodbye

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

Shake and shake the catsup bottle. None will come, and then a lot'll.

Here is where people, One frequently finds, Lower their voices And raise their minds.

Beware the idiot, the zealot and the tyrant; each clothes himself in the armour of ignorance.

The great improvement of the radio over the telephone is that it may be turned off without offending the speaker.

Until Eve arrived, this was a man's world.

Melville died in New York on September 28, 1891, blissfully unaware that, in the years to come, so many people would leave the hyphen out of 'Moby-Dick.

It's all right to hold a conversation, but you should let go of it now and then.

Dedicated to that amazing device, the Required Reading List, better even than artificial respiration for keeping dead authors alive.

Oregon was discovered when someone followed the Oregon Trail right out to the end.

The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style.

some libraries are no longer called libraries but are known as Learning Resource Centers or Media Centers. Librarians, however, are still generally known as librarians and not yet as Learning Resourcists or Media Centerists, though this may be only a matter of time.

Almost nothing is known about Homer, which explains why so much has been written about him.

Scott calls Bois-Guilbert 'an unprincipled voluptuary,' which is hard to improve on.

Beware the tyrant – he clothes himself in the armour of ignorance’.

It is possible that librarians will be robots, controlled by Master Minds having mastery of a master computer at the Library of Congress. Or there will be no libraries and librarians, flesh-and-blood or otherwise. The onetime library patron will press a button and turn a dial on his TV, whereupon the requested book, in the desired language, will appear on the screen, the pages turning at the designated speed.

Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies. Yet he was a little bit of each - poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a 'three-bottle' J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessnes, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection - self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")

Rockweiler (nickname) has settled down over the years, he is a man mountain, he stands some six-and-a-half foot tall, and is round about eighteen or nineteen stones in weight. He too works in Barlinnie, this dog was responsible for giving the Wendy House seg unit the tough name tag, as he dished out the beatings to some very hard prisoners in the past. I can’t take that away from him, but he was a bit of a shit bag as well because he wore the full riot body armour when he offered to fight.

He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with pot-pourri; in one comer a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinee, by Felippo Negroli; in another a tripod table of porphyry, spectrally repeating in its polished surface the opal hues of a vessel of old Venetian glass half filled with some topaz-coloured liqueur - such and many more tokens of a luxurious aestheticism wrought in the observer an immediate sense of pleasurable enervation. He noticed, with a swaying thrill of delight, that his feet were on a padded rug of Astrakhan - one of many, disposed eccentrically about the yellow tassellated-marble floor; and he noticed that the sole light in the chamber came from an iridescent globed lamp, fed with some fragrant oil, that hung near an alcove traversed by a veil of dark violet silk. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")

He thinks of Tyndale in the bleach fields, his human sins whited-out, speaking from within a haze of smoke. He thinks of the river at Advent, its frozen path. There is a poet who writes of winter wars, where sound is frozen. The soil beneath the snow seals in the noise of stampeding feet, the clank of harness, the pleas of prisoners, the groans of the dying. When the first rays of spring warm the ground, the misery begins to thaw. Groans and cries are unloosed, and last season's blood makes the waters foul. Now Tyndale has put on the armour of light. On the last day he will rise in a silver mist, with the broken and the burned, men and women remaking themselves from the ash pile: with Little Bilney and young John Frith, with the lawyers and the scholars and those who could barely read or read not at all but only listen; with Richard Hunne who was hanged in the Lollards Tower, and all those martyrs from the years before we were born, who set forth Wyclif's book. He will clasp hands with Joan Boughton, whom he, the Lord Privy Seal, saw burned to bone when he was a boy. In those blessed days the whole of creation will shine, but till then we see through a glass darkly, not face to face. Somewhere - or Nowhere, perhaps - there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are midden and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

Only the History of William Marshal described this encounter in close terms, though the broad details of its account were confirmed in other contemporary sources. One thing seems certain. This was to be no fair fight. So intent had Richard been upon hunting down his father, that he had begun his chase wearing only a doublet and light helm. This added speed to his pursuit, but left him dreadfully exposed to attack. Worse still, the Lionheart was armed with only a sword. Marshal, by contrast, had a shield and lance. The biographer described how: [William] spurred straight on to meet the advancing [Duke] Richard. When the [duke] saw him coming he shouted at the top of his voice: ‘God’s legs, Marshal! Don’t kill me. That would be a wicked thing to do, since you find me here completely unarmed.’ In that instant, Marshal could have slain Richard, skewering his body with the same lethal force that dispatched Patrick of Salisbury in 1168. Had there been more than a split second to ponder the choice, William might perhaps have reacted differently. As it was, instinct took over. Marshal simply could not bring himself to kill an un-armoured opponent, let alone the heir-apparent to the Angevin realm, King Henry II’s eldest surviving son. Instead, he was said to have shouted in reply: ‘Indeed I won’t. Let the Devil kill you! I shall not be the one to do it’, and at the last moment, lowering his lance fractionally, he drove it into Richard’s mount. With that ‘the horse died instantly; it never took another step forward’ and, as it fell, the Lionheart was thrown to the ground and his pursuit of the king brought to an end.

a considerable portion of the appalling loss of British life was due to the destruction of the old armoured cruisers which had no business at Jutland

Weakly protected battle cruisers should never have indulged in a sustained gunnery duel, especially when there were four vastly more powerful fast battleships available in the same scouting force. Armoured cruisers should never have been there at all. Destroyers obscured the enemy.

Many interpretations can be made of the events of May 31, 1916. All sorts of claims were made at the time, and many more since. The facts on the material are clear. These were some of the most important. There was something wrong with British shells, and the battle cruisers were not thoroughly enough protected, especially against the flash of cordite to the magazines. British armour plate was as good as German, but on most of the ships it was not thick enough. The buoyancy and damage control of the German ships was much better than the British. High speed was useful, but not at the expense of protection. The bigger the gun, as most people expected, the better the result.

William Shakespeare...was baptized on April 26, 1564. When he was born is disputed, but anyone who argues that it was after this date is just being difficult.

...you would do well to turn from Chapter XXXVI to Chapter CXXXIII without further delay, thus saving nearly a hundred chapters without anybody's knowing the difference if you keep quiet. After all, Ahab isn't the only one entitled to be a skipper.

Day an' night they set in a room with a checker-board on th' end iv a flour bar'l, an' study problems iv th' navy. At night Mack dhrops in. 'Well, boys,' says he, 'how goes th' battle?' he says. 'Gloryous,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Two more moves, an' we'll be in th' king row.' 'Ah,' says Mack, 'this is too good to be thrue,' he says. 'In but a few brief minyits th' dhrinks'll be on Spain,' he says. 'Have ye anny plans f'r Sampson's fleet?' he says. 'Where is it?' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'I dinnaw,' says Mack. 'Good,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Where's th' Spanish fleet?' says they. 'Bombardin' Boston, at Cadiz, in San June de Matzoon, sighted near th' gas-house be our special correspondint, copyright, 1898, be Mike O'Toole.' 'A sthrong position,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Undoubtedly, th' fleet is headed south to attack and seize Armour's glue facthory. Ordher Sampson to sail north as fast as he can, an' lay in a supply iv ice. Th' summer's comin' on. Insthruct Schley to put on all steam, an' thin put it off again, an' call us up be telephone. R-rush eighty-three millyon throops an' four mules to Tampa, to Mobile, to Chickenmaha, to Coney Island, to Ireland, to th' divvle, an' r-rush thim back again. Don't r-rush thim. Ordher Sampson to pick up th' cable at Lincoln Par-rk, an' run into th' bar-rn. Is th' balloon corpse r-ready? It is? Thin don't sind it up. Sind it up. Have th' Mulligan Gyards co-op'rate with Gomez, an' tell him to cut away his whiskers. They've got tangled in th' riggin'. We need yellow-fever throops. Have ye anny yellow fever in th' house? Give it to twinty thousand three hundherd men, an' sind thim afther Gov'nor Tanner. Teddy Rosenfelt's r-rough r-riders ar-re downstairs, havin' their uniforms pressed. Ordher thim to th' goluf links at wanst. They must be no indecision. Where's Richard Harding Davis? On th' bridge iv the New York? Tur-rn th' bridge. Seize Gin'ral Miles' uniform. We must strengthen th' gold resarve. Where's th' Gussie? Runnin' off to Cuba with wan hundherd men an' ar-rms, iv coorse. Oh, war is a dhreadful thing. It's ye'er move, Claude,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. "An

The passion of these newly rich Americans for industrial merger yielded to an even more insistent passion for a merger of their newly acquired domains with more ancient ones; they wanted to veneer their arrivisme with the traditional. It would be gratifying to feel, as you drove up to your porte-cochère in Pittsburgh, that you were one with the jaded Renaissance Venetian who had just returned from a sitting for Titian; to feel, as you walked by the ranks of gleaming and authentic suits of armour in your mansion on Long Island – and passed the time of day with your private armourer – that it was only an accident of chronology that had put you in a counting house when you might have been jousting with other kings in the Tournament of Love; to push aside the heavy damask tablecloth on a magnificent Louis XIV dining-room table, making room for a green-shaded office lamp, beneath which you scanned the report of last month’s profit from the Saginaw branch, and then, looking up, catch a glimpse of Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan and flick the fantasy that presently you would be ordering your sedan chair, because the loveliest girl in London was expecting

Today, these doormen, they wear body armour, armoured gloves, stab proof vests and all sorts; it’s totally changed, you get shot at the door you are paid to stand at, never mind getting stabbed. Druggies go away, get a gun, return and start shooting at you! Yeah, times are changing fast and there are some nice kids out there and some of them are fucking wild. I can’t see it getting better with these drug mugs because they get on them and they can’t get off them again.

Armoured cruiser operations with a fleet of Dreadnoughts (though Jellicoe misguidedly thought otherwise and lost three at Jutland) were now ruled out owing to their near equality in speed. The battle cruisers could have filled these fleet duties if they had not possessed an armament that was bound to tempt a commander in chief to place them in line for the sake of their big guns, risking a hit on their vulnerable vital areas.

Britain’s second batch of three battle cruisers (still called armoured cruisers) was laid down from February, 1909, to June, 1910. They were as disappointing and conservative as the Colossus and Orion classes of battleship, and can be regarded as the worst ships built for the Royal Navy during the Fisher era.

At the end of 1912, then, the United States Navy had in commission six First Generation Dreadnoughts. In all of them, the wing turret was eschewed in favour of centre-line disposition; the turbine had arrived; armour plate and internal subdivision were equal to all but the German Dreadnoughts; the average speed was rather below those of its rivals, the gunpower rather above; in size, the latest pair exceeded that of any other capital ship in the world except the latest British battle cruiser.

A TIDY SPELL" I've just been through a tidy spell, I tell you it's a verity, I've sorted out the things to keep, The things to give to charity. I've sorted out my ties and belts, I've sorted out my shirts, I've sorted out my coats and slacks--- To part with some it hurts. I've sorted out my shoes and socks, I've sorted out my shorts, I've sorted out so much, in fact, That now I'm out of sorts. -by Richard Armour

Money BY RICHARD ARMOUR Workers earn it, Spendthrifts burn it, Bankers lend it, Women spend it, Forgers fake it, Taxes take it, Dying leave it, Heirs receive it, Thrifty save it, Misers crave it, Robbers seize it, Rich increase it, Gamblers lose it... I could use it!