Asquith's Quotes

#1. Herbert Asquith's clarity is a great liability because he has nothing to say.

Arthur Balfour

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

Margot Asquith

#3. Lord Birkenhead is very clever but sometimes his brains go to his head.

Margot Asquith

#4. I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)

D.H. Lawrence

#5. The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.

Margot Asquith

#6. 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.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#8. Slinky as a lynx, hot as pepper, cool as rain, dry as smoke. There's considerably more to her than staying sexy at 60.

Ros Asquith

#9. We are within measurable, or imaginable, distance of a real Armageddon. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.

H. H. Asquith

#10. I have no face, only two profiles clapped together.

Margot Asquith

#11. I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before ... One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.

Cynthia Asquith

#12. 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.

Margot Asquith

#13. Rumor is untraceable, incalculable, and infectious.

Margot Asquith

#14. He has a brilliant mind until he makes it up.

Margot Asquith

#15. What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#20. 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.

Margot Asquith

#21. There is no more striking illustration of the immobility of British institutions than the House of Commons. Herbert

H. H. Asquith

#22. 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 ...

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#24. His modesty amounts to deformity.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#26. 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.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#28. He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#30. I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment.

H. H. Asquith

#31. The War office kept three sets of figures - one to mislead the public, another to mislead the cabinet and the third to mislead itself.

H. H. Asquith

#32. You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius ...

Margot Asquith

#33. [Jean Harlow] 'Say - aren't you Margot Asquith?' (pronouncing the hard 't')
[Margot Asquith] 'Yes Dear, But the 't' is silent, as in Harlow.

Margot Asquith

#34. She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.

Margot Asquith

#35. 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.

Margot Asquith

#36. When our new armies are ready it seems folly to send them to Flanders, where they will chew barbed wire, or be wasted in futile frontal attacks.

H. H. Asquith

#37. Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people.

Cynthia Asquith

#38. The army will hear nothing of politics from me and in return I expect to hear nothing of politics from the army.

H. H. Asquith

#39. 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.

Margot Asquith

#40. 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.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#45. Greatness is a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.

H. H. Asquith

#46. 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.

Margot Asquith

#47. 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.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#49. Of all human troubles the most hateful is to feel that you have the capacity of power and yet you have no field to excercise it.

H. H. Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#51. 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.

Margot Asquith

#52. 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.

Margot Asquith

#53. The Bible tells us to forgive our enemies, not our friends

Margot Asquith

#54. 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.

Margot Asquith

#55. We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international good faith at the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.

H. H. Asquith

#56. He could never see a belt without hitting below it.

Margot Asquith

#57. Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Margot Asquith

#58. At 50, don't let aging get you down. It's too hard to get back up. Happy 50th birthday.

H. H. Asquith

#59. Asquith, when drunk, can make a better speech than any of us when sober.

Bonar Law

#60. 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.

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

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

Margot Asquith

#63. William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature, and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves.

Aldous Huxley

#64. 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 ...

Margot Asquith

#65. Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.

H. H. Asquith

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

Margot Asquith