Licence Quotes

#1. It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

Gavyn Davies

#2. I'm a songwriter, and I understand artistic licence. We can embellish, go on little journeys and explore our inner selves. It can be quite self-indulgent.

Laura Marling

#3. Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage licence. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.

Vaughn Walker

#4. There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with ... nobody can ever improve the software.

Bill Gates

#5. I have a driver's licence, but the truth is that I hardly ever drive. I prefer to get around by taxi.

Ferran Adria

#6. I didn't get my licence because I wasn't allowed to. But I haven't had a seizure for a long time so I could, theoretically, get my licence. But I'm now just so used to not driving, I'm scared of what I'd do.

Hugo Weaving

#7. Every dog is allowed one bite, but a different view is taken of a dog that goes on biting all the time. He may not get his licence returned when it falls due.

Harold Wilson

#8. The commonplace needs no defence,Dullness is in the critic's eyes,Without a licence life evolvesFrom some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms,Behind these hedges trimly shorn,As in a stable once, so hereIt may be born, it may be born.

William Plomer

#9. A free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.

Barack Obama

#10. I thought I'd join the RAF and become a wing commander. I realised this wasn't possible, although I do have a pilot's licence.

Mike Oldfield

#11. Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.

John Donne

#12. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

Tennessee Williams

#13. There's a rumour going 'round that if you amass a certain number of penalty points on your driving licence, the authorities will make you take your test again! Now, if ever there was an incentive to drive carefully, they could not have threatened a more terrifying ordeal.

Jasper Carrott

#14. I have to get a licence to drive a motorcycle to protect myself and the people around me. I am adamant there should be some sort of licensing required to have children.

Tim Allen

#15. At school, I was a shy lad and still am. But acting gives me licence to be up there, demanding the focus. It's the one time in my life where I don't have to shout to be heard.

Emun Elliott

#16. We all have to recognise, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the licence to do always as we please.

Harry S. Truman

#17. The prospect of the UK without a BBC funded by the licence fee is anywhere between improbable and impossible.

Tessa Jowell

#18. In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house ...

Virginia Woolf

#19. The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us.

Mitchell Baker

#20. Crash Holly's so short, you can see his feet on his driver's licence photo.

Jerry Lawler

#21. This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.

Sigmund Freud

#22. War had given Francis his respite, and success had brought him his final reward: the freedom he wished from his marriage. The licence, if he desired it, to go back to Russia. The knowledge, one supposed, that, severed from Philippa, he could allow the past to lie in peace, and cease troubling him.

Dorothy Dunnett

#23. I'm the only man in the world with a marriage licence made out to whom it may concern.

Mickey Rooney

#24. Even non-commercial media rely on transferring cost to users through licence fees, donations from listeners, viewers, or readers, or grants from companies and foundations that have wrestled their funds from the public in some form of earlier commercial activity.

Robert G. Picard

#25. It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.

Richard Dawkins

#26. Funny how being decrepit, diseased and sentenced to death gave you so much power. She couldn't go to Morocco nor even drive herself into town. She could hardly move off the couch. But she could say whatever she wanted: she had bitch licence.

Fiona McGregor

#27. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free sex and a free lay church in a free lay state.

James Joyce

#28. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a licence?

Markus Zusak

#29. But what is Freedom? Rightly understood, A universal licence to be good.

Hartley Coleridge

#30. I've done my coaching badges, I've got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I'm doing now. I'm also the elite performance director of the Welsh FA. The main thing for me was always Liverpool Football Club and my country, Wales - and I'm lucky enough to still be involved with both of them.

Ian Rush

#31. Yes, it's true, I have bought a helicopter. I really like it. I can't fly it, but I plan to get a licence one day.

Shane Filan

#32. Like having your own licence to print money.

Roy Thomson

#33. I lurch from chaos to chaos. I can't find my driving licence and my clothes are everywhere - cooking is the neatest thing I do.

Nigella Lawson

#34. The only store where visitors can officially buy alcohol without a licence is at the Barracuda Beach Resort

Lonely Planet

#35. But I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#36. None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.

John Milton

#37. I love being able to go on local flights when the weather is right. I've popped to the Isle of Wight, Cornwall and been mountain flying in Wales. When I got my licence I was over the moon, it was one of the greatest days of my life - it took two years to get!

Jay Kay

#38. Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink: if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss; and as many lies as will lie in thy shee.

William Shakespeare

#39. He would be atleast sixteen-old enough to have a driver's licence- and he would have crinkles around his eyes that showed he had a sense of humor and he would be tall, the kind of boy all the other girls would like to date

Beverly Cleary

#40. The TV licence people just can't believe we don't have a television. I'm a bolshie git. I shout at them things like, 'I don't need TV, I'm an intellectual.'

Julian Cope

#41. For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

Virginia Woolf

#42. There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.

Timothy West

#43. Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers, and the writers of editorials.

Rex Murphy

#44. I want the BBC to be a mass market public service broadcaster still funded by the licence fee ... and the licence fee is more durable than many people in the commercial sector believe.

Gavyn Davies

#45. The dominion of good men is profitable, not so much for themselves as for human affairs. But the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater licence in wickedness;

Augustine Of Hippo

#46. L'Age Licence. As in: License to experience, mess up, license to fail, license to do... whatever, before you're settled.

Lucy Knisley

#47. Once I know people know who I am, it gives me a lot of licence and freedom to behave in ways I wouldn't normally.

Larry David

#48. We are not entitled to such licence, I mean that of affirming what we please; we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and the measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings

Gregory Of Nyssa

#49. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

Charles Dickens

#50. Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.

Alan Bennett

#51. ( ... ) I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr Wilkinson's driving licence to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.

Ben Aaronovitch

#52. This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#53. Sometimes it seemed like I was the one expected to soldier on while everyone else had a licence to fall apart.

Anni Taylor

#54. What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Joanne Harris

#55. [That form of] eloquence, the foster-child of licence, which fools call liberty.
[Lat., Eloquentia, alumna licentiae, quam stulti libertatem vocabant.]

Tacitus

#56. Ignorance is ignorance, not a licence to believe what we like.

Bryan Magee

#57. But the good news was that my elder sister refused to get married straight away and I couldn't get married until she did so I had the licence to go off and dream.

Indra Nooyi

#58. As Joel said, there's a bit more licence to attack over here, whereas the NRL is a bit more grinding-type football.

Brett Finch

#59. I've been a road-rat since I got my driver's licence at 16, so I've probably gone across America 20 times.

Sean Penn

#60. First I went to the Sorbonne to do my licence en lettres, but I also started to study law.

Claude Chabrol

#61. I have to admit to not being the greatest technician, but stop motion animation gives me licence to create machines that wouldn't otherwise be possible - inventions that seem real and actually work.

Nick Park

#62. I don't have my pilot's licence anymore, but I'm still very political.

Mathias Rust

#63. There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite; dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does

Milton Friedman