Top 100 Mortimer's Quotes
#1. It is better to eat the dog than be eaten by the dog', Montagu had remarked quietly to the king, after being dismissed from Mortimer's presence.
Ian Mortimer
#2. When York's son, hitherto Earl of March, learned that his father's cause had devolved upon him he did not shrink. He fell upon the Earl of Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians, and on February 2, 1461, at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, near Hereford, he beat and broke
Winston S. Churchill
#3. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.
Robert Hughes
#4. Mortimer's face twisted when the Piper pressed his knife against his ribs. Oh yes, he's obviously made the wrong enemies in this story, thought Orpheus. And the wrong friends. But that was high-minded heroes for you. Stupid.
Cornelia Funke
#5. I guess secrets are part of the fabric of everybody's lives. I mean everybody's lives, and guilt is part of the fabric of everybody's lives.
Emily Mortimer
#6. It sounds crazy, but I promise you it's true; wearing red lipstick really can change the course of a night out
Minnie Mortimer
#7. It's not how many books you get through, it's how many books get through you.
Mortimer Adler
#8. In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.
Mortimer Adler
#9. The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.
Mortimer J. Adler
#10. I think that you can get more passionate about somebody the longer you're with them and the more you know them and the more you go through together. Being married is definitely better than it's cracked up to be I think.
Emily Mortimer
#11. Education is the sum total of one's experience, and the purpose of higher education is to widen our experiences beyond the circumscribed existence or our own daily lives.
Mortimer Adler
#12. I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.
John Mortimer
#13. It's a hard thing to do, to be given a script, and know that you've got to turn up on the first day of the shoot - generally without having had any rehearsal - and present a character. It's really baffling; it's incredibly hard to know how to begin, to approach it, other than just thinking about it.
Emily Mortimer
#14. Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.
Mortimer Adler
#15. Mickey Mouse was supposed to be called Mortimer, but Walt Disney's wife found it creepy
Adam Anderson
#16. The odd thing is if you asked me to do the accent now I would find it very difficult unless I was also playing that part, because I associate it so much with entering into the role and stepping into someone else's shoes.
Emily Mortimer
#17. What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
John Mortimer
#18. I'm just happy to be a film where for once I don't have to worry about my hair, because my managers are always complaining about my hair looking depressing in my movies. Which is true. I mean, it's true.
Emily Mortimer
#19. The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctor's surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they have something interesting to think about.
John Mortimer
#20. Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.
Mortimer Adler
#21. Millions of public workers have become a kind of privileged new class - a new elite, who live better than their private sector counterparts. Public servants have become the public's masters. No wonder the public is upset.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#22. Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book's general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer.
Mortimer J. Adler
#23. I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences, and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really need it. There's nothing that I'm too scared to have a go at.
Emily Mortimer
#25. Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector's work subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#26. Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal - some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father's estates, not the younger - so why should men and women be treated equally?
Ian Mortimer
#27. To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe ... it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.
Emily Mortimer
#28. I borrowed my friend's car the other day in an attempt to persuade my husband that we needed a car and literally this is true, in the first day of borrowing the car, I got three tickets and I rear-ended it.
Emily Mortimer
#29. Despite being extremely professional, Michael Caine has a giggle which was lethal for me because once you catch his eyes, once you realize the other person is a giggler too, it's curtains.
Emily Mortimer
#30. She felt a tightness in her chest and sent for Dr Simcox.
'What's the trouble?'
'Look out there, that's the trouble! It's so green and quiet and it's always bloody raining.'
'That's England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I'm afraid there's no known cure for it.
John Mortimer
#31. Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!
Emily Mortimer
#32. Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship.
Mortimer Adler
#33. It's quite nice when you've been generally dissed about your irrelevancy and then suddenly have people coming on bended knee and saying we need you to come back.
Edward Mortimer
#34. Doing press is like eating at McDonald's: while it's going on it's vaguely enjoyable - you're seduced by your own vanity and taking yourself rather seriously - but immediately afterwards you feel sick.
Emily Mortimer
#36. In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.
Emily Mortimer
#37. I think we probably will end up in America because he would be giving up much more to come and live here. If you want to work in film, that's really where you have to be. But I'm not sure that being an ex-pat is very good for one's sense of self.
Emily Mortimer
#38. The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.
Mortimer J. Adler
#39. Guy de Chauliac's advice to those wishing to avoid infection is as follows: 'Go quickly, go far, and return slowly.
Ian Mortimer
#40. The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God's love and the love of God.
Mortimer Adler
#41. You are exposing yourself all the time as an actor. There's the risk of being thought of as bad or boring or unattractive.
Emily Mortimer
#42. I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.
Emily Mortimer
#43. I had watched Alfie, but I didn't consider it a prerequisite. Michael Caine was just extremely fabulous. He's one of the most professional actors I've ever worked with. I guess after a lifetime of doing it, you know what you're doing. He's incredibly uncomplaining, undemanding.
Emily Mortimer
#44. It's dangerous talking about yourself too much because you find yourself talking in sound bites.
Emily Mortimer
#45. Oh, you think everyone's interesting. That's because you're a Red. I don't. I believe that quite a lot of people were just manufactured when God was thinking of something else.
John Mortimer
#46. Every time you start a new job, you're starting from the beginning again and it's terrifying. And you feel like you're going to be fired and told to go home and never to darken the doors of these people ever again.
Emily Mortimer
#47. Lots of people there seemed to be in denial, in absolute denial, of death - everybody's pretending that death doesn't happen in L.A.; if you do enough exercise and take enough wheatgrass and have your pill every day, you might not die.
Emily Mortimer
#48. Can't you see? Before you knew the truth, we were happy. What's the god in ferreting out the truth all that time? It's always unpleasant."
"Is it only lies that are Pleasant?"
"Usually. That's why people tell them. To make life bearable.
Penelope Mortimer
#49. I remember talking to John Mortimer, and he said he was relying on Rumpole to keep him in his old age; well, I'm doing the same with Phryne - she's my mainstay.
Kerry Greenwood
#50. Love consists in giving without getting in return; in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That's why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange.
Mortimer Adler
#51. The teacher's role in discussion is to keep it going along fruitful lines - be moderating, guiding, correcting and arguing like one more students.
Mortimer Adler
#52. I was determined not to become an American citizen but I did it for completely cynical reasons: to avoid paying inheritance tax in the U.S.
Emily Mortimer
#53. Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.
Mortimer J. Adler
#54. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess
Mortimer J. Adler
#55. Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.
Mortimer Adler
#56. This is how Mortimer Tate ended up killing the first three human beings he'd laid eyes on in nearly a decade.
Victor Gischler
#57. I have tried to be honest with you, although I suppose that you would really have been more interested in my not being honest. Some of these things happened, and some were dreams. They were all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality.
Penelope Mortimer
#58. The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.
John Mortimer
#59. From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.
Mortimer J. Adler
#60. Pope John's advisers were worried about the freedom to speak and to come and go to and from the council.
Ian Mortimer
#61. Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?
John Mortimer
#62. Can't get around the old minimum wage, Mortimer.
Dan Aykroyd
#63. The human mind is as naturally sensitive to arguments as the eye is to colors. (There may be some people who are argument-blind!) But the eye will not see if it is not kept open, and the mind will not follow an argument if it is not awake.
Mortimer J. Adler
#64. The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.
John Mortimer
#66. You can't change people. You know that. You can't make them stop hating each other, or longing to blow up the world, not by walking through the rain and singing to a small guitar. Most you can do for them is pull them out of the womb, thump them on the backside and let them get on with it.
John Mortimer
#67. This tottered ensign of my ancestors
Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea
Whereof we got the name of Mortimer,
Will I advance upon these castle-walls.
Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,
And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!
Christopher Marlowe
#68. Often thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine who lives in Mortimer Street
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#69. I never felt I was quite the ticket academically. I always felt I had to put in an enormous amount of effort not to be disappointing. So I worked really hard, but at the time it suited me, because I didn't do very much else.
Emily Mortimer
#70. Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.
Mortimer Adler
#71. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
Saul David
#72. Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Mortimer J. Adler
#73. If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Mortimer J. Adler
#75. The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
Mortimer Adler
#76. On the three pigs he and his wife own: We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn't want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.
John Mortimer
#77. He's a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I'm a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?
John Mortimer
#78. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
Mortimer J. Adler
#79. One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While
Mortimer J. Adler
#80. It will be cheering to know that many people are skillful chessplayers, though in many instances their brains, in a general way, compare unfavorably with the cognitive faculties of a rabbit.
James Mortimer
#81. One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.
Mortimer Adler
#82. 'Leonie' did get made and it was an extremely wonderful experience. I got to travel the world. I filmed for 6 months - 3 months in New Orleans and 3 months in Japan.
Emily Mortimer
#83. Work is toil: what one does only to earn a living. If it gives pleasure, it is leisure.
Mortimer Adler
#84. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
Mortimer J. Adler
#85. Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.
Mortimer J. Adler
#86. But I have to grow out of it, because it's very boring, really. Even when you're telling people how crap you are, you're still banging on about yourself.
Emily Mortimer
#87. I'm always sort of anticipating life being difficult, but on a basic level, that's sort of on the surface, on a basic level, I'm optimistic in the sense that I think it's all going to be alright in the end.
Emily Mortimer
#88. I want to fly from a window and pour through the air like a wind of love to raise his hair and slide into the palms of his hands.
Penelope Mortimer
#89. You never lose by loving, only by holding back"
Faith Mortimer
Faith Mortimer
#90. Hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
Mortimer Collins
#91. Before you build a better mousetrap, it helps to know if there are any mice out there.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#92. Oscar Wilde once quipped, "The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything and the young know everything.
Ian Mortimer
#93. Law practice is the exact opposite of sex:even when it's good, it's bad.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#94. To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
John Mortimer
#95. So far I haven't really been prominent enough to get critical attention focused on me. So, of course, I fully expect bad reviews, but I will be wracked with misery as a result.
Emily Mortimer
#97. love is nothing but an overrated emotion that brings nothing but pain to those unfortunate enough to suffer from it.
Carole Mortimer
#99. My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.
Mortimer Adler
#100. Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
Mortimer Adler
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