Top 100 Oxford's Quotes
#1. The slaughter of Oxford's dogs and cats had been well intentioned, but the result had been an explosion in the town's population of rats, with few surviving predators to keep them down,
Ann Swinfen
#2. On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' ... Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
#3. Ralston stiffened at the reference to the stupid wager that caused so much pain and unhappiness. He ignored Oxford's proffered hand, and instead met the baron's concerned gaze, and said, Keep the money. I have her. She's all I want.
Sarah MacLean
#4. In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
Donald Hall
#5. Okay, everyone please be completely quiet, because I can literally hear a whisper, and it'll throw off my stream of consciousness, and when I get my stream of consciousness going that's when I give the best, illest quotes. Literally, a whisper can throw it off.
Kanye West
#7. My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.
Jez Butterworth
#8. Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.
Philip Zaleski
#9. One of my biggest Achilles' heels has been my ego. And if I, Kanye West, the very person, can remove my ego, I think there's hope for everyone.
Kanye West
#10. People say it takes a village to raise a child. People ask me how my daughter is doing. She's only doing good if your daughter's doing good. We're all one family.
Kanye West
#11. Nigel Barton:Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there.
Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then?
Dennis Potter
#12. I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It's freezing and it starts to rain and it's the ugliest bus I've ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds.
David Thewlis
#13. Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.
T. S. Eliot
#14. I have six or seven 'what to name the baby' books, the Oxford dictionary of names, and a fabulous tome that's 26 languages in simultaneous translation - French, German, all the European majors, plus Esperanto, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
Melanie Rawn
#15. The death of the MG marks the end of one of the most perfect products of free enterprise, born out of the voracious will to succeed of one man and the burgeoning market for middle-class status symbols. The car first appeared as a souped-up Morris Oxford in 1923 when it won the Land's End Rally.
Nick Davies
#16. A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.
Donald Hall
#17. There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive.It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference , that's all.
Barbara Pym
#18. Being in Oxford can be a bit like being on holiday - there's plenty of time spent in the pub.
Kevin Whately
#19. See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#20. Well that's what Andy wore to bed. You know, the oxford button-down Brooks Brothers shirt that he's been wearing all day and his big long socks. He'd just take off his jeans and his boots and go to bed. Then he'd change into a fresh ensemble after he had breakfast the next morning.
Bob Colacello
#21. It's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.
Owen Gingerich
#22. In 1960, I went to St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964.
John E. Walker
#23. Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.
Rowan Atkinson
#24. We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet.
Michael Palin
#25. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#26. I had a dream I was walking down the street and didn't have to hold anyone's hand
Kelly Oxford
#27. As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.
John Gurdon
#29. Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell.
Jennifer Crusie
#30. I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it.
Colin Baker
#31. A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses
A. J. Jacobs
#32. The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#33. Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.
John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.
John Fowles
#34. I hope I helped change people's preconceptions about 'Page 3' girls by appearing on Newsnight and at the Oxford Union debate.
Peta Todd
#35. Skyline reveals a city's purpose and character. Oxford had its dreaming spires; Manhattan its glittering towers; Edinburgh its eccentric spikes.
Alexander McCall Smith
#36. People used to ask me for advice, and I'd say, 'Please, don't ask me!' Yes, I did economics at Oxford, but that's not the same as having a broad knowledge of personal finance.
Sophie Kinsella
#38. Your aunt Rose is dying," Petranilla said as soon as he was close. "May God bless her soul. Mother Cecilia told me." "You look shocked - but you know how ill she is." "It's not Aunt Rose. I've had other bad news." He swallowed. "I can't go to Oxford.
Ken Follett
#39. F1s can only prescribe on in-patient drug cards and TTOs . The GMC's Good Medical Practice ( 2013 ) guidance states you should avoid providing medical care to yourself or anyone with whom you have a close personal relationship .
Oxford Handbook
#40. An oxymoron? What's that? A moron who studies at Oxford?
Johnny Carson
#41. Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
Alain De Botton
#42. Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.
P.G. Wodehouse
#43. It is futile to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know, because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless, my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in the privacy of my study.
P.G. Wodehouse
#44. Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.
Adrian McKinty
#45. There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.
Ella Dominguez
#46. Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley's favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers, and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun.
John Le Carre
#47. Because I'd done 30 plays or so at Oxford, I thought that I was an actress anyway because that's what I was doing!
Katherine Parkinson
#48. From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
Margaret Halsey
#49. On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.
John Sulston
#50. I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl.
Jeanette Winterson
#51. I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
V.S. Naipaul
#52. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it's largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.
Mark Forsyth
#53. He has a calsium deposit on the medulla oblongota of his brain, but he is a brilliant man. This man has a BA, an MA from Havard, and a PhD from Oxford. He's a brilliant man I tell you, Mean Gene.
Lou Albano
#54. I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
Taiye Selasi
#55. Beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them as luxury.
Kanye West
#56. I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy.
Adrian McKinty
#57. I find a lot of people struggling in their lives because they feel like it was expected they do a certain thing or act a certain way and not follow what their gut is telling them to do.
Kelly Oxford
#58. Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.
Peter Agre
#60. I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.
Oscar Wilde
#61. I didn't know a thing about Oxford and had never been to Britain. My father suggested it because in 1939 he had been about to take up a place at Wadham College, but the war broke out, and he joined the Army instead.
Tariq Ali
#62. We have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs.
Kanye West
#63. The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
C.S. Lewis
#64. In which year did a Harvard sculler last outrow an Oxford man at Henley?" Langdon had no idea, but he could imagine only one reason the question had been asked. "Surely such a travesty has never occurred.
Dan Brown
#65. I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
Reid Hoffman
#66. My host at Richmond, yesterday morning, could not sufficiently express his surprise that I intended to venture to walk as far as Oxford, and still farther. He however was so kind as to send his son, a clever little boy, to show me the road leading to Windsor.
Karl Philipp Moritz
#67. I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
Richard Dawkins
#68. It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
Evelyn Waugh
#69. One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
Donald Hall
#70. A lot of girls annoy me who go to university - one girl told me she was going to Oxford because it was something to do between leaving school and getting married. And I've got to pay for that being an income tax payer.
Jeffrey Bernard
#71. I don't think I'm going to become Brad Pitt overnight, but I presume if walk down Oxford Street, there is a chance someone might clock me.
Taron Egerton
#72. Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Oxford:
Gary L. Wenk
#73. When I play discos in Belfast or freshers' week in Oxford, there are 1,800 kids dressed as me. It's odd, it's funny, and it pays really well.
David Hasselhoff
#74. Do or don't, there is no don. Don is an honor not bestowed on any procrastinator, not even a professor at Oxford.
Jarod Kintz
#76. What I like about Oxford is how small it is; it's really more of a big town than a city.
Samantha Shannon
#77. The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.
Conan O'Brien
#78. I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing.
Eddie Marsan
#79. I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.
Alan Bennett
#80. But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.
Mary Augusta Ward
#81. Mrs Kerslake:" but if there is no chance of being offered a place at Oxford, surely-?"
Simon Kerslake: "Thats not what i said Mother, I shall be an undergraduate at Oxford by the first day of term
Mark Twain
#82. Locavore" may have been the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year, but there's already been a word for those whose diets are restricted to seasonal items grown in their immediate area: That word is "peasant.
Brett Martin
#83. In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.
James Meade
#84. Sorry, I thought I was just thinking that.
Kelly Oxford
#85. My first paid job was delivering newspapers. The first paid acting job I got was dressing up as Edam cheese and handing out leaflets on London's Oxford Street. I got pushed over by these little herberts and given a good shoe-in.
Jason Flemyng
#86. None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
Edmund Crispin
#87. The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men.
John Aubrey
#88. The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
Oscar Wilde
#89. My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.
Antonia Fraser
#90. Are you going to eat me in my sleep?"
"Friends are like potatoes. If you eat them, they die."
"Is that a no?"
"Are you a potato?
Rain Oxford
#91. Oxford is wonderful. I'm having a great time. We do go out, but I still try to spend most of my time studying in the library.
Chelsea Clinton
#92. In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.
Imran Khan
#93. An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive. - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester
#94. I had weaseled my way into their hearts like I knew I would.
Kelly Oxford
#95. Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
E. M. Forster
#96. Since my education, I've done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians - certainly when I was there - went to Cambridge. I don't know whether it's the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford, because it seemed more of an easy bridge.
Tom Hiddleston
#97. The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
Robertson Davies
#98. I met my wife in Oxford, fell in love with her, and followed her to New York. I was an illegal there for the first few years, until we got married, so I ended up doing lots of interesting jobs, some for a few days, some for a few months.
Adrian McKinty
#99. Governance has been at the heart of the work of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations and is a clear focus in its report, 'Now for the Long Term.'
Mo Ibrahim
#100. The silver Thames takes some part of this county in its journey to Oxford.
John Aubrey
