George Villiers (of Brokesby) - Common Ancestor of Sixteen British Prime Ministers

Famous quotes containing the words common, ancestor, sixteen, british, prime and/or ministers:

“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

“We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority ... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our “white mythology.” Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.”
—Ihab Hassan (b. 1925)

“Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)

“In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”
—Nancy Banks-Smith, British columnist. Guardian (London, February 20, 1979)

“In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys’ bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)

“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)