"Flog A Dead Horse"
The first recorded use of the expression with its modern meaning is by John Bright, referring to the Reform Bill of 1867, which called for more democratic representation in Parliament, an issue about which Parliament was singularly apathetic. The Oxford English Dictionary cites The Globe, 1872, as the earliest verifiable use of flogging a dead horse, where someone is said to have "rehearsed that... lively operation known as flogging a dead horse".
Read more about this topic: John Bright
Famous quotes containing the words flog, dead and/or horse:
“It is a crime to put a Roman citizen in chains, it is an enormity to flog one, sheer murder to slay one: what, then, shall I say of crucifixion? It is impossible to find the word for such an abomination.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness:
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of “Emergency”. It was a tactic of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini.... The invasion of New Deal Collectivism was introduced by this same Trojan horse.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)