Winged monkeys (often referred to in adaptations and popular culture as flying monkeys) are characters from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, of enough impact between the books and the 1939 movie to have taken their own place in popular culture, regularly referenced in comedic or ironic situations as a source of evil or fear.
Famous quotes containing the words winged and/or monkeys:
“Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky—
So this winged hour is dropped to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)