Harold Nicolson Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

The Irish do not want anyone to wish them well; they want everyone to wish their enemies ill.

Harold Nicolson
The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.

Harold Nicolson
Venizelos and Lenin are the only two really great men in Europe.

Harold Nicolson
Rudyard Kipling's eyebrows are very odd indeed! They curl up black and furious like the moustache of a Neapolitan tenor.

Harold Nicolson
Suez—a smash and grab raid that was all smash and no grab.

Harold Nicolson
How narrow is the line which separates an adventure from an ordeal.

Harold Nicolson
Filling in embarkation forms before a Channel crossing:
Harold Nicolson: What age are you going to put, Osbert?
Osbert Sitwell: What sex are you going to put, Harold?

Harold Nicolson
Clemenceau, Lloyd George and President Wilson... It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake...

Harold Nicolson
Intellectuals incline to be individualists, or even independents, are not team conscious and tend to regard obedience as a surrender of personality.

Harold Nicolson
Attlee is a charming and intelligent man, but as a public speaker he is, compared to Winston [Churchill], like a village fiddler after Paganini.

Harold Nicolson
We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission. We were bent on doing great, permanent noble things.

Harold Nicolson
To be a good diarist, one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind.

Harold Nicolson
Ponderous and uncertain is that relation between pressure and resistance which constitutes the balance of power. The arch of peace is morticed by no iron tendons…One night a handful of dust will patter from the vaulting: the bats will squeak and wheel in sudden panic: nor can the fragile fingers of man then stay the rush and rumble of destruction.

Harold Nicolson
I am haunted by mental decay such as I saw creeping over Ramsay MacDonald. A gradual dimming of the lights.

Harold Nicolson
For seventeen years, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.

Harold Nicolson
These, then, are the qualities of my ideal diplomatist. Truth, accuracy, calm, patience, good temper, modesty and loyalty. They are also the qualities of an ideal diplomacy. But, the reader may object, you have forgotten intelligence, knowledge, discernment, prudence, hospitality, charm, industry, courage and even tact. I have not forgotten them. I have taken them for granted.

Harold Nicolson