Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Nigel Rees
Nigel Rees Quotes
4 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw – which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them.
Nigel Rees
Source
Report...
When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to George Bernard Shaw.
Nigel Rees
Source
Report...
An analogous process I shall call Churchillian Drift... Whereas quotations with an apothegmatic feel are normally ascribed to Shaw, those with a more grandiose or belligerent tone are, as if by osmosis, credited to Churchill. All humorous remarks obviously made by a female originated, of course, with Dorothy Parker. All quotations in translation, on the other hand, should be attributed to Goethe (with 'I think' obligatory).
Nigel Rees
Source
Report...
I am only too aware that I am open to Rees's Second Law of Quotation: "However sure you are that you have attributed a quotation correctly, an earlier source will be pointed out to you."
Nigel Rees
Quote of the day
Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle, Yet with itself every soul standeth single.
Alice Cary
Nigel Rees
Creative Commons
Born:
June 5, 1944
(age 80)
Bio:
Nigel Rees is an English writer and broadcaster, best known for devising and hosting the long-running Radio 4 panel game Quote... Unquote and as the author of more than fifty books mostly works of reference on language, and humour in language.
Known for:
Brewer's Famous Quotations (2006)
Graffiti Lives, O.K. (1979)
Nigel Rees on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
British Broadcaster Quotes
Broadcaster Quotes
20th-century Broadcaster Quotes
Related Author
E. Cobham Brewer
British Lexicographer
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes