Peter Ustinov Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

Peter Ustinov
The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.

Peter Ustinov
It's wrong to flog a man. It's against his being a man.

Peter Ustinov
The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

Peter Ustinov
I have four children which is not bad considering I'm not a Catholic.

Peter Ustinov
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.

Peter Ustinov
Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.

Peter Ustinov
2nd Soldier: Do you mean that, as a General, you're not the tiniest bit ambitious for our military future?
General: I prefer our military past. The harm's done and there it is. As for being a General, well, at the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords, we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

Peter Ustinov
Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.

Peter Ustinov
In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

Peter Ustinov
I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.

Peter Ustinov
What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

Peter Ustinov
Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

Peter Ustinov
And here is the lesson I learned in the army. If you want to do a thing badly, you have to work at it as though you want to do it well.

Peter Ustinov
All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses - fix your bayonets boys - gentlemen, synchronize your watches - in ten seconds time the barrage starts,... a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years.

Peter Ustinov
The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticient, while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.

Peter Ustinov
Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

Peter Ustinov
You know Seymour, there are some men who cannot stand too much perfection. They see it as a disease, which must be stamped out at its first rash showing.

Peter Ustinov
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.

Peter Ustinov
We have fought two wars to end war. In 1976, the nations of this world set aside the same amount of money for its starving children as they lavished on armaments every two hours. Can any right-minded man afford to be a pessimist? That was a luxury for easier days.

Peter Ustinov
Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

Peter Ustinov
Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.

Peter Ustinov
To be gentle, tolerant, wise and reasonable requires a goodly portion of toughness.

Peter Ustinov
The French and the British are such good enemies that they can't resist being friends.

Peter Ustinov
The sea is calm you said. Peaceful. Calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who's to tell me it's any different here on board, or yonder on dry land.

Peter Ustinov
Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.

Peter Ustinov
The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation.

Peter Ustinov
Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.

Peter Ustinov
The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill.

Peter Ustinov
There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.

Peter Ustinov