patrick.net

Awesome!

Really should have read this after knocking back a few.

Awesome list.

All time favorite Churchill comeback to his great repeated social irritant Lady Astor:

“If I Were Your Wife I’d Put Poison in Your Tea!”
“If I Were Your Husband I’d Drink It”

TwoScoopsOfSpaceForce says

“If I Were Your Wife I’d Put Poison in Your Tea!”
“If I Were Your Husband I’d Drink It”

This could be why husbands today, are still willing to eat their wives cooking.

I have nothing but respect for you, and very little of that.

You have no one but yourself to blame; everyone else blames you too.

“If that boy, I say if that boy was any sharper, he’d cut himself!”
Foghorn Leghorn

A few from Berlusconi (so not from distant past):

To German MEP Martin Schulz, at start of Italy's EU presidency in July 2003: "I know that in Italy there is a man producing a film on Nazi concentration camps - I shall put you forward for the role of Kapo (guard chosen from among the prisoners) - you would be perfect."

During the controversy raging over the above remark: "I'll try to soften it and become boring, maybe even very boring, but I am not sure I will be able to do it."

At the Brussels summit, at the end of Italy's EU presidency, in December 2003: "Let's talk about football and women." (Turning to four-times-married German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder.) "Gerhard, why don't you start?"

A joke about Aids told by Mr Berlusconi: "An Aids patient asks his doctor whether the sand treatment prescribed him will do any good. 'No', the doctor replies, 'but you will get accustomed to living under the earth'."

His response to critics who said the joke was offensive: "They have lost their minds; they really have come to the end of the line, indeed they have gone beyond it. I would advise them, too, to undergo sand treatment..."

and a few from Prince Philip, my favoUrite royal:

British women can't cook.

Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.
In 1981, in reference to an economic recession.

If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.

If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed.
Said to a group of British students in China in 1986.

I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist... I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

You can't have been here that long—you haven't got a pot belly.
Said to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary in 1993.

Aren't most of you descended from pirates?
Said in 1994 to an inhabitant of the Cayman Islands.

Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.
On a visit to the new National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, said to a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band.

If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?
Said in relation to the proposal to ban firearms in the UK following the Dunblane shooting.

When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.

People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.
Said on a visit to Lockerbie in 1993 to a man who lived in a road where eleven people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet.

You are a woman, aren't you?
After accepting a gift from a Kenyan woman.

How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?
Asked of a driving instructor in Scotland.

You managed not to get eaten then?
Said to a British student in Papua New Guinea.

Do you still throw spears at each other?
Said in 2002 to an Indigenous Australian businessman.

Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?
Said to a blind, wheelchair-bound woman who was accompanied by her guide dog.

Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages.
Said while presenting a Duke of Edinburgh Award to a student. When informed that the young man was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans and was told that he was not.

How can you tell the difference between them?
Said to United States President Barack Obama after being told that Obama had met with the Chinese and Russian ambassadors along with David Cameron.

Well, you'll never fly in it, you're too fat to be an astronaut.
Said at the University of Salford to a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut, who was wishing to fly the NOVA rocket.

It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.
Of a fuse box, whilst on a tour of a factory in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1999.

There's a lot of your family in tonight.
Said in November 2009 to a Mr Patel (a common Indian Surname) at a reception for 400 British Indian businessmen at Buckingham Palace

You look like you’re ready for bed!
Said in 2003 to President of Nigeria, who was in national dress.

"Are you all one family?"
Said to multi-racial dance troupe Diversity at the 2009 Royal Variety Performance.

"Oh, what, a strip club?"
Response to Elizabeth Rendle, a 24-year-old, who, when introduced to the prince, said that she worked as a barmaid in a nightclub.

Have you run over anybody?
Said to the Mayor of Waltham Forest who uses a mobility scooter.

Patrick says

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."
-Samuel Johnson

Winner!!

Patrick says

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

Bigly!

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

That seems to be a complement. Shows the author is a skilled communicator can put together meaningful sentences using common words. Not everyone need be a George Will, who appears to write articles specifically to use some obscure and rare term he just looked up.

HeadSet says

Not everyone need be a George Will, who appears to write articles specifically to use some obscure and rare term he just looked up.

100% agree. Put the god damn thesaurus down and write the words that everyone knows. Big or strange words make you smart not - Yoda.

HeadSet says

That seems to be a complement. Shows the author is a skilled communicator can put together meaningful sentences using common words. Not everyone need be a George Will, who appears to write articles specifically to use some obscure and rare term he just looked up.

As a sometimes writer, and an admirer of Hemingway, I concur with this assessment. If you have to use enormous or obscure words to communicate your point, you’ll lose the magic that pulls the reader along through your story. The only exception to this rule is when you are trying for a particular description to peg a character as unique from all other characters. Such as this example:

“I despise Faulkner and have never made it all the way through one of his execrable works.”

See? I used an odd word, but it is actually a perfect word and it sets Faulkner apart from other writers.

“I despise Faulkner and have never made it all the way through one of his execrable works.”

I thought "execrable" and "excrement" are fairly common. Those two words are used when decorum prohibits saying "shitty," but every ones knows what you meant.

Great wordsmith art but doesn't compute for modern day NPCs, doubleplusungood (hate) speech. Orange man baaad!

mell says

Orange man baaad!

Even Bushisms had their charm:
- "He's not the sharpest tool in the shed."
- Or "He's not the brightest bulb on the tree."
- Or even "He's a few fries short of a Happy Meal."

Heraclitusstudent says

"He's not the sharpest tool in the shed."

Was made famous by Smashmouth's 'All Star' in '99, before Dubya ...

www.youtube.com/embed/5xxQs34UMx4

"Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed .."

HEYYOU says

"Donald Trump is a lying,5 time draft dodging,sexual harassing pervert,multiple adulterer! The truth is not an insult."
-HEYYOU

A synonym for "Fuck you!" is" Fuck you!".

This thread is titled Great Insults from the Past. Not mediocre ravings. Please provide better material.

Patrick says

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Compared to reading Faulkner, I should prefer to read a dictionary."
- anyone who has had to read Faulkner