How about famous quotes this week? Funny, serious, historical, et cetera. SamJ, I'm trying to build toward working in some scientific categories. I promise a science-theme quiz of some sort in the next, oh, three weeks. In the meantime this one will be fun. Some of these are ones I've liked for a long time, others pretty famous ones that a lot of you should know. I've made this one fairly global and pretty British. Let's go.
1. Lady Astor said to Churchill: "Winston, if you were my husband, I would flavour your coffee with poison." To which Churchill replied:
a. "Lady Astor, I've had your coffee; 'tis poison already."
b. "Bevan has attempted that many times previously."
c. "Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it."
2. Gertrude Stein said "there is no there there" referring to which American city?
a. Philadelphia
b. Oakland, California
c. Miami
3. What philosopher said: "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom"?
a. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
b. David Ricardo
c. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
4. Who said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"?
a. Mao Tse-Tung
b. Che Guevara
c. Oliver Cromwell
5. Fill in the blank of this famous Oscar Wilde deathbed quote: "Either that _____ goes or I do!"
a. Sherry
b. Wallpaper
c. Chandelier
6. What writer said: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world"?
a. Virginia Woolf
b. Marguerite Duras
c. Doris Lessing
7. John Bartlett, of course, was the compiler of a renown English-language book of quotations. Another famous 19th-century book devoted to explaining "phrase and fable" was compiled by whom?
a. William Hazlitt
b. E. Cobham Brewer
c. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
8. Who came up with this great one: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"?
a. Herbert Marcuse
b. Mary McCarthy
c. Albert Einstein
9. According to the website Examining the OED, who is the second-most quoted author in that volume's pages, Shakespeare obviously being the first?
a. John Milton
b. Sir Walter Scott
c. Geoffrey Chaucer
10. One of America's greatest quotemeisters of the 20th-century came up with the following gems.
On a certain restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
After having taken a wrong turn: "We may be lost, but we're making good time."
On paying attention: "You can observe a lot by watching."
Who was this?
a. Yogi Berra
b. Groucho Marx
c. Oscar Levant
Those just crack me up. Answers below the fold.
Answers: 1-c; 2-b; 3-c; 4-a; 5-b; 6-a; 7-b; 8-c; 9-b; 10-a.
Notes:
1. Always loved that one. Thought the "Bevan" might get some of you.
2. Oakland was her hometown.
3. Threw that one in for you, Hegelian.
4. Well known and should've been easy, although Che might have thrown some of you.
5. Pretty good fake answers.
6. I suspect many of you who didn't know guessed Lessing.
7. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was required reading in my father's household.
8. Marcuse especially is a good fake.
9. A gimme for the Brits, I'd think. Sourcing here. Shakespeare, incidentally, has more quotes than the Bible.
10. A gimme for the Yanks. For those Brits who don't know, he played baseball for the Yankees in the 40s-60s and was really kind of a natural genius. There are a lot more where those came from, including his reflection on baseball: "90% of the game is half mental." See more here.
