The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Stanhope ‘Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington’ 2 November 1835
What is the best to be done for the country? How can the Government be carried on?
Stanhope ‘Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington’ 18 May 1839
There is no mistake; there has been no mistake; and there shall be no mistake.
‘Wellingtoniana’ (1852) p. 78
If you believe that you will believe anything.
Attributed reply to a gentleman who accosted him in the street saying, ‘Mr. Jones, I believe?’
11.47 H. G. Wells 1866-1946
The thing his [Henry James’s] novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without
a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focussed on the high altar. And on the
altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.
‘Boon’ (1915) ch. 4
It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any
cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.
Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but it can, at any rate modestly, and with an artistic
singleness of mind, pick up that pea.
‘Boon’ (1915) ch. 4 (on Henry James)
In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.
‘The Country of the Blind’ (1904; revised 1939) p. 52.
‘Sesquippledan,’ he would say. ‘Sesquippledan verboojuice.’
‘The History of Mr Polly’ (1909) ch. 1, pt. 5
‘I’m a Norfan, both sides,’ he would explain, with the air of one who had seen trouble.
‘Kipps’ (1905) bk. 1, ch. 6, pt. 1
‘I expect,’ he said, ‘I was thinking jest what a Rum Go everything is. I expect it was something
like that.’
‘Kipps’ (1905) bk. 3, ch. 3, pt. 8
He [James Holroyd] was a practical electrician but fond of whisky, a heavy, red-haired brute
with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of the Deity but accepted Carnot’s cycle, and he
had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.
‘Lord of the Dynamos’ in ‘Complete Short Stories’ (1927)
The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to
and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the
savage individual man into the social masonry.
‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ (1900) ch. 23
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
‘The Outline of History’ (1920) vol. 2, ch. 41, pt. 4
The shape of things to come.
Title of book (1933)
The war that will end war.