Peter Ustinov Quotes

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.

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

I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.

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

I'm Rally of Unionist Separist Extremes, sometimes known as the R.U.S.E. … It's the party at present in power.

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.

If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue.

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

I am an international citizen conceived in Russia, born in England, working in Hollywood, living in Switzerland, and touring the World.

I am convinced that it is of primordial importance to learn more every year than the year before. After all, what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn.

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter.

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

British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive it. If you can't there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps.

I hate being moved. I hate that man who came in. So self-righteous, so cruel. He made fun of me, that's why I cried. You never did that. You led me into temptation by your - politeness.

Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.

Please keep off the grass.

A diplomat these days is nothing but a head waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally.

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

A twinge of conscience is a glimpse of God.

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

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

It is youth that has discovered love as a weapon.

I have Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Ethiopian blood in my veins.

Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head.

This is a free country, madam. We have a right to share your privacy in a public place.

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

I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.

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

Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn't know! It was just... his... turn!

Unfortunately, a superabundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

Courage is often lack of insight, whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.

Generals are fascinating cases of arrested development - after all, at five all of us wanted to be generals.

World Government is not only possible, it is inevitable; and when it comes, it will appeal to patriotism in its truest sense,in its only sense, the patriotism of humans who love their national heritages so deeply that they wish to preserve them in safety for the common good.

To live like a poor man is only fun when you are rich.

I don't know why I have these dreams. I've never wanted to be Pope. In fact, I have a greater affinity to Martin Luther.

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.

Monica Seles: I'd hate to be next door to her on her wedding night.

Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

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.

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...

Laughter... the most civilized music in the world.

I think that first nights should come near the end of a play's run-as indeed, they often do.

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

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.

The older I get, the more people listen to me - even though I say the same as always.