[Correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill:]
"Dear Winnie, Here are two tickets to my new play. Bring a friend, if you have one."
"Dear GBS, Sorry, but I can't make it to the opening night of your new play. However I would appreciate tickets to the second night performance - if you have one."

[ Insults between Lady Astor & Winston Churchill ]
"Sir, if I were married to you, I would serve you posion in your wine."
"Madam, if I were married to you, I would drink it."

[ Insults between WC & Besse Bradock MP ]
"Sir, you are drunk."
"Indeed, Madam, and you are ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober."

[On political opponent Clement Attlee]
"A sheep in sheep's clothing."

[On Stanley Baldwin]
"He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened."

[On The Times' newspaper during the Irish Home Rule debate]
"The Times is speechless, and takes three columns to express its speechlessness."

*

"The Sun has the class of a polyester shirt and the soul of a Colombian hit-man."
        - The Washington Post, 1989

"Have English class barriers broken down?"
"Of course they have, otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here talking to someone like you."
        - Sandra Harris, making the mistake of interviewing Barbara Cartland

"It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government, and the reputation of the title 'Sir' has sustained heavy damage."
        - Andrei Illarionov, on Sir David King's performance at a Climate Change conference in Russia

"Miniscule For Sport."
        - Giacomo Malverni, describing then British Minister for Sport, diminuitive Colin Moynihan

"The one good thing about global warming is that as the waters rise, Hazel Blears will drown first."
        - Anonymous Labour MP, about the diminuitive Cabinet minister

"As he is a most egregious ass he is not dangerous."
        - Bernard Levin, describing union leader Clive Jenkins

"The damnest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence... also the damnest fool."
         - Abraham Lincoln, describing political rival General John Fremont

"Now that soldiers have become statesmen in America, are the troops goose-stepping?"
"Please tell Mr Molotov that I’m not sure I understand the purport of his remark, but if it is what I think it is, tell him I do not like it."
        - George Marshall, US Secretary of State, refusing to be insulted by the Soviet Ambassdaor

"He's an evil reptilian kitten eater from another planet."
        - Email from Ernie Eves Campaign describing political rival Dalton McGuinty (Canada'03)

When David Gest split from Liza and launched a multi-million dollar suit on grounds of physical abuse, Jon Stewart observed, "There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli."
        - Mark Steyn

"Pamela Anderson revealed all the taste and refinement of a hooker on holiday."
        -  Joan Collins, on fashion at the Oscars

"I've never met her but everyone says she is really rude and arrogant. If he's stuck with the shrew, I hope he screws everything that's not tied down."
        - Joan Rivers, on Victoria and David Beckham

A lot of ass but so very little class.
        - Ian O'Doherty, after Sadie Frost poses nude for PETA, "The Irish Independent"

Jo O'Meara looks uncannily like the b*****d child of Pat Butcher and Vinnie Jones.
        - Ian O'Doherty

Rat-faced council estate escapee... A uniquely unpleasant individual with appalling taste in men. Or should that be taste in appalling men?
        - Ian O'Doherty, on Kate Moss

"Jade Goody: men all over the country want to take her home and shag her brains in."
        - Jonathon Ross

Anyone who grew up in the South (of the USA) is bound to have heard the phrase 'poor white trash'. Teresa Heinz Kerry has given us a new category: 'rich white trash'.
        - Thomas Sowell

"You would think with all the money she saves on food she could buy a dress."
        - Ant, US comedian, on waif-like Lara Flynn Boyle's outfit for the 2003 Golden Globes

"A fat person pretending to be thin."
        - Norm of "Hale & Pace", letting fly at Vanessa Feltz on "The Weakest Link"

"Anorexics addicted to shopping with hollow lobotomised heads."
        - Brazilian paper Gazeta Esportiva describing the wives and girlfriends of English soccer team

"Sir Martin Sorrell is more arrogant than the entire French nation put together."
        - Alain de Pouzilhac, head of rival advertising group Havas.

"Excuse me, I'm trying to work here. How would you like it if I stood yelling down the alley while you're giving blowjobs to transsexuals?"
        - Paul Merton, stand up comedian, favourite riposte to hecklers, "Room 101"

"It was like being toppled on by a wardrobe with the key still in the lock."
        - An ex of heavyweight Conservative MP Nicholas Soames recalls their time together

"Why are we honoring this man? Have we run out of human beings?"
        - Milton Berle

"Hello you little bast*rd."
"It's the little I object to."
        - Elinor Glyn to Charlie Chaplin in "The Cat's Meow"

"Lola, dear, you know, there are really only two things I dislike about you."
"Really? What are they?"
"Your face."
        - Marina Rudd and Lola Brewster, in "The Mirror Crack'd"

"If you ever have an idea of your own Sprattley, warn me first. I don't want to die of shock."
        - Inspector Abberline to Inspector Sprattley, "Jack The Ripper"

"Guys like you, you don't quit and you never leave."
        - Mary Margaret, to someone spending too much time in a bar, "All the Real Girls"

"I know your name, but I can't recall your face."
        - Oscar Wilde.

When the sharp-tongued Benjamin Disraeli, so the story goes, was ordered in the last century to withdraw his declaration that half of the cabinet were asses. "Mr. Speaker, I withdraw," was Disraeli's response. "Half the cabinet are not asses."
        - Benjamin Disraeli, 19th century Conservative Prime Minister

"A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."
        - Disraeli, describing his great Liberal rival Gladstone

"Inexpungable tapeworms which devour the nutrients and eat up the bowels of India."
        - Edmund Burke, letting fly at the board of the East India Company

"Shamed of this necessity... while I clean out the fellow's s**t-filled mouth I see my own fingers covered with s**t."
        - Sir Thomas More, attacking Martin Luther, from his Latin "Responsio ad Lutherum"

"I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober and there is nothing in him."
        - England's King Charles II, about Prince George of Denmark

"He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing."
        - James Russell Lowel, dismissing a rival

"I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything."
        - Lord Melbourne

"Portsmouth: A city of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs."
        - Boris Johnson, Conservative MP

"Worth seeing, but not worth going so see."
        - Dr Johnson, about Antrim's Giant's Causeway

"If that is what the honourable gentleman really believes, he should take two aspirins, breathe deeply and lie down in a darkened room."
        - Kenneth Clarke, former Conservative Chancellor

"You are a transient, here today and, if I may say so, gone tomorrow politician."
        - BBC Interviewer Robin Day to Conservative Minister, John Nott.

It's probably easier for Lord Deedes to think the way he does, because he does not have to live the way we do.
        - comment seen on 'Telegraph' website

"I'll give him credit for this: At least he's not a convincing liar. "
        - David Frum, watching Ron Paul

"Mr Speaker, I said the honourable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honourable member may place the punctuation where he pleases."
        - Richard Brinsley Sheridan MP, on being asked to apologise for calling a fellow MP a liar

"No greater love hath a man than to lay down his friends for his life."
        - Anonymous comment after a Harold MacMillan cabinet reshuffle\bloodbath

"The first known case of a rat joining a sinking ship."
        - Anonymous report after Herbert Hoover's appointment of Theodore Joslin

"An excellent man: he has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
        - Oscar Wilde, about George Bernard Shaw (attributed)

"It felt like being ravaged by a dead sheep."
        - Dennis Healey, after a rather easy debate.

In Jonathan King's "Black Sheep", the large flock on a New Zealand sheep station become lethally aggressive as the result of reckless genetic engineering... The movie gives new meaning to Denis Healey's remark about being attacked by Geoffrey Howe.
        - Philip French, film critic for "The Observer"

I'll tell you one thing about llamas. If they take against you, they spit straight in your eye, directing the jet with appalling accuracy between prominent front teeth. Very much like Margot Asquith, according to her many backpedalling friends.
        - Nancy Banks-Smith, "The Guardian"

He is a man who has been mastered by the English language. It can do anything with him.
        - Clive James, describing Michael Foot

Trained to kill with her voice, which was like a macaw taking off repeatedly from a steam catapult.
        - Clive James, recalling a co-presenter

"I see the pain on your face when you say the word intellectual, because it has so many syllables in it."
        - Clive James, to Stephen Colbert on the "Colbert Report"

John Pilger is a man who encounters the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse so often he must keep sugar lumps in his pocket.
        - John Smith, "The Irish Independent"

Will we never be free of the malign effect of this little gargoyle?
        - Christopher Hitchens, writing about Henry Kissinger in 2006

If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag.
        - Kevin Myers, "The Telegraph"

It appears that not even the heat of ridicule can weaken Rosie O'Donnell's steely resolve to make an idiot of herself.
        - Jonah Goldberg

"You don't hate the mosquito; you just want it out of your face."
        - Simon Cowell, about fellow American Idol host Ryan Seacrest

"It's the kind of Meg Ryan of birds."
        - Michael Parkinson, recalling his difficult 'interview' with Emu

Janet Street-Porter had the great good fortune to be born with looks that were exactly right for her era. When she left home in 1967, her resemblance to Plug in The Beano’s Bash Street Kids was, for the first time ever, enormously fashionable.
        - Christopher Hart, "The Times"

"You are what you eat? She looks like she's eaten Gollum off Lord Of The Rings."
        - Paul McKenna, describing Dr Gillian McKeith, presenter of "You Are What You Eat"

"Look at her. Shrill, nagging little face. In Ireland this is what we thought Protestants looked like when we were growing up. Really pale and miserable and going on at you."
        - Dara O'Briain, sending dietician Gillian McKeith to "Room 101"

"She's a professional slapper, which appears to be an actual career opportunity in England."
        - Brendan O'Connor, on Page Three girl Jodie Marsh

"She had a face on her that would drive rats from a barn."
        - from "The Podge and Rodge Show"

Charlotte Church has shed four stone by using some new fangled vibrating fitness machine. Unfortunately, she hasn't shed the 15 stone useless muppet she calls her boyfriend. He was the orange fella at the rugby yesterday in case you're wondering who he is.
        - Ireland's Sunday World takes aim at Gavin Henson

François Mitterrand was supposed to have said that Margaret Thatcher had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula. Actually, I discover, he said ‘the voice of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Stalin’. "Britain’s Andy Murray" (the phrase puts a strain on one’s Unionism) has the mouth of Cherie Blair and the charm of Gordon Brown.
        - Charles Moore, "The Sptector"

"I'm a victim of sexual discrimination."
"No, you're the victim of a cruel sexual experiment performed by your mother and father."
        - Harry Enfield

He caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if nature has intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment
       - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Code of the Woosters", 1936.

"Sportswriters are a rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks, a gang of vicious monkeys jerking off in a zoo cage... more disgusting by nature than maggots oozing out the carcass of a dead animal."
        - Hunter S Thompson

"Why dont you come over tonight? Our dogs in heat."
"<tosses coin> Here's the 50p I owe your wife for the blowjob."
        - Pj O'Rourke, "Modern Manners"

"I think it's time I told you this : I slept with your mother... and I think your sister's jealous."
        - Henry, "Henry Fool"

"Darrell, 40,000 people die every day. Why aren't you one of them?"
        - Bobby Cooper, "U-Turn"

"Don't tease me about my hobbies. I don't tease you for being an a**hole."
        - Mark, "Garden State"

"His brain is showing less activity than your c*ck."
        - Russell Tupper, "Huff"

"Henry's bed is his province. He can people it with sheep for all I care. Which, on occasion, he has done."
        - Eleanor of Acquitane, about King Henry II, "The Lion In Winter"

She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.
        - Robertson Davies

Science: "How will this work?"
Engineering: "Why will this work?"
Management: "When will this work?"
Arts: "You want fries with that?

I can't think of a single memorable thing she did the entire time she was there. I've seen cloud formations that have captured my attention more effectively, and that's taking into account the fact that Carol was one of the more attractive girls in the house.
        - JJ Hawkins, on Big Brother's Carol, "TV Squad"

Malcolm McLaren’s son is an underwear maker who finds Tony Blair so "morally corrupt" he really can’t accept the MBE he had been foolishly offered. Wow. Who knew Malcolm McLaren could father children? The last time I saw him, he was on the floor of a bar in New York City, barking like a dog and looking for something he claimed he had dropped — and, for once, not his trousers.
        - Denis Boyles, "National Review"

"They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men and a virgin in the whole organization."
        - Mayor Vincent J.Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city nativity scene removed

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
        - English Professor, Ohio University

I'm not intending to imply insult or judgment here but I am curious to know in order to be able to respond to your posts in an appropriate manner, so please forgive what appears to be, but in fact is not intended as, an insulting question: Are you stupid?
        - Melinda Shore

"Good career move."
        - Gore Vidal, upon hearing of Truman Capote's death

"Don't be so humble, you're not that great."
        - Golda Meir to Moshe Dayan

"He is not enough of a man to be able to stand a real woman near him."
        - Magda Gobbels, about Adolf Hitler

"What other problems do you have besides being unemployed, a moron and a dork?"
        - John McEnroe to a spectator at a tennis match

"It's been a bit of a long battle with Harbhajan. The first time I ever met him he was the same little obnoxious weed that he is now."
        - Matthew Hayden on Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh.

"You will either die on the gallows or of a loathsome disease."
        - John Montague to John Wilkes

"That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
        - John Wilkes in reply

"If one road led to hell and the other to Mexico, I would be indifferent which to take."
        - Nathan Bedford Forrest

"The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth."
        - Insult from Easter Island

"It's amazing how insults in most languages sound the same."
        - Paul, "In My Father's Den"

I had one guy at a gas station in New York say to me: "Hey, you look like that Hugh Grant. No offence."
        - Hugh Grant

The reason so many people turned up at his funeral was to make sure he was dead.

- Samuel Goldwyn, on Louis B. Mayer

- James Edward Day, letter dictated but never sent, in response to a request from a pensioner to be put on a stamp.

- Edward Flaherty

- Mr. Blackwell

- King Vidor (about Gary Cooper)

~ Ruthless People

~ Ace Ventura, Pet Detective

        - Abraham Lincoln

"A curse on his virtues, they've undone the country."

        - Joseph Addison, "Cato"

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