All Quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.”
“How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do"”
“Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.”
“Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;”
“And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home. - Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane, now his wife”
“Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.”
“Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.”
“A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”
“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
“Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.”
“What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.”
“Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.”
“It pays to advertise! - her best-known slogan for S. H. Benson's, then one of Britain's most prominent advertising firms (Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Berg, 1990, p. 194)”
“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.”
“Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.”
“If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.”