Thirteen 13-word Quotes

1. I may be wrong , but I have never found deserting friends conciliates enemies.
Margot Asquith, British Political Hostess (1864-1945)

2. Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; Girls aren't like that
Kingsley Amis, English novelist and poet (1922-1995) "A Book Idyll"

~ see possible origin, also a 13-word quote: Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence
Lord Byron (1788-1824)

3. An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

Quentin Crisp, English writer The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

4. Happy the hare at morning for she cannot read the hunter's waking thoughts.

W.H. Auden, English poet (1907-73) Dog Beneath the Skin

5. Kissenger brought peace to Vietnam the same way Napoleon brought peace to Europe. (by losing)
Joseph Heller, American novelist (1923- )

6. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker, American critic and humorist (1893-1967)

7. That woman speaks eighteen languages and can't say No in any of them.
Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns (1934)

8. A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
'Short' II (1976)

9. I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.

~ alright brother-in-law is one-word; here's a quote from the same man with exactly 13 words:

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King, speech at St Louise, 22 March 1964

10. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)

11. But bacon's not the only thing that's cured by hanging from a string.
Hugh Kingsmill, English man of letters on 'Two Poems, after A.E. Housman'

12. A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.

E.E. Cummings, American poet (1894-1962) 1x1 (1994) no.13

and this 13th quote is important to me right now:

13. If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist of Norman T.J.Bailey The Mathematical Approach to Biology and Medicine (1967)

Source: Elizabeth Knowles (ed) (1998) The Oxford Dictionary of 20th Century Quotations. Great Britain: Oxford University Press

~ header from Samulli / click here for more T13 ~