Peter Ustinov's Quotes

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.

I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

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

It is youth that has discovered love as a weapon.

Men think about women. Women think about what men think about them.

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

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

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

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

The truth is an ambition which is beyond us.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

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.

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.

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

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.

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

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

Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them.

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.

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

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

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

Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.