It is the festive season and time for a quiet laugh — or a loud one if you wish.

Following is a selection of observations taken from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (OUP, Revised Fourth Edition, 1996) to which reference can be made for precise source, (eg. play, poem, newspaper etc.) and date.

WOODY ALLEN
“Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.”

“My brain? It’s my second favourite organ.”

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

BRENDAN BEHAN
“When I came back to Dublin, I was court martialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.”

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”

ROBERT BENCHLEY
“In America there are two classes of travel — first class and with children.”

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

ALAN BENNETT
“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.”

“Here I sit, alone and sixty,
Bald, and fat, and full of sin,
Cold the seat and loud the cistern,
As I read the Harpic tin.”

W.C.FIELDS
“Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.”

“Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against.”

CHICO MARX
“I wasn’t kissing her, I was just whispering in her mouth.”

H.L.MENCKEN
“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

“Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone, somewhere, may be looking.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

GEORGE MIKES
“On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.”

“Continental people have good sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.”

“An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”

DOROTHY PARKER
“And I’ll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.”

(On being told that President Calvin Coolidge had died.) “How do they know?”

“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”

“She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B.”

WILL ROGERS
“There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that is education.”

“The more you read about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”

“Well all I know is what I read in the papers.”

“You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”

TOM STOPPARD
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”

“I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”

“Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?”

HARRY S. TRUMAN
“All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

“I never given them (the public) hell. I just tell the truth and they think it is hell.”

“A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who has been dead 10 or 15 years.”

“It’s a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”

“I didn’t fire him (General MacArthur) because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was half to three quarters of them would be in jail.”

“Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.”

KENNETH TYNAN
(On Noel Coward) “Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.”

“A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.”

“A neurosis is a secret you don’t know you’re keeping.”

“There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.”

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

“A diplomat these days is nothing but a head-waiter who’s allowed to sit down occasionally.”

MAE WEST
“Give a man a free hand and he’ll try to put it all over you.”

“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”