Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

War is the trade of Kings.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart... good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it's done.

The American language should be descriptive rather than proscriptive.

Liberty may be of no more use Than stirring up the flame of civil wars; Then, by disorder fatal to the world, One wants no king, the other wants no equal.

... as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object

when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho to-day-Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical, will be on the wing, bandy'd like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprizon'd in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump'd, and bruised along the King's high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!

The ministers and the Jacobins are making the king declare war tomorrow on Austria. The ministers are hoping that this move will frighten the Austrians and that within three weeks we will be negotiating (God forbid that this should happen). May we at last be avenged for all the outrages we have suffered from this country!

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Kings play at war unfairly with republics; they can only lose some earth, and some creatures they value as little, while republics lose in every soldier a part of themselves.

To boldly split infinitives that no man had split before.

Then, at the end of every hand, Miss Bolo would inquire with a dismal countenance and reproachful sigh, why Mr. Pickwick had not returned that diamond, or led the club, or roughed the spade, or finessed the heart, or led through the honour, or brought out the ace, or played up to the king, or some such thing; and in reply to all these grave charges, Mr. Pickwick would be wholly unable to plead any justification whatever, having by this time forgotten all about the game.

The strong man wants to be allowed to DO; the little man wants to stop him.

All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.

I have always been a critic of government policy. I was in government for more than five years. Before that I was a critic. Within the government I was a critic, pushing for reform and always at odds with power brokers within the party.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict.

What's this war in the heart of Nature? Why does Nature vie with itself? The Land contend with the Sea? Is there an avenging power in Nature? Not one power, but two?