Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes

Give me the liberty of the Press, and I will give the Minister a venal House of Peers, I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons…armed with the liberty of the Press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed.

An oyster may be crossed in love!

When a heroine goes mad, she always goes into white satin.

No scandal about Queen Elizabeth, I hope?

The puff collusive is the newest of any; for it acts in the disguise of determined hostility. It is much used by bold booksellers and enterprising poets.

Puffing is of various sorts; the principal are, the puff direct, the puff preliminary, the puff collateral, the puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication.

Mr Dangle, here are two very civil gentlemen trying to make themselves understood, and I don’t know which is the interpreter.

There needs no small degree of address to gain the reputation of benevolence without incurring the expense.

When a scandalous story is believed against one, there is certainly no comfort like the conscience of having deserved it.

Wine does but draw forth a man’s natural qualities.

Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen; Here’s to the widow of fifty; Here’s to the flaunting extravagant quean; And here’s to the housewife that’s thrifty. Chorus. Let the toast pass, Drink to the lass I’ll warrant she’ll prove an excuse for a glass!

I hate to see prudence clinging to the green suckers of youth; ’tis like ivy round a sapling, and spoils the growth of the tree.

I think you will like them, when you shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.

Alas! the devil’s sooner raised than laid. So strong, so swift, the monster there’s no gagging: Cut Scandal’s head off, still the tongue is wagging.

Ah, Amanda, it’s a delicious thing to be a young widow!

Oh, poor Dolly! I never shall see her like again; such an arm for a bandage veins that seemed to invite the lancet.

[To] have an unmannerly fat clerk ask the consent of every butcher in the parish to join John Absolute and Lydia Languish, spinster. Oh that I should live to hear myself called spinster!

Pray, sir, be easy; the quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it.

She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.

Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.