Top 80 Peter Ustinov Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The great thing about history is that it is adaptable.”

— Peter Ustinov

52. “Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I’ll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks.”

— Peter Ustinov

53. “Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn’t amount to much.”

— Peter Ustinov

54. “Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn’t know! It was just – his turn!”

— Peter Ustinov

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

— Peter Ustinov

56. “Men think about women. Women think about what men think about them.”

— Peter Ustinov

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

— Peter Ustinov

58. “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.”

— Peter Ustinov

59. “Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.”

— Peter Ustinov

60. “Books, I don’t know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can’t for the life of me see why people have to write them.”

— Peter Ustinov

61. “A diplomat these days in nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.”

— Peter Ustinov

62. “Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.”

— Peter Ustinov

63. “The stupidity of a stupid man is exercised in a restricted field; the stupidity of an intelligent man has a much wider diffusion, and a far greater effect, aided as it is by the element of surprise.”

— Peter Ustinov

64. “Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.”

— Peter Ustinov

65. “It is youth that has discovered love as a weapon.”

— Peter Ustinov

66. “People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it’s very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights.”

— Peter Ustinov

67. “Because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures.”

— Peter Ustinov

68. “By increasing the size of the keyhole, today’s playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.”

— Peter Ustinov

69. “There are experts in little things but there are no experts in big things. There are experts in this fact and that fact but there are no moral experts.”

— Peter Ustinov

70. “In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.”

— Peter Ustinov

71. “Generals are fascinating cases of arrested development – after all, at five all of us wanted to be generals.”

— Peter Ustinov

72. “Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?”

— Peter Ustinov

73. “Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head.”

— Peter Ustinov

74. “And here is the lesson I learned in the army. If you want to do a thing badly, you have to work at it as though you want to do it well.”

— Peter Ustinov

75. “I think that first nights should come near the end of a play’s run-as indeed, they often do.”

— Peter Ustinov

76. “I had started by imitating a parrot, which is unusual, in that a parrot is supposed to imitate you. By taking the initiative you allow the parrot no alternative but to be itself, which proves again that attack is often the best defence.”

— Peter Ustinov

77. “Basically I’m a very serious person, but I think the form it takes with me is comedy. I see the amusing side of all potentially pompous situations.”

— Peter Ustinov

78. “Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.”

— Peter Ustinov

79. “I don’t know why I have these dreams. I’ve never wanted to be Pope. In fact, I have a greater affinity to Martin Luther.”

— Peter Ustinov

80. “Acting on television is like being asked by the captain to entertain the passengers while the ship goes down.”

— Peter Ustinov

81. “Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra’s vision.”

— Peter Ustinov

82. “As I grow older I find that though I think I’m saying the same things as I always did, people listen to me more.”

— Peter Ustinov

83. “It’s wrong to flog a man. It’s against his being a man.”

— Peter Ustinov

84. “Sometimes I wish I could just fall in love. Then, at least you know who your opponent is.”

— Peter Ustinov

85. “I have four children which is not bad considering I’m not a Catholic.”

— Peter Ustinov

86. “The older I get, the more people listen to me – even though I say the same as always...”

— Peter Ustinov

87. “At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords we’re all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.”

— Peter Ustinov

88. “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.”

— Peter Ustinov

89. “I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter.”

— Peter Ustinov