Peter Ustinov

Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox - affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.

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

I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.

Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.

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

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

World Government is not only possible, it is inevitable; and when it comes, it will appeal to patriotism in its truest sense,in its only sense, the patriotism of humans who love their national heritages so deeply that they wish to preserve them in safety for the common good.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

We used to have lots of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven't thought up questions.

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

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

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

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

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.

Sex is a conversation carried out by another means.

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

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.

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

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

At my age, I'm often asked if I'm frightened of death and my reply is always, I can't remember being frightened of birth.