That's not fair! Trivia Quiz

Answer: nice

"Be nice to people on your way up because you'll need them on your way down." (also quoted as "...meet them on your way down.") is an epigram by Wilson Mizner, but the exact occasion on which it was first said or written remains unknown. While it is not ultimately proven that he was the first to use it, it is almost universally attributed to him.

Answer: trivial

This quote comes from Russell's 1925 essay "Freedom in Society", first published in "Harper's Magazine" (March 1926) and republished in 1928 in a collection entitled "Sceptical essays".

Answer: polite

Winston Churchill said this in comment on the overly formal and diplomatic tone of Britain's declaration of war against Japan on December 8, 1941. In full, the quote read "Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."

Answer: gratified

This quote is a piece of wisdom from "The Old Man and Death" - it is somewhat unusual for a fable in that it does not use animal characters. In this brief piece, an old forest laborer, tired of his work and pain, exclaims "I wish that death would come and take me", whereupon the grim reaper actually appears and asks what the man's desire is.

He replies "Could you please put that bundle back on my shoulders?"

Answer: pleasant

Voltaire, birth name François-Marie Arouet, was one of the most prolific authors of all time with over two thousand works to his name. The quote in this question, however, comes from a letter he wrote to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, in November 1770. Through his wisdom and wit, Voltaire had befriended many powerful and educated personalities of the time and was engaged in countless postal exchanges with them - the number of his letters still existing today exceeds 20,000.

Answer: verbal

The original quote - an intentional oxymoron - was said about one of his colleagues in the motion picture industry, reported to have been either Joseph Schenk or Joseph Mankiewicz, to underline his trustworthiness. It has later been frequently misquoted as "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on", a variant Mr. Goldwyn was not only aware of but actually quite liked.

Answer: intense

Many quote collections attribute this saying to Henry Kissinger, but the true origin is Sayre's law, based on a 1950s creation by political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre. A slightly different version of the quote has been published in the Wall Street Journal in 1973: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

Historian Charles Issawi later generalized this to "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake", coining the name "Sayre's law" for the generalized version.

Answer: better

This quote is from the essay "Defense of Freedom", published in the 1960/61 collection "Resistance, Rebellion and Death" which consists of a number of short writings personally selected by the author shortly before his death in 1960. The complete sentence reads "Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."

Answer: no

One of many quotes stemming from the Algonquin Round Table, a daily luncheon of authors in New York in the 1920s, and initially used in a newspaper column, this quote was formally documented in the 1934 biographic "Our Mrs. Parker", written by Alexander Woollcott, along with many others of her Algonquin witticisms. Whom this quote originally referred to is unfortunately not known.

Answer: stupid

Along with many other aphorisms, this quote appears in the appendix to Shaw's "Man and Superman". This appendix is a fictional treatise called "The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion", attributed to the play's central character, John Tanner, which, however, has its grounds in the real world, and is considered a factual political essay reflecting Shaw's own philosophy.