I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
Interpretation
The quote humorously suggests that future diplomats are trained to speak hesitantly or ineffectively.
Peter Ustinov's quote humorously critiques the nature of diplomacy, implying that diplomats are not only taught the art of negotiation but also how to navigate the complexities of communication with uncertainty. This stammering metaphor highlights the challenges diplomats face in balancing honesty with the need for tact and diplomacy, while also poking fun at the sometimes awkward nature of political discourse.
In practice
In a speech about the challenges of international relations, one might quote Ustinov to illustrate the complexities of diplomatic communication.
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 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.
Feminist humor raises consciousness. And the reason it's funny is because it stands something on its head. Goodness knows you've got to have a sense of humor if you do feminism full-time, I tell you.
The nightmare is you spend the rest of your life being funny at parties and then people say, 'Why didn't you do that when you were on television?'
Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.
When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don't mean - well, maybe I do - laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot.
Life is too short to be taken seriously.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.