"I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance."

Fred Astaire Music See all quotes by Fred Astaire →

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“There comes a day when people begin to say, 'Why doesn't that old duffer retire?' I want to get out while they're still saying Astaire is a hell of a dancer.”

“When you talk about Fred Astaire, you talk about heaven. What more can I say?”

“is, along with Fred Astaire, the best-dressed actor in American movies”

“A very distinguished colleague began his criticism of this show by asking what is Mr Astaire's secret. May I suggest that the solution hangs on a little word of three letters? Mr Astaire's secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino and of Mr Maurice Chevalier — sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in His Eyes. You'd have thought by the look of the first night foyer that it was Mothering Thursday, since every woman in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.”

“Astaire can't do anything bad.”

“Come on, Fred, I'm not your sister, you know.”

Resonant Thoughts

"In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends — anything that will drag in a few more people."

— Robertson Davies

Literature1913–1995

#justice

"Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did."

— Sophie Scholl

Politics1921–1943

#justice

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."

— John Dalberg-Acton

Literature1834–1902

#justice

"For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, …"

— Samuel Beckett

Literature1906–1989

#justice