Quotes About Understatement

Deceivingly, Miss Neville, the word vodka means 'little water.' The Russians are masters of the understatement." - Lord Nash

To say that the two assassins were dead was as much of an understatement as saying that a supernova is the end of a star's life. It conveyed nothing of the catastrophic violence involved.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is an expert of understatement in his leadership of Linux development community. When eager programmers would ask him, '"What part of Linux should I work on?' his answer would usually be, '"Let me know when you find out' (p.286).

Is Understatement 101 a course in medical school? Of course. It's the prereq for Lying Through One's Teeth.

After years of brushing up against all kinds of people in the public eye, I've learned that great leaders are first of all great servants—and that great service is modest, understated, in speech and action. Understatement is self-restraint, and self-restraint is hardly a sign of weakness. On the contrary, wisely used, few things carry more power.

The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.

To say Mercants are a tight-knit unit is a slight understatement. More correct would be to say that if the consider you a threat to one of their own, they will cut out your liver, fry it in front of you, then offer it to you with a side dish of poison of choice.

As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, 'The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.

In the twentieth century, power announced itself. In the twenty-first, the surest way to spot real power is by its understatement.

It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 'The Battle of Maldon' where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered - 'Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less'. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.