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Wall-to-wall masterpieces, after all, ought to be preferred to wall-to-wall decorative arts, even if the decorative arts are of the highest quality peppered and salted with dukes and tiaras.
Sep 10, 2025
It's like Duke Ellington said, there are only two kinds of music - good and bad. And you can tell when something is good.
The Duke of Wellington brought to the post of first minister immortal fame,-a quality of success which would almost seem to include all others.
Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep
Of course; a nurse wouldn't have been quite so bold in her speech. Not to a duke's heir. Not even to a wealthy tradesman who held the power of her employment in his too-large hands.
Do you think 'Duke' is a good name?' she asked. His face blanked for a second before it cleared. He glanced at the dog in consideration. 'I don't think so. He would outrank me.
You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what's his favorite composition? And I say, I haven't written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions.
Every issue, the characters and I duke it out. They usually win.
If I were to put on Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington, one might say the combination isn't good.
The guy you see on the screen isn’t really me. I’m Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like JOHN WAYNE . I know him well. I’m one of his closest students. I have to be. I made a living out of him.
I think my real depressions started when I was about 16 and doing The Patty Duke Show. I would go to bed at about 10 o'clock on a Friday night and not get up again until 6:30 Monday morning
Do you still throw spears at each other?
Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car, is it?
We go into the red next year... I shall have to give up polo.
You managed not to get eaten then?
They don't hang dukes, darling. He'd be let off by reason of insanity. Everyone knows the upper classes are batty.
I majored in religion for my entire undergraduate career at Duke University and then I went to seminary for a year unsure whether or not I really had the call to be a minister. I spoke with a pastor of my home church and told him I was going to seminary. He said "Do you feel the call to be a minister?" and I said "Honestly, I don't. I know it's the greatest call you could have but I'm not feeling that call myself. He said "Well, you know, you're wrong. It's not the greatest call. The greatest call is whatever calling God has for you."
The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.
It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies - if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke - if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.
No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
A couple of years ago, I went to see a production of Wicked in San Francisco with a friend of mine, one that Patty Duke was in, and he said, "Do you want to meet her?" And I said, "Yeah!" And I went backstage, and she walked out of her dressing room, looked at me, and said, "I know you." And I went, "Well, uh, yeah, I was in My Sweet Charlie." And she said, "Yeah! You were the guy in the car on the road!" And I was. It was amazing.
I did have a tiny moment in a TV movie called My Sweet Charlie, starring Patty Duke.
And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.
People will always go to games. And not just Duke versus North Carolina. Even Appalachian State against Chatworth.
The reality is our season prepared us so well that if we have to play Duke in the second game, we've done that three times this year. We've played North Carolina and Duke back-to-back that this would be the third time. We're just very prepared for this moment.
There's no other state, none, that's as connected to their basketball program as this one. Because those other states have other programs. Michigan has Michigan State, California has UCLA, North Carolina has Duke. It's Kentucky throughout this whole state, and that's what makes us unique.
...he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.
You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
[Duke] is the same way that Harper Row is a character who doesn't want to know who you are beneath the mask, and that makes her interesting. She'll show up and help Batman, but she never wants to know if he's Bruce Wayne.
When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.
What kind of crops do they raise in the towns? Only Grand Dukes, Bolsheviks and drunkards!
I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work.
I get the Martian look all the time even in the hood. I walk down to the shopping block and people just look at me with their mouth open man like what are you doing out here and I'm like I'm trying to get a pair of sneakers duke what's good? What are you doing [and I'm like] I'm hungry I wanted some juice and I needed some bread.
You can't have been here long, you haven't got a pot belly.
My inspiration comes from the message Duke Ellington gave - you are unique, be yourself, put out that thing that is you, then use your work ethic and produce great music.
It's been a lifetime of trying to have less beef. Beef comes very naturally to me. I was born with my dukes up, but that's not always necessary anymore. I have to retrain myself.
I need a bath." He chuckled. "You smell of smoke, as do I." The duke turned, leaning heavily on his cane. "Jameson, open the carriage door. We shall return to the house." Beth smiled up at Christian. "Shall we adjourn to the house to get some ointment for your hands and a bath, my love?" His eyes lit. "A bath?" Grandfather snorted. "Someone send to London for a special license! Now.
I remember the night when I was playing at Birdland, and Duke Ellington walked in wearing that cap of his and with all his elegance. The Duke then came backstage, and I was there with my band. That's the one thing I miss.
Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music and provides concrete examples of some of the best ways to present the music in the widest variety of settings-radio, TV, recordings, movies, concert halls, festivals, solo, small ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, opera, Broadway shows.... You name it, he did it!
The duke contents himself mainly with attempting to rule the world and other suchlike nonsense. When one is guiding the patterns of the social universe, a single spinster preternatural is unlikely to cause one undue distress.
A Duke couldn't have the arse hanging out of his trousers when meeting foreign diplomats. Actually even plain old Sam Vimes never had the arse hanging out of his trousers, either, but no one would have actually started a war if he had.
At the happy ending of the Tempest, Prospero brings the kind back togeter with his son, and finds Miranda's true love and punishes the bad duke and frees Ariel and becomes a duke himself again. Everyone - except Caliban - is happy, and everyone is forgiven, and everyone is fine, and they all sail away on calm seas. Happy endings. That's how it is in Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was wrong. Sometimes there isn't a Prospero to make everything fine again. And sometimes the quality of mercy is strained.
October— You were sleeping so peacefully that I was loath to wake you. Duke Torquill, after demanding to know what I was doing in your apartment, has requested that I inform you of his intent to visit after ‘tending to some business at the Queen’s Court.’ I recommend wearing something clinging, as that may distract him from whatever he wishes to lecture you about this time. Hopefully, it’s your manners. You are truly endearing when you sleep. I attribute this to the exotic nature of seeing you in a state of silence. —Tybalt
Who knows who will be on board? A couple of spies, for sure. At least one grand duke; a few beautiful woman, no doubt very rich and very troubled. Anything can happen and usually does on the Orient Express.
You will agree that the Duke Lacrosse team raped and damaged or whatever, even though it didn't happen. You will be made to agree. You will understand that there is going to be amnesty and you will love it and you will stop speaking out against it. And until you do, you are in our crosshairs. It's who they are. That is the modern-day Democrat Party, and certainly that is the attitude of their major donors.
That overachieving, ambitious, nobody-can-hold-me-down attitude I had, which came from a place of anger and aggression, has transformed into feeling like I will take on the world, but I will do it with an embrace, rather than with my dukes up.
The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me."
The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.
A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.
It isnt only fictional heroes to whom toast means home and comfort. It is related of the Duke of Wellington - I believe by Lord Ellesmere - that when he landed at Dover in 1814, after six years absence from England, the first order he gave at the Ship Inn was for an unlimited supply of buttered toast.