“Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot”
– Traditional rhyme
“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy”
– Guy Fawkes
“Milton says [gunpowder] was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels”
– Ambrose Bierce
“It is Guy Fawkes who is remembered today and King James who is forgotten”
– PL Travers
“The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans”
– Jonathan Swift 1667-1745
“Look like th’innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t”
– Lady Macbeth, a reference to a medal commemorating the Gunpowder Plot
“It is impossible to understand the course of the Powder Treason unless one takes into account the magnetism of Robert Catesby.”
– Lady Antonia Fraser
“The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer’s ink is the greater explosive: it will win.”
– Christopher Morley, American journalist
“As the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder”
– Virginia Woolf
“Guy Fawkes was the last man to enter Parliament with good intentions”
– Lt Col AD Wintle
“Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory”
– James Russell Lowell, American Romantic poet
“There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder”
– John Ruskin