Who said: "Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them"

"Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them" - Peter Ustinov

Double Oscar-winner Peter Ustinov, one of Britain's best loved and most respected actors, died in 2004 aged 82.

The son of part-Russian parents, Sir Peter was a novelist, noted public speaker and an ambassador for charity UNICEF. His starring roles include movies such as Spartacus, Topkapi, Death on the Nile and Logan's Run, as well as many TV shows including the role of Hercule Poirot in film adaptations of Agatha Christie's novels.

He was born in London in 1921, and educated at Westminster School in London which he hated and left at 16 years of age, finding quick success on the London stage. During World War II he was batman to actor David Niven and the pair became lifelong friends.

Fluent in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish, he could also speak a little Greek and Turkish. He was married three times to Isolde Denham, Suzanne Cloutier and Helene du Lau d'Allemans, and had four children.


More quotes by Peter Ustinov:

• If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
• Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
• Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?
• Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.
• I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
• It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.
• Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
• People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.
• The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
• To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
• Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
  

More Quotes

This quote & biography originally ran in an issue of BookBrowse's membership magazine. Full Membership Features & Benefits.