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This is one of the highest-scoring topics in BCS English Literature. Almost every exam includes 3–5 questions on "Who said it?" or "Who wrote it?" — testing quote attribution and title-author matching. Pure memorization topic with no grammar or analysis needed. Learn the tables below and you can score full marks.
| Quote | Author/Speaker |
|---|---|
| "Knowledge is power" | Francis Bacon |
| "Man is a political animal" | Aristotle |
| "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum) | Rene Descartes |
| "Government of the people, by the people, for the people" | Abraham Lincoln |
| "Give me liberty, or give me death" | Patrick Henry |
| "The child is father of the man" | William Wordsworth |
| "To err is human, to forgive divine" | Alexander Pope |
| "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" | Thomas Gray |
| "The pen is mightier than the sword" | Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
| "Survival of the fittest" | Herbert Spencer (not Darwin!) |
| "I have a dream" | Martin Luther King Jr. |
| "A little learning is a dangerous thing" | Alexander Pope |
| "Sweet are the uses of adversity" | William Shakespeare (As You Like It) |
| "Brevity is the soul of wit" | William Shakespeare (Hamlet) |
| "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" | John Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn) |
| "If music be the food of love, play on" | Shakespeare (Twelfth Night) |
| "The unexamined life is not worth living" | Socrates |
| "Eureka!" | Archimedes |
| "Necessity is the mother of invention" | Plato |
| "United we stand, divided we fall" | Aesop |
| "That government is best which governs least" | Thomas Jefferson |
| "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" | Muhammad Ali |
| Title | Author |
|---|---|
| Paradise Lost | John Milton |
| Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| Treasure Island | R.L. Stevenson |
| The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | S.T. Coleridge |
| A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
| Tess of the d'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway |
| Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| 1984 | George Orwell |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| Waiting for Godot | Samuel Beckett |
| Murder in the Cathedral | T.S. Eliot |
| The Waste Land | T.S. Eliot |
| Pygmalion | G.B. Shaw |
| Arms and the Man | G.B. Shaw |
| The Merchant of Venice | Shakespeare |
| Hamlet | Shakespeare |
| Dr Faustus | Christopher Marlowe |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) |
| Ulysses | James Joyce |
| Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
| The Road Not Taken | Robert Frost |
| Ode to the West Wind | P.B. Shelley |
| Don Juan | Lord Byron |
Pope Said Two Things: "To err is human..." AND "A little learning is a dangerous thing" — both by Alexander Pope.
Pen ≠ Shakespeare: "The pen is mightier than the sword" = Bulwer-Lytton (NOT Shakespeare). This is the #1 BCS trap in this topic.
Spencer ≠ Darwin: "Survival of the fittest" = Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, not Charles Darwin.
Two Georges: George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) vs George Eliot (Middlemarch) — Orwell = male, Eliot = female.
Shaw's Plays Start with Consonants: Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, Man and Superman — PAM Shaw.
Eliot Wrote Two Famous Works: The Waste Land (poem) + Murder in the Cathedral (play) — both T.S. Eliot.
Milton = Paradise: Paradise Lost = Milton. Just remember "Milton's Paradise."
Q1. "The pen is mightier than the sword" was said by — (a) Shakespeare (b) Bacon (c) Bulwer-Lytton (d) Milton Answer: (c) Bulwer-Lytton — Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote this in his play Richelieu (1839). This is NOT by Shakespeare — a very common BCS trap.
Q2. Who wrote Pride and Prejudice? (a) Charlotte Brontë (b) Jane Austen (c) Mary Shelley (d) George Eliot Answer: (b) Jane Austen — Published in 1813, it is one of the most famous English novels.
Q3. "Survival of the fittest" was coined by — (a) Charles Darwin (b) Herbert Spencer (c) Thomas Huxley (d) Aristotle Answer: (b) Herbert Spencer — Though associated with Darwin's theory, the phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer after reading Darwin's work.
Q4. Who wrote Gulliver's Travels? (a) Daniel Defoe (b) Jonathan Swift (c) Alexander Pope (d) John Dryden Answer: (b) Jonathan Swift — A satirical novel published in 1726 about Lemuel Gulliver's voyages to fantastical lands.
Q5. "To err is human, to forgive divine" is from — (a) Francis Bacon (b) William Shakespeare (c) Alexander Pope (d) John Milton Answer: (c) Alexander Pope — From his poem An Essay on Criticism (1711). Pope also wrote "A little learning is a dangerous thing."