“I have come up with an epigram so devastatingly clever in its sarcasm that my adversaries will be forced to admit defeat and submit to my will immediately.”

“The Romans found, from bitter experience, the truth in the age-old epigram that the more laws, the worse the republic.”

“Yet one of her favoured modes of writing is the epigram, that celebration of inversion.”

“His mother, a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More's sister, was the youngest daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist and playwright.”

“He consulted me upon it, who am a little of an epigrammatist myself, you know.”

“Still other nonfictional writers have been detached, seemingly aloof, or, like the 17th-century French epigrammatist La Rochefoucauld, sarcastic.”

“The only author the two seem to share in common is Oscar Wilde, hurling his various art-for-art's-sake epigrams at each other like barbs.”

“For him, the centrepieces of conversation were aphorisms, epigrams and paradoxes which seemed to trip effortlessly from his honeyed tongue.”

“It's tough to choose a single epitaph for a man who invoked so many epigrams and proverbs.”