In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
ATTRIBUTION:
Orson Welles (1915–84), U.S. filmmaker, actor. The Third Man (1949).
contributed by Welles to Graham Greene’s screenplay of the film in which Welles starred. Welles later claimed that the speech was based on a fragment of an old Hungarian play.
