Samuel Johnson famously dismissed it as "unresisting imbecility," while Shaw, no Shakespeare fan, found it "stagy trash."

Later 19th century writers had little use for verse satire, Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed them as "classics of our prose."

When she tried to visit Picasso in his Paris studio, he famously dismissed her with the telling remark: "Madame, you will find the lingerie department on the second floor."

But it was Truman who famously dismissed the Hiss investigation as a "red herring."

There will be no rewards for negativism, no prizes for those whom Lady Thatcher famously dismissed as "moaning minnies".

Voltaire famously dismissed Canada as Quelques arpents de neige, "some acres of snow".

Presaging the shift in thinking in the 19th century, Bentham famously dismissed the idea of natural rights as "nonsense on stilts".

He famously dismissed bebop as "a form of music distinct from jazz".

In 1990, before the current name was adopted, Charles Haughey famously dismissed a CMRS report Must the Poor always Wait?