A selection of quotes that have inspired, amused or otherwise occupied me…
“It was between him and the Lord, him dyin’. I jus’ shot him in the head.” — R.L. Burnside
“It is scarcely credible, but true, that intelligent men in Britain thought they were fighting footnotes and intelligent men in Germany thought they were defending E-flat chords.” — Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War
“No court sits in judgment over a drake who has raped a duck.” — Economist article on evolution
“The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.” — Walter Bagehot
“At last I can begin to live like a human being.” — Nero, on the dedication of his 300-acre palace, complete with 120ft statue of himself, mile-long pillared arcade and enormous artificial lake
“Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.” — George Orwell
“During the past twenty-five years the activities of what are called “intellectuals” have been largely mischievous. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that if the “intellectuals” had done their work a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940.” — Orwell again
“‘Mr Orwell is intellectual-hunting again’. I have never attacked ‘the intellectuals’ or ‘the intelligentsia’ en bloc. I have used a lot of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive literary cliques which have infested this country, not because they were intellectuals but precisely because they were not what I mean by true intellectuals. The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking.” — Orwell, intellectual-hunting again
“In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, No Child’s Behind Left.” — Christopher Hitchens
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” — Samuel Johnson, 1775
“If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.” — Lord Clark, Civilisation
“The Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren’t lesser beings, they’re just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists.” — Bjork
“I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
“No true civilisation could have produced such a town.” — J.B. Priestley, on Gateshead
“Mother, there are no cafes any more in Shepford. There are no tea shops, supper rooms, chop houses, grills, fish-and-chip saloons, oyster bars, inns or coffee houses. Where do you think you’re living? England?” — Keith Waterhouse, Billy Liar on the Moon
“When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class. And what I want to know is when you middle class perverts are going to stop using the Labor Party as a spiritual spitoon.” — Kim Beazley senior, 1970
“Postmodern irony is allusive, multilayered, preemptive, cynical, and above all, nihilistic. It assumes that everything is subjective and nothing means what it says. It’s a sneering, world-weary, bad irony, a mentality that condemns before it can be condemned, preferring cleverness to sincerity and quotation to originality. Postmodern irony rejects tradition, but offers nothing in its place.” — Jon Winokur, The Big Book of Irony
“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” — George Bernard Shaw
“I remarked again how much the comfortable circumstance that we still had a King made for the reputation of England in this world of Asia. Ancient and artificial societies like this of the Sherifs and feudal chieftains of Arabia found a sense of honourable security when dealing with us in such proof that the highest place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition.” — T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
