Aviators

"My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don't have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate, nothing more."

"Shoot first and inquire afterwards, and if you make mistakes, I will protect you."

"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."

"The Jew must clearly understand one thing at once, he must get out!"

"Now you see. You are even turning the Fuehrer against me. Ah, the Jews, the Jews, they'll be the death of me yet!"

"Excellency, please sign. I hate to say it, but my job is not the easiest one. Prague, your capital–I should be terribly sorry if I were compelled to destroy this beautiful city. But I would have to do it, to make the English and French understand that my air force can do all it claims to do. Because they still don't want to believe this is so, and I should like an opportunity of giving them proof."

"Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate.I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question."

"The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!"

"Why has this silly engine suddenly turned up, which is so idiotically welded together? They told me then, there would be two engines connected behind each other, and suddenly there appears this misbegotten monster of welded-together engines one cannot get at!"

"The people were merely to acknowledge the authority of the Führer, or, let us say, to declare themselves in agreement with the Führer. If they gave the Führer their confidence then it was their concern to exercise the other functions. Thus, not the individual persons were to be selected according to the will of the people, but solely the leadership itself."

"I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand ... I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!"

"The German people trusted the Führer. Given his authoritarian direction of the state, they had no influence on events. Ignorant of the crimes of which we know today, the people have fought with loyalty, self-sacrifice, and courage, and they have suffered too in this life-and-death struggle into which they were arbitrarily thrust. The German people are free from blame."

"We are living through a National Socialist revolution. We emphasize the term “socialist” because many speak only of a “national” revolution. Dubious, but also wrong. It was not only nationalism that led to the breakthrough. We are proud that German socialism also triumphed. Unfortunately, there are still people among us today who emphasize the word “national” too strongly and who do not want to know anything about the second part of our worldview, which shows that they have also failed to understand the first part. Those who do not want to recognize a German socialism do not have the right to call themselves national."

"Just as nationalism protects a people from outside forces, so socialism serves a people's domestic needs. We want the people's strength to be released within the nation, forging the people once more into a strong block. The individual citizen must again have the sense that, even if he is finds himself in the simplest and lowest position, that his life and opportunities are assured."

"Marxist socialism was degraded to a concern only with pay or the stomach. The bourgeoisie degraded nationalism into barren hyper-patriotism. Both concepts, therefore, must be cleansed and shown to the people anew, in a crystal-clear form. The nationalism of our worldview arrived at the right moment. Our movement seized the concept of socialism from the cowardly Marxists, and tore the concept of nationalism from the cowardly bourgeois parties, throwing both into the melting pot of our worldview, and producing a clear synthesis: German national Socialism. That provided the foundation for the rebuilding of our people. Thus this revolution was National Socialist."

"Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein."

"The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused."

"After the United States gobbled up California and half of Mexico, and we were stripped down to nothing, territorial expansion suddenly becomes a crime. It's been going on for centuries, and it will still go on."

"Do you think I give that much of a damn about my lousy life? — For myself, I don't give a damn if I get executed, or drown, or crash in a plane, or drink myself to death! — But there is still a matter of honor in this life! — Assassination attempt on Hitler! — Ugh! — Gott im Himmel!! I could have sunk through the floor! And do you think I would have handed Himmler over to the enemy, guilty as he was? Dammit, I would have liquidated the bastard myself!"

"Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

"What do I care about danger? I've sent soldiers and airmen to death against the enemy — why should I be afraid?"

"Hitler decided that. I thought it was stupid because I believed that first we had to defeat England. Also we had to take Gibraltar."

"No. It was the last hours and he (Hitler) was under pressure. If I could have seen him personally it would have been different."

"I know you want to study me psychologically. That's reasonable and I appreciate it. At least you don't lecture to me and pry into my affairs. You have a good technique as a psychiatrist. Let the other fellow talk and stick his neck into the noose. I don't mean that the way it sounds. But you hardly say anything. Someday I'm going to ask you questions."

"I have always been interested in family history. Chromosomes are funny things, aren't they? They may skip a generation and you can find children who resemble the grandfather, rather than either parent. Heredity is more important than environment. Blood will tell. For example, a man is either musical by heredity or he is not. You can't make a man musical by the environment. You can find a person who is very musically inclined and be puzzled because neither parents nor grandparents had any ear for music. But if you trace it back, you will find that the great-grandfather was a musician. But the environment plays a great part in the development of a man. It is significant whether a man is brought up in the city or in the country, near a lake or on the shores of the ocean."

"In Berlin Jews controlled almost one hundred percent of the theaters and cinemas before the rise to power."

"Hitler had the willpower of a demon and he needed it. If he didn't have such a strong willpower he couldn't have achieved anything. Don't forget, if Hitler had not lost the war, if he did not have to fight against the combination of big powers like England, America, and Russia — each one he could have conquered individually — these defendants and these generals would now be saying, 'Heil Hitler,' and would not be so damn critical."

"To me there are two Hitlers: one who existed until the end of the French war; the other begins with the Russian campaign. In the beginning he was genial and pleasant. He would have extraordinary willpower and unheard-of influence on people. The important thing to remember is that the first Hitler, the man who I knew until the end of the French war, had much charm and goodwill. He was always frank. The second Hitler, who existed from the beginning of the Russian campaign until his suicide, was always suspicious, easily upset, and tense. He was distrustful to an extreme degree."

"I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions. In 1934, I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that if I disapprove of the experimentation on animals, how could I possibly be in favor of torturing humans? The prosecution says that I had something to do with the freezing experiments which were performed in the concentration camps under the auspices of the air force. That is pure nonsense! I was much too busy to know about these medical experiments, and if anybody had asked me, I would have disapproved violently. It must have been Himmler who thought up these stupid experiments, although I think he shirked his responsibility by committing suicide. I am not too unhappy about it because I would not particularly enjoy sitting on the same bench with him. The same is true of that drunken Robert Ley, who did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started. He was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand."

"The atrocities are, for me, the most horrible part of the accusation in this trial. They thought that I took it lightly or laughed about it or some such nonsense, in court. That is definitely a mistake. I am the type of person who is naturally against such things and my own psychological reaction is to laugh or smile in the face of adversity. Perhaps that explains my attitude in court. Besides, I was not to blame for these horrors. It's not just that I am a hard man because of my long experience in the army and in politics. It's true that I saw plenty in the First World War and during the air raids and at the front in this war. But I was always a person who felt the suffering of others. To paint me as an unfeeling ogre who laughs in court at the atrocities is stupid."

"All nonsense. Nobody knows the real Göring. I am a man of many parts, but the autobiography, what does that tell you? Nothing. And those books put out by the party press, they are less than useless."

"I think that women are wonderful but I've never met one yet who didn't show more feeling than logic."

"If I didn't have a sense of humor, how could I stand this trial now?"

"In the first place I'm sure Hitler did not write that damned testament himself. Probably some swine like Bormann wrote it for him. But I don't see what is so terrible in the testament when you examine it, anyway. There was Berlin, bombed every minute. The noise of artillery from the lousy Russians, the American and British bombers overhead. Maybe Hitler was a trifle unbalanced by all that. If he wrote the testament at such a time, it was hysteria. But essentially, what difference does it make?"

"I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany."

"The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally."

"No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Göring. You may call me Meyer."

"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set – then at least I'll own something that has always worked."

"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning!"

"I will decide who is a Jew!"

"Hitler neither developed his ideas in a vacuum nor rose to power alone. A rather motley crew of people formed his inner circle. Its membership changed many times, as people fell in and out of favor. Three individuals who stuck with Hitler throughout his political career and gained international profiles were Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler. All of them would play key roles in the Nazi regime, each amassing enormous power even as they fought among themselves for Hitler's favor."

"Hermann Göring (1893-1946) was a hero of World War I who rose through the air force to become commander of the famous Richtofen Squadron. Somewhat at a loss after the war ended with Germany's defeat and massive demilitarization, he joined the Nazi Party in 1922. One of Hitler's oldest associates, Göring had the distinction of having been wounded at the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Nazi lingo reserved the label "old fighters" for those of the faithful who had been members before the failed Putsch. Hitler often presented Göring as one of Nazism's more respectable figures. Göring's father had been a judge and consular official, and he had ties with conservative and nationalist circles. Göring senior had even served as resident minister plenipotentiary in German Southwest Africa, site of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people in 1907. In fact there was a major street named after him in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia (now Daniel Munamava Street)."

"Throughout the 1930s Hitler showered appointments on Hermann Göring. When the Nazi Party became the largest party in the German parliament, Göring became president of the Reichstag (as the German parliament was called). Göring established the Gestapo, a political police force, and was named commander in chief of the Luftwaffe (air force). In 1936 Hitler chose Göring to head the Four-Year Plan to prepare Germany for war. A swaggering, flamboyant individual who relished luxury and excess, Göring was also an ambitious schemer and vicious infighter."

"Goering, wreathed in smiles and orders and decorations received us gaily, his wife at his side. There is something un-Christian about Goering, a strong pagan streak, a touch of the arena, though perhaps, like many who are libidinous-minded like myself, he actually does very little. People say that he can be very hard and ruthless, as are all Nazis when occasion demands, but outwardly he seems all vanity and childish love of display."

"In Goering's tones there is just such a shadow. He is a complex villain if ever there was one. He also kept his bravery to the end and made a showing at Nuremberg which shamed his colleagues. He also kept his stubborn cunning, defeating the hangman."

"I can't see a thing wrong with Göring's behavior as far as this trial is concerned. They have proven none of the charges. I have mentioned to Göring that the trouble with National Socialism is that it is a house divided, that we Germans tried to live in a community without considering our neighbors, and Göring agreed with me. So even Göring isn't as bad a fellow as the prosecution would have the world believe."

"The statesmen of the 1930s were not blind to the danger posed by a Germany dominant on the continent. On the contrary, it became conventional wisdom that the nation's capital would be flattened within twenty-four hours of the outbreak of war by the might of Hermann Gôring's Luftwaffe. In 1934 the Royal Air Force estimated that the Germans could drop up to 150 tons a day on England in the event of a war in which they occupied the Low Countries. By 1936 that figure had been raised to 600 tons and by 1939 to 700 tons - with a possible deluge of 3,500 tons on the first day of war. In July 1934 Baldwin declared, 'When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.' Yet he and his successor Neville Chamberlain failed altogether to devise a rational response to the German threat. It was one thing to let the Japanese have Manchuria; it meant nothing to British security. The same was true of letting the Italians have parts of Abyssinia; even Albania could be theirs at no cost to Britain. The internal affairs of Spain, too, were frankly irrelevant to the British national interest. But the rise of a Greater Germany was a different matter."

"And another question was unfortunately not asked of Göring: 'The German people put faith in you even if they doubted Hitler because you were gentlemanly and more likable. What did you, Göring, do to justify this confidence? You have led a luxurious life and collected stolen art.'"

"Göring wanted to know if we had ever thought about this. "Jawohl, Herr Reichsmarschall!" He looked me straight in the eyes and said, "What would you think of an order to shoot down pilots who were bailing out? "I should regard it as murder, Herr Reichsmarschall", I told him, "I should do everything in my power to disobey such an order". "That is just the reply I had expected from you, Galland"."

"The blame for the faulty use of the Air Force must be apportioned equally to Hitler and to Goering. Neither the bravery nor the military and technical ability of the Luftwaffe sufficed to compensate for the vanity of its Commander-in-Chief and for the indulgence that Hitler showed towards the ambitions of his principle disciple. Only much later did Hitler form a true picture of Goering's worth- or rather worthlessness- but it is significant that on 'grounds of policy' he always refused to replace him in an appointment that was, for better or for worse, decisive to the outcome of the war. It has often been maintained that Hitler showed unshakable loyalty to his 'old comrades'. So far as Goering is concerned this was unfortunately true. It is also true that he frequently complained about him, but he never drew the correct conclusions from his own observations."

"The two incidents which contributed most deeply to the motivation of his life came about in 1918, just after the Armistice. First, Goering refused to demobilize and surrender his planes. He was ordered to do so by the German General Staff, but he refused to obey, until he was finally brought to ground near Darmstadt. He said farewell to his fellow officers, toasting the day when Germany would be supreme in the air. His planes were then destroyed. He never got over this. The destruction of his precious aircraft, by men whom he considered his infinite inferiors, was a psychic shock from which he did not recover; his present passionate energy to build a new German air fleet is compensation. Second, after he had returned to Berlin, a socialist mob saw him in uniform and forcibly tore his officer's insignia from his coat lapels. Foaming with rage, he swore vengeance. His hatred of socialists, which is psychopathic in intensity, dates from that day. This incident is important to Nazi history. It is not entirely fanciful to assume that much of the Brown Terror was motivated by this incident."

"His ambition as well as his vanity is enormous. On March 6, 1933, exactly one day after the elections which confirmed Hitler's accession to office, he ordered his portrait painted- with a book in his lap conspicuously titled Life of Napoleon. His pets are lion cubs. All of them, male or female, are named Caesar. He is as carnivorous as Hitler is frugal- brusque, impulsive, brutal. Testimony after the Munich Putsch of 1923 recorded his orders to "beat in the skulls" of his opponents "with rifle butts". His famous order to the police in February, 1933, to shoot "enemies" without question, really signalled the beginning of the Nazi terror. His ruthlessness is unthinking, spasmodic, hot-blooded. He is not a plotter like Goebbels. He has great executive ability, and this serves to make him doubly dangerous."

"The jokes about Goering are, of course, legion. Most of them, are predicated either on the resplendency of his uniforms or his abnormal size. He is not merely fat: he is fat atop an immensity of muscle. He moves with the vigor of a man a hundred pounds lighter: there is nothing torpid about him; his energy is terrific. But the story goes that he is so obese that he "sits down on his own stomach"; he and Emmy have to sleep in a tent: and he wears "corsets on his thighs." One story is that he dons an admiral's uniform whenever he takes a bath, with rubber duplicates to all his medals. A new unit of weight has been established in Germany- a "goering"- to signify the aggregate displacement of his decorations. Once he visited a steel factory and his companions were horrified to see him suddenly leave the floor and dart perpendicularly upward to the ceiling. Reason: an electro-magnet above had caught his medals. Another little story has him arriving late at a luncheon in Berlin, where he is to meet an eminent (and doubtless mythical) visiting Englishman. Goering apologizes for his tardiness, and says he has been out shooting. The Englishman turns to him with the lofty words, "Animals, I presume?" Goering, incidentally, is said to be fond himself of all the stories about him. Once, the legend has it, Hitler fell into a doze during a performance of Lohengrin. The Führer was too tired to keep fully awake. His eyes opened suddenly as the figure of the shining knight in armor took the stage. Hitler thought it was Goering. "Hermann," he shouted, "you are going too far." Goering's basic importance, if the present set-up lasts, is not his blood lust, not his position in Prussia, not his command of the Prussian police. What matters is his association with aviation. The next war will be fought in the air, and it is an ill-omen that a man like Goering, with his immense drive and ruthlessness, should be supremely responsible for the developments of the German air army."

"I was immensely entertained at meeting the man. One remembered all the time that he had been concerned with the "clean-up" in Berlin on June 30th 1934, and I wondered how many people he had been responsible for getting killed. Like a great schoolboy, full of life and pride in all he was doing, showing it all off, and talking high politics out of the setting of green jerkin and red dagger. A modern Robin Hood: producing on me a composite impression of film-star, gangster, great landowner interested in his property, Prime Minister, party manager, head-gamekeeper at Chatsworth."

"Had Hitler died in middle of the 1930's, Nazism would probably have shown, under the leadership of a Goering, a fundamental change in its course, and the Second World War might have been averted. Yet the sepulcher of Hitler, the founder of a Nazi religion, might perhaps have been a greater evil than all the atrocities, bloodshed and destruction of Hitler's war."

":Strasser: Are your people ready at the hotel?"

"The large and varied role of Göring was half militarist and half gangster. He stuck his pudgy finger in every pie. He used his SA musclemen to help bring the gang into power. In order to entrench that power, he contrived to have the Reichstag burned, established the Gestapo, and created the concentration camps. He was equally adept at massacring opponents and at framing scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. He built up the Luftwaffe [air force] and hurled it at his defenseless neighbors. He was among the foremost in harrying Jews out of the land. By mobilizing the total economic resources of Germany, he made possible the waging of the war which he had taken a large part in planning. He was, next to Hitler, the man who tied the activities of all the defendants together in a common effort."

"These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. If we combine only the stories of the front bench, this is the ridiculous composite picture of Hitler's Government that emerges. It was composed of: A No. 2 man who knew nothing of the excesses of the Gestapo which he created, and never suspected the Jewish extermination programme although he was the signer of over a score of decrees which instituted the persecution of that race; A No. 3 man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy; A Foreign Minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy; A Field-Marshal who issued orders to the armed forces but had no idea of the results they would have in practice ... ... This may seem like a fantastic exaggeration, but this is what you would actually be obliged to conclude if you were to acquit these defendants. They do protest too much. They deny knowing what was common knowledge. They deny knowing plans and programmes that were as public as Mein Kampf and the Party programme. They deny even knowing the contents of documents which they received and acted upon. ... The defendants have been unanimous, when pressed, in shifting the blame on other men, sometimes on one and sometimes on another. But the names they have repeatedly picked are Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Bormann. All of these are dead or missing. No matter how hard we have pressed the defendants on the stand, they have never pointed the finger at a living man as guilty. It is a temptation to ponder the wondrous workings of a fate which has left only the guilty dead and only the innocent alive. It is almost too remarkable. The chief villain on whom blame is placed — some of the defendants vie with each other in producing appropriate epithets — is Hitler. He is the man at whom nearly every defendant has pointed an accusing finger. I shall not dissent from this consensus, nor do I deny that all these dead and missing men shared the guilt. In crimes so reprehensible that degrees of guilt have lost their significance they may have played the most evil parts. But their guilt cannot exculpate the defendants. Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him. All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler's shroud. It was these dead men whom these living chose to be their partners in this great conspiratorial brotherhood, and the crimes that they did together they must pay for one by one."

"Air tactics, after all, merely interested Goering because he believed they could be solved at once by quick, unconsidered solutions."

"The stage was thus set for the entrance of Hermann Goering and his once powerful Luftwaffe. On 24th November the Reichsmarschall was present at a situation conference at Hitler's headquarters when Zeitzler stated that the Sixth Army had requested a minimum of 750 tons of supplies a day flown into the Stalingrad ring. It was realized that such a figure was beyond the capacity of the Luftwaffe or any other air force, and the General Staff had decided on a minimum of 300 tons a day. Zeitzler doubted if the Luftwaffe could raise sufficient transport aircraft to undertake the job; what had Goering to say about it? "Well?" demanded Hitler, looking directly at Goering. It is doubtful if Goering knew anything about the state of the Luftwaffe in Russia. For over a year, he had drifted lazily between Berlin and Rome; occasionally amusing himself in Vienna, always seeking refuge from the grim reality of a world at war. His star had waned in the Nazi hierarchy; he no longer had any friends, only associates who treated him with contempt or openly ignored him. He was a worried, lonely and dispirited man, hiding behind the inevitable mask of joviality and wanting desperately to be left alone with his jewels and art treasures. But the shackles of responsibility still weighed heavily upon him. He was Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. "The task is a difficult one," said Goering. "Nevertheless, you will carry it out." Hitler turned to his Chief of Staff. "You see, Zeitzler? It can be done." Zeitzler shook his head. "It would need at least 200 planes a day," he commented. "The Luftwaffe can do it!" insisted Goering, turning crimson with anger. He had spoken with scarcely a moment for thought, and, as always, had immediately convinced himself that he was right. In retrospect, one can only feel surprise that Hitler, after so many disappointments, was still willing to believe him."

"Hands clasped behind his back, Hermann Goering wandered sadly through the great house-cum-mausoleum he had named Karinhall. Many of the rooms were empty now; for weeks a large staff had been carefully packing the hundreds of art treasures for transporting to Berchtesgaden and other places. Valuable paintings, statues, priceless glass and porcelain, all had departed by lorry and train to the south, to be followed very soon by the crockery, furniture and a mountain of personal baggage. Within a month, nothing would remain at Karinhall except empty showcases, leaving the last evidence of Goering's years of triumph a deserted shell to be destroyed by high explosive on his orders. He was living in a nightmare: evacuating Karinhall before the Russian tanks and infantry blasted a path through the beautiful estate; trying to salvage a few baubles out of the wreckage of his former glory. He was already a commander without any forces; soon he would be a prince without a palace. Thus far had the mighty fallen; and Goering wept to think that at a time when Soviet guns were massed against Berlin, the amazing new aircraft that could have saved the Third Reich- and the Luftwaffe- were entering operational service. The Me 262, haunted by Hitler's interference; the Ta 152, Kurt Tank's replacement for the Fw 190; the rocket-driven Me 163 interceptor; the tandem-engine Do-335; all exceptional fighters, yet available in such pathetically small numbers. And Germany had new bombers, too: the Me 264, intended for the bombing of New York; the Ju 287; the Ar 234, first turbo-jet bomber in the world. Dozens of other projects still lay on abandoned drawing-boards, soon to be studied by the Allies. Did Goering, as he walked aimlessly through the vastness of Karinhall, remember Ernst Udet, and the wonderful new aircraft he had been promised back in 1941? there had been too many delays, too many tactical errors, too many wrong decisions. Now, time was the strongest enemy; the trees with their ripening fruit were about to come crashing down."

"For month after month during the summer of 1946 Hermann Goering sat in the dock beside Hess, von Ribbentrop, Keitel and the other defendants, eyes sunken in his head, the grey-blue Luftwaffe uniform hanging in folds on his shrunken frame. Despite his haggard appearance, he was mentally alert and followed the trial closely; during his cross-examination he crossed swords so deftly with the prosecution that the United States Prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, lost his temper. In his final statement, the former Reichsmarschall said: "I did not want a war, and I did not bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out, I did everything to assure victory..." It was his last public speech, and there was no applause."

"For Hermann Wilhelm Goering, the fighter pilot of the First World War whose amazing rise to power brought him many high honors, including the title of Marshal of the Greater German Reich, it can only be said that he possessed great physical courage and an intelligence not readily apparent to those who only saw the bemedalled facade. He was also a skillful hunter who could be an amusing and lively host. But Goering was frequently cunning, deceitful and vindictive, a man given to wild boasting- "My bombers will darken the sky over London!"- and fits of childish temper. He was blinded by the vanity that destroyed his career; his craving for riches became such an obsession that even personal ambition ceased to be of any importance. He sought a life of luxury, and having achieved untold wealth, loved it not wisely but too well, to the exclusion of responsibility, the Nazi Party and all else. He ransacked the art museums of Europe while German military aviation fell in flames. The organization and administration of the Luftwaffe paid a bitter price for his indolence."

"After lunch [in March 1935] Goering told me that the British treated their Cabinet ministers very shabbily. In the matter of official residences or even motor-cars, for example, little or nothing was done for them. "I have 42 official cars," he told me proudly, "and that is not enough. I have had to buy a giant Mercedes for myself." Goering's uninhibited vulgarity was at once revolting and rather comic. At an official dinner-party in his house he produced samples of table-glass he had ordered, heavily cut objects with gold rims. "And when this is delivered," he explained, "the muck you now see on the table will be taken down to the kitchen and smashed with a hammer.""

"German troops crossed the frontier and marched on Vienna... As luck would have it, Goering was giving a monster party at the Haus der Flieger that night [11 March 1938]... News of the Austrian coup had reached the guests... As usual after a coup, the Germans showed signs of nervousness and did all they could to reconcile foreign opinion. Goering at once took Henderson into a corner and urged him to use his good offices to see that peace was not broken. He even sought to placate Mastny, the Czech Minister in Berlin, to whom he gave his word of honour that events in Austria would have no detrimental effect on relations between the Reich and Czechoslovakia. He then sought out the Minister again and repeated the assurance, adding that he was able to give Hitler's word as well. It was a perfect example of Nazi technique. First you brutally assault a man; then you rush round to his neighbours to express the pious hope that there will be no breach of the peace, particularly since you do not intend to assault them."

"For over two hours Goering and I chatted about the war... [H]e readily admitted that Hitler had made mistakes. Of these the gravest and the one most damaging to German fortunes was Hitler's failure to seize Spain and North Africa in 1940. Goering said that Germany should have resolved immediately after the fall of France to march through Spain, with or without Franco's assent, capture Gibraltar and spill into Africa. This could very easily have been done and it would have altered the whole course of the war. He had pressed Hitler, but in vain. When asked to explain why Hitler had rejected his advice, Goering replied that Hitler was convinced in 1940 that he had won the war... I asked Goering whether Hitler had not made two bad mistakes in attacking Russia and gratuitously declaring war on the United States. Goering agreed, but thought that if in 1941 Hitler had been in possession of Africa, he could have safely afforded the luxury of attacking Russia and America simultaneously."

"I...asked Goering whether he considered that our strategic bombing of Germany had paid off. He said it had without a doubt. But for the bombing, the war would have gone on a great deal longer, and in that event rockets and buzz bombs would have devastated Britain. As it was, we had only scraped home by a very short head. If he had had his way, Hitler would have allowed him to build special broad-gauge railways to bring the missiles to the bomb sites. If the R.A.F. had not disrupted communications, the Germans could have launched very many more missiles than they in fact did. In reply to a further question Goering admitted that the Battle of Britain had been a turning-point in the war. It had been a great disappointment to him. But he was very scornful about the R.A.F. claims of German losses and regarded the issue of the battle as a draw. But a draw was of no use to Germany, and her tragedy was that she failed to achieve victory."

"At the start of the Second World War, there were still some questions, at least on the Allied side, about what constituted a legitimate target (a British Cabinet minister is said to have protested in 1939, ‘But that’s private property,’ when the possibility of bombing German industry in the Ruhr came up). The all-out nature of the war swept such issues aside, although, again on the Allied side, they never completely disappeared. All the belligerents used bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight on. Ports, factories, railway marshalling yards, oil depots, dams and bridges were all targets, but so too were housing and city centres. Hermann Goering promised Hitler in the summer of 1940 that he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities, especially London. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, was convinced, and managed to persuade his superiors, including Winston Churchill, that the war against Germany could be won by the bomber and that the critical target was German morale."

"Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference* between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If It would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. ... If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come. This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country."

"World War I air ace and heir to the Red Baron's (von Richtofen's) Squadron. Hitler's closest and most loyal associate in the Nazi High Command. Head of the Luftwaffe. The Reich's main economic planner. Diplomat. Superb art collector. Overweight morphine addict. Gourmand and dandy. Defeated war criminal. Suicide... The events of Hermann Goering's life comprise a tragedy of truly dramatic proportions. Yet even more fascinating was the private man behind the public figure, for as Leonard Mosley writes in this definitive biography, "he was, nonetheless, at the same time both the strongest and the weakest man in the Nazi ruling circle, the only human being. Surrounded as he was by fanatics, madmen, zealots, and petty-crooks-jumped-to-high-places, he was the only one among them dogged in his dark moments by a tremendous sense of guilt and aware right from the beginning that he would have to pay." That is the final judgement rendered here of the extraordinary and terribly misguided man who, next to Hitler, played the largest part in the shaping of the Nazi inferno."

"I remember coming away from my first meeting and asking myself the question: How had such a worldly, cultivated man got himself mixed up with such a sleazy and murderous gang as the Nazis? I was somewhat chastened shortly afterward when I went to one of his meetings and saw on the platform not the charming art and animal lover I had first encountered but a raving anti-Semite mouthing all the shibboleths of the Party, a quivering mass of hate and rancor. I was to meet hims several times before I finally left Berlin on the outbreak of World War II, and each encounter made me more conscious of the contradictions of his nature. Which was the real Hermann Goering? The self-proclaimed friend of Britain who seemed to be sincerely and genuinely trying to prevent an Anglo-German war in 1939? The family man, the ecologist, the lover of art and beauty? The Party hack and Hitler's fawning slave? The peacock, the bully, the cunning deceiver of foreign statesmen? By the time I left Berlin, I had still not made up my mind. The last time I saw Hermann Goering, he was so confident that his efforts to prevent World War II would succeed that he bet me a bottle of champagne that Britain would not fight Germany. Was it a brave effort on his part to frustrate Hitler's plans, or was it merely a trick?"

"History will no doubt recognize that he was a man of extraordinary talents and considerable achievements. He played a large part in restoring the self-respect of the German people and forcing the world to pay attention to them. He built up the German Luftwaffe into a formidable force which might have won World War II for Germany in 1940 had it been used the way he planned. He worked hard, and at considerable risk, to prevent the war in the West from starting in 1939 and the war in Russia in 1941. He was an extremely brave man, and faced manfully up to the challenges of war, of pain, and, at the end, of death without flinching. No future historian will be able to avoid conceding that at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, with a poor case to fight, he challenged his opponents and won. His supreme victory was to cheat them in the end of his body dangling from their gallows. But for all his fearlessness and defiance, there is once vice from which Hermann Goering suffered which will prevent any history book from accepting him as a great man. It was not the vice of vanity, from which, when all's said and done, many great men have suffered. It was not his hard-driving and ruthless ambition, for that has carried many a great leader to the top in times gone by. It was not his flamboyance, which outraged so many of his contemporaries, but would not be unnoticed on Carnaby Street or Sunset Boulevard today. It was not even his Nero-like capacity for fiddling while Rome was burning, or, rather, playing with his jewels and drooling over his pictures while Germany was sinking into defeat, because what else was there to do? The vice from which Goering suffered, and for which the history books will undoubtedly blame him, was his moral cowardice. It was his great crime. All through his association with Adolf Hitler, there were moments when he might have changed the course of National Socialism and Germany's race to perdition- by arguing with and persuading the Fuehrer to begin with, by usurping him when that was no longer possible."

"Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, the psychiatrist at Nuremberg, was talking to Goering one day when the Reich Marshal recounted how he and Ernst Roehm had built up the Brownshirt Army between them. "It was evident," Kelley noted at the time, "that Roehm and Goering were more than brothers in arms, they were friends." Then Goering went on to tell how he and Roehm had become rivals for Hitler's favor, and how he finally had arranged for Roehm to be shot during the purge. Kelley broke in and asked him how he could have brought himself to arrange the killing of a friend. "Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright," Kelley noted. "Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: 'But he was in my way...'""

"There came a time when Adolf Hitler was in his way too, and when his elimination would not only have resulted in the apotheosis of Hermann Goering but in the re-emergence of sanity in Germany. But it turned out that the man who was not afraid of anything else, danger or death, was afraid of Adolf Hitler. Rather than challenge him in a last mortal combat and finish him off, for Germany's sake, as well as for the world, he opted out of the struggle. It is that failure to show his abhorrence, to take a stand, to oust Hitler before it was too late, for which history will not forgive him."

"Goering's great air offensive against Great Britain, Operation Eagle (Adlerangriff), had been launched on August 15 with the objective of driving the British Air Force from the skies and thus achieving the one condition on which the launching of the invasion depended. The fat Reich Marshal, as he now was, had no doubts about victory. By mid-July he was confident that British fighter defenses in southern England could be smashed within four days by an all-out assault, thus opening the way for the invasion. To destroy the R.A.F. completely would take a little longer, Goering told the Army High Command: from two to four weeks. In fact, the bemedaled German Air Force chief thought that the Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to her knees and that an invasion by land forces probably would not be necessary."

"At eleven minutes past 1 A.M. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentrop mounted the gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison, and he was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl. But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn was to have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact."

"Now, for example, Göring made an excellent impression. I must say I rather liked him. The fashion was for 'strong men.' Göring had his weaknesses — he was like a child in many respects — but he was a human being."

"Hermann Göring, at this time Hitler’s most important associate, held overall responsibility for economic planning. His Four-Year-Plan Authority had been charged with preparing the German economy for war between 1936 and 1940. Now his Four-Year-Plan Authority, entrusted with the Hunger Plan, was to meet and reverse Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The Stalinist Five-Year Plan would be imitated in its ambition (to complete a revolution), exploited in its attainment (the collective farm), but reversed in its goals (the defense and industrialization of the Soviet Union). The Hunger Plan foresaw the restoration of a preindustrial Soviet Union, with far fewer people, little industry, and no large cities. The forward motion of the Wehrmacht would be a journey backward in time. National Socialism was to dam the advance of Stalinism, and then reverse the course of its great historical river. Starvation and colonization were German policy: discussed, agreed, formulated, distributed, and understood. The framework of the Hunger Plan was established by March 1941. An appropriate set of “Economic Policy Guidelines” was issued in May. A somewhat sanitized version, known as the “Green Folder,” was circulated in one thousand copies to German officials that June. Just before the invasion, both Himmler and Göring were overseeing important aspects of the postwar planning: Himmler the long-term racial colony of Generalplan Ost, Göring the short-term starvation and destruction of the Hunger Plan. German intentions were to fight a war of destruction that would transform eastern Europe into an exterminatory agrarian colony. Hitler meant to undo all the work of Stalin. Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race. Such were the plans."

"I learned that besides Hitler, only Göring was charismatic and powerful enough to have had a German constituency of his own. (...) In the early days of Hitler's regime he was the man of action."

"Even the last scintillating assembly of the leaders of the Reich could scarcely distract me from my cares. That was the gala celebration of Goering's birthday on January 12, 1944, which he held at Karinhall. We all came with expensive presents, such as Goering expected: cigars from Holland, gold bars from the Balkans, valuable paintings and sculptures. Goering had let me know that he would like to have a marble bust of Hitler, more than life size, by Breker. The overladen gift table had been set up in the big library. Goering displayed it to his guests and spread out on it the building plans his architect had prepared for his birthday. Goering's palace-like residence was to be more than doubled in size. At the magnificently set table in the luxurious dining room flunkies in white livery served a somewhat austere meal, in keeping with the conditions of the time. Funk, as he did every year, delivered the birthday speech at the banquet. He lauded Goering's abilities, qualities, and dignities and offered the toast to him as "one of the greatest Germans." Funk's extravagant words contrasted grotesquely with the actual situation. The whole thing was a ghostly celebration taking place against a background of collapse and ruin."

"Around the middle of February, I called on Goering one evening in Karinhall. I had discovered from studying the military map that he had concentrated his parachute division around his hunting estate. For a long time he had been made the scapegoat for all the failures of the Luftwaffe. At the situation conferences Hitler habitually denounced him in the most violent and insulting language before the assembled officers. He must have been even nastier in the scenes he had with Goering privately. Often, waiting in the anteroom, I could hear Hitler shouting at him. That evening in Karinhall, I established a certain intimacy with Goering for the first and only time. Goering had an excellent Rotschild-Lafite served at the fireplace and ordered the servant not to disturb us. Candidly, I described my disappointment with Hitler. Just as candidly, Goering replied that he well understood me and that he often felt much the same. However, he said, it was easier for me, since I had joined Hitler a great deal later and could free myself from him all the sooner. He, Goering, had much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together- and he could no longer break loose."

"At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Goering had undergone a systematic withdrawal cure which had ended his drug addiction. Ever since, he was in better form than I had ever seen him. He displayed remarkable energy and became the most formidable personality among the defendants. I thought it a great pity that he had not been up to this level before the outbreak of the war and in critical situations during the war. He would have been the only person whose authority and popularity Hitler would have had to reckon with. Actually, he had been one of the few sensible enough to foresee the doom that awaited us. But having thrown away his chance to save the country while that was still possible, it was absurd and truly criminal for him to use his regained powers to hoodwink his own people. His whole policy was one of deception. Once, in the prison yard something was said about Jewish survivors in Hungary. Goering remarked coldly: "So, there are still some there? I thought we had knocked off all of them. Somebody slipped up again." I was stunned."

"The Germans did not succeeded in gaining undisputed control of the air, a prerequisite for a successful land invasion. As later revealed, German production hadn't concentrated on building sufficient air strength, either in type or numbers. Moreover, Goering continually interfered with operations during the critical period of the Battle of Britain, ordering costly daylight bombing attacks that resulted in a tremendous attrition of Nazi planes. There seemed to be a total lack of firm objectives- "too many targets", as General Kreipe has said. Although Goering was a disciple of the doctrines of General Douhet, he was often guilty of dissipation of means."

"Professional Luftwaffe officers, realizing that German bombers were not armored or otherwise equipped for defense against enemy fighters, were opposed to the Battle of Britain. But Hitler, supported of course by Hermann Goering, overruled his professional airmen and insisted upon carrying through."

"When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated."

"Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud."

"I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me."

"A writer’s subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there."

"There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz."

"Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off."

"During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high."

"The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar… I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you."

"Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."

"The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a Hölderin in his cradle. And yes, of course, if it had to be done over, I would do it again. Hitler had condemned us to kill. Not even the most just causes are ever innocent."

"Gary’s life was shaped by war, revolution, emigration, anti-Semitism, defeat, and murderous low-altitude bombing runs. But he never wallowed in victimhood – quite the contrary. He wrote scathing satires of the victim syndrome, and never claimed that his changes of country and language were anything but opportunities to be someone else. He didn’t need to know whether he was Russian, or Jewish, or Polish, or Catholic, or French. In a questionnaire on ethnic identity he would have answered: all of the above. Gary is a good model for our own century of transnational lives."

"In 1966, Gary and Seberg visited the memorial of the Warsaw ghetto, in the city where he’d lived as a child for several years before moving to France. This confrontation with the trauma of history — a horror he narrowly avoided — was overwhelming. Gary hallucinated the arm of a hidden Jew emerging from a sewer grill shaking its fist, and fainted from the shock. When he came to, some combination of survivor’s guilt and righteous anger was conceived, taking shape in The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1967) — a breathtakingly original, hilarious, and complex exploration of Gary as a man, an author, and a Jew. Genghis (né Moishe) Cohn, a comedian from Berlin imprisoned in Auschwitz, exposes his bare bottom to Schatz, the SS officer who kills him, and instructs him to “Kush mire in toques.” (Opines Cohn’s ghost: “There have undoubtedly been more worthy and noble last words in history than ‘Kiss my ass,’ but I have never made any claim to greatness and, besides, I’m quite pleased with my effort…”)."

"Too famous for his work to be judged without bias, Gary felt he needed to break free from categorization. So, in 1973, at age 59 — the same age his mother was when she died — Gary invented Émile Ajar. He was by then twice divorced, retired from the diplomatic corps, and had published 22 books, including the Goncourt-winning The Roots of Heaven (1956), about illegal elephant poaching in Africa. It was time for a new adventure, as he explains in The Life and Death of Émile Ajar: “I was tired of being nothing but myself…there was the nostalgia for one’s youth, for one’s debut, for one’s renewal…. I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity.” … events turned downright farcical. The Life Before Us was awarded the 1975 Prix Goncourt, the rules of which stipulate that it may be awarded to an author just once in his lifetime, and Gary had already received it for The Roots of Heaven. He instructed Ajar’s lawyer to turn down the honor on her client’s behalf, but the prize administrators would hear nothing of it. “The Goncourt Prize cannot be accepted or refused any more than life and death. Mr. Ajar remains the laureate.”"

"Beyond Gary’s creative mendacity, one aspect of his life was indubitably genuine. After Germany invaded France, Gary escaped to London, where he became a war hero, serving as a fearless bomber pilot for the Free French Forces. Flying missions even when recuperating from battle wounds, Gary fought a feisty personal, even visceral battle against the Nazis (in one interview, Gary described himself as “testicularly anti-racist”) that was a concrete reality in a life devoted to more amorphous artistry, and his wartime loyalties remained a permanent obsession."

"When it counted, Gary was ultimately accurate, as when he left a suicide note in 1980, explaining that he decided to end his life because he had written all he wished to write and not because his estranged and tormented ex-wife, film star Jean Seberg, had committed suicide a year earlier. Yet such basic home truths in Gary’s life and work can be obscured by his prose style and grandiose, self-mythifying persona. The Dance of Genghis Cohn itself demonstrates Gary’s paradoxical approach of using, as Bellos observes, “vulgarity and coruscating wit to defeat the greatest obscenity of 20th-century history, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazi Germany.” The novel’s protagonist (a blend of Mongol and Jewish, as Gary himself claimed to be), murdered by the Nazis in 1943, becomes a dybbuk in the mind of his executioner. The victim/protagonist forces his murderer to sing songs redolent of Yiddishkeit, like “My Yiddishe Mama.” Such burlesque ironies, painted with broad brushstrokes in a popular novel published one year before the release of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers, demonstrated the comic potential of ridiculing Hitler, but offended some readers in France, notably a critic from the weekly news magazine L’Express, who termed The Dance of Genghis Cohn an “affront to the memory of those who died at Auschwitz.” Forty-five years on, readers and critics are relishing the same pitilessly absurdist authorial voice, describing savage and coarse events of modern history in the savage and coarse terms that so troubled Gary’s readers when his books first appeared decades ago."

"In 1975, Emile Ajar's second novel, La Vie devant soi, was a French literary sensation. The fictionalised memoir of an Arab boy growing up in a Parisian suburb, packed with extraordinary slang, aggressive jokes and almost unbelievable characters, the book was lathered with praise by critics, eventually winning the Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Booker. It went on to become the bestselling French novel of the 20th century. There was only one problem: Ajar was actually Roman Gary, already a bestselling French author (and previous winner of the Goncourt, which is supposed to be awarded to any particular writer only once), who had reinvented himself to outwit the literary establishment and win a new readership."

"By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages — first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg — had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions. But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy."

"Let's go! (Russian: Поéхали, Poyekhali!)"

"I am a friend, comrades, a friend!"

"Dear friends, both known and unknown to me, fellow countrymen, men and women of all lands and continents! In a few minutes a mighty spaceship will take me into the far-away expanses of the Universe. What can I say to you in these last minutes before the start? I see my whole past life as one wonderful moment. Everything I have experienced and done till now has been in preparation for this moment. You must realise that it is hard to express my feelings now that the test for which we have been training ardently and long is at hand. I don't have to tell you what I felt when it was suggested that I should make this flight, the first in history. Was it joy? No, it was something more than that. Pride? No, it was not just pride. I felt very happy - to be the first in space, to engage in an unprecedented duel with Nature - could one dream of anything greater than that? But then I thought of the tremendous responsibility of being the first to accomplish what generations of people had dreamed of, the first to show man the way into space... Can you think of a task more difficult that the one assigned to me. It is not responsibility to a single person, or dozens of people, or even a collective. It is responsibility to all Soviet people, to all mankind, to its present and its future. And if I am nevertheless venturing on this flight, it is because I am a Communist, because I draw strength from unexampled exploits performed by my compatriots, Soviet men and women. I know that I shall muster all my will power the better to do the job. Realising its importance, I will do all I can to carry out the assignment of the Communist Party and the Soviet people. Am I happy to be starting on a space flight? Of course I am. In all times and all eras man's greatest joy has been to take part in new discoveries. I would like to dedicate this first space flight to the people of communism, a society which our Soviet people are already entering, and which, I am confident, all men on earth will enter. It is a matter of minutes now before the start. I say to you good-bye, dear friends, just as people say to each other when setting out on a long journey. I would like very much to embrace you all - people known and unknown to me, close friends and strangers alike. See you soon!"

"If all those people are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet too!"

"Many people are interested in my biography. I have read in a newspaper that some irresponsible persons in the United States of America, who are distant relatives of the Gagarins princes and think that I am one of their offsprings. I have to disillusion them. I am a simple Soviet man. I was born March 9, 1934, to the family of a collective farmer. The place of my birth: Smolensk region, Gzhatsk district, the village of Klushino. I’ve never heard and don’t know any princes or nobility in my family tree. Before the revolution my parents were poor peasants. The older generation of my family, my grandfather and grandmother, were also poor peasants."

"Rays were blazing through the of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich."

"Ведь главная сила в человеке — это сила духа."

"Our people, with their genius and their heroic work, created the Vostok spaceship, wonderful in the world, and its very smart, very reliable equipment. From the start to the very landing, I had no doubt about the successful outcome of the space flight. I would like to sincerely thank our scientists, engineers, technicians, all Soviet workers who created such a ship which allows to confidently comprehend the secrets of outer space. Let me also thank all the comrades and the whole team that prepared me for the space flight. I am convinced that all my friends, pilot-cosmonauts, are also ready to fly around our planet at any time. It is safe to say that we will fly on our more distant routes on our Soviet spacecraft. I am immensely glad that my beloved Motherland was the first in the world to make this flight, the first in the world to penetrate the Cosmos. The first plane, the first sputnik [satellite], the first cosmic spaceship and the first space flight — these are the stages of the great path of my Motherland toward the mastering the secrets of the Nature."

"Облетев Землю в корабле-спутнике, я увидел, как прекрасна наша планета. Люди, будем хранить и преумножать эту красоту, а не разрушать её!"

"What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth.... The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots.... When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth's light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquiose, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black."

"When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"

"I looked and looked but I didn't see God."

"I see no God up here."

"The people of the United States share with the people of the Soviet Union their satisfaction for the safe flight of the astronaut in man's first venture into space. We congratulate you and the Soviet scientists and engineers who made this feat possible. It is my sincere desire that in the continuing quest for knowledge of outer space our nations can work together to obtain the greatest benefit to mankind."

"Trying to describe the experience of going to space has been difficult from the very beginning. When Yuri Gagarin, the first man who went into space, returned to Earth, there was a huge reception in his honor. As his close friend and cosmonaut colleague Alexei Leonov tells it, then-premier Nikita Khrushchev cornered Gagarin "So tell me, Yuri," he asked, "did you see God up there?" After a moment's pause. Gagarin answered, "Yes sir, I did." Khrushchev frowned. "Don't tell any one," he said. A few minutes later the head of the Russian Orthodox Church took Gagarin aside. "So tell me, my child," he asked Gagarin, "did you see God up there?'" Gagarin hesitated and replied "No sir, I did not." "Don't tell anyone.""

"He was like a sound amplified by a mountain echo. The traveller is small, but the mountains are great, and suddenly they merge into a single whole. Such was Yuri Gagarin. To accomplish a heroic exploit means to step beyond one's own sense of self-preservation, to have the courage to dare what today seems unthinkable for the majority. And to be ready to pay for it. For the hero himself, his feat is the limit of all possibilities. If he leaves something "in reserve", then the most courageous deed thereby moves into the category of work: hard, worthy of all glorification, but — work. An act of heroism is always a breakthrough into the Great Unknown. Even given most accurate preliminary calculations, man enters into that enterprise as if blindfold, full of inner tension and ready for any outcome."

"Anton Pervushin said, “In fact, Gagarin should be remembered for completely different words. I always remember that Yuri Gagarin said: ‘An astronaut cannot be suspended in space and not have God in his mind and his heart.’”"

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster."

"Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitans have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour's occupying you is greater than the profit."

"This death’s livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary."

"The sword was odd. The Arab Movement was one: Feisal another (his name means a flashing sword): then there is the excluded notion, Garden of Eden touch: and the division meaning, like the sword in the bed of mixed sleeping, from the Morte d'Arthur. I don't know which was in your mind, but they all came to me — and the sword also means clean-ness, and death."

"All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!"

"To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail."

"You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That's the feeling."

"I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself."

"Isn't it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it's we who led our parents on to bear us, and it's our unborn children who make our flesh itch."

"... wait and watch with the deepest interest the development of the Jewish National Home. If Jews succeeded in translating the policy embodied in the Balfour Declaration [to action by establishing a state], it would certainly be a performance unique in the history of mankind."

"Arabia for the Arabs, Judea for the Jews, and Armenia for the Armenians."

"Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is."

"An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance."

"[B]ut suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head, we might be a vapor, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind, as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target. He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at."

"Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practicing the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex."

"The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander..."

"It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfill the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyze the enemy’s organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of communication” in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not."

"In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

"The Jewish experiment is a conscious effort, on the part of the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the ages, and return once more to the Orient from which they came.” as quoted by R.Elie Mishel, "Lawrence of Arabia, the Unexpected Zionist"

"The success of their scheme will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power." as quoted by R.Elie Mishel, "Lawrence of Arabia, the Unexpected Zionist"

"the sword also means clean-ness + death"

"I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars To gain you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me When I came."

"This, therefore, is a faded dream of the time when I went down into the dust and noise of the Eastern market-place, and with my brain and muscles, with sweat and constant thinking, made others see my visions coming true. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible."

"I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only need was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this was at last done in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred killed, by turning to our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman."

"Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin..."

"Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare."

"The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themself fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth."

"The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being. The Bedawi might be a nominal Sunni, or a nominal Wahabi, or anything else in the Semitic compass, and he would take it very lightly, a little in the manner of the watchmen at Zion's gate who drank beer and laughed in Zion because they were Zionists. Each individual nomad had his revealed religion, not oral or traditional or expressed, but instinctive in himself; and so we got all the Semitic creeds with (in character and essence) a stress on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of God; and according to the power and opportunity of the believer was the expression of them."

"The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.' My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part."

"Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its products among others for private benefit. The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen."

"Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only wearers of khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before whom they took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes, they would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might slip in and out of Feisal's tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert."

"The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had imposed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim. In Kasim there was but little coffee-hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold and silver head-ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical. It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbours' beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of Tightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes — sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and uncumbered minds of the desert-dwellers."

"He saw me shivering, partly I think, with cold, and made it whistle over my ear, taunting me that before his tenth cut I would howl for mercy, and at the twentieth beg for the caresses of the Bey; and then he began to lash me madly across and across with all his might, while I locked my teeth to endure this thing which lapped itself like flaming wire about my body."

"Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors."

"Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages."

"There is no other man I know who could have achieved what Lawrence did. As for taking undue credit for himself, my own personal experience with Lawrence is that he was utterly unconcerned whether any kudos was awarded him or not."

"I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time... We shall never see his like again. His name will live in history. It will live in the annals of war... It will live in the legends of Arabia."

"The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action."

"A disgusting little thing."

"With hindsight, it is easy to see why a slim, self-effacing Englishman named Thomas Edward Lawrence became one of this century's most ballyhooed celebrities. Out of the appalling carnage of World War I — the mud-caked anonymity of the trenches, the hail of mechanized death that spewed from machine guns and fell from airplanes — there emerged a lone Romantic, framed heroically against the clean desert sands of Arabia. U.S. journalist Lowell Thomas was the first to recognize that Lawrence's wartime work — organizing disparate Arab tribes into armed revolt against the occupying Turks, allies of Germany — had pop-myth possibilities. Thomas' publicity essentially created the figure known as Lawrence of Arabia, but others contributed to the saga. Robert Graves wrote a life of Lawrence that appeared in 1927, when its subject was only 39. Lawrence told his own story in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was published shortly after his death from a motorcycle accident in 1935. Since then, the Lawrence legend has thrived through a steady stream of biographies and memoirs. … He would be easier to understand if he were simply larger than life or what his detractors claimed: a self-aggrandizing charlatan. But he took no pleasure in his notoriety; he ran from it. The Selected Letters adds another interpretation to an already overwrought tale. The age demanded a hero, Lawrence qualified, and the 20th century then got what it deserved: a loner, an ascetic, a man who might have been happier as a medieval monk than as the public cynosure he became. No paragon in his own eyes, Lawrence nonetheless remains a haunting presence in the contemporary consciousness, an indissoluble mixture of weaknesses and strength."

"He is one of the few romantic figures of this mechanical war. ... Two or three hypnotic personalities alone appeared. Lawrence of Arabia was one of them. In the Hejaz he got on amazingly well with the Arabs, whose confidence he was able to win in the fullest measure, and he became an adviser and military leader among them in a series of intrepid adventures which harassed and embarrassed the unorganised, ill-equipped Turk. Without any military training, like Clive, he developed a remarkable military flair. Largely owing to his inspiration, a mobile force of irregular cavalry was raised amongst the Arabs who had rebelled against Turkish rule. Although the force raised was a small one, compared with the enormous numbers of men engaged on both sides on the Palestine Fronts, it is difficult to overestimate the value of the service they rendered in the attack upon the Turkish positions."

"The Work is a masterpiece, one of the few very best of its kind in the world."

"At this moment, somewhere in London, hiding from feminine admirers, reporters, book publishers, autograph collections, and every species of hero worship, is a young man whose name will go down in history along with those of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Clive, "Chinese" Gordon, and other legendary heroes of Great Britain's glorious past."

"No artist can develop without increasing his self-knowledge; but self-knowledge supposes a certain preoccupation with the meaning of human life and the destiny of man. A definite set of beliefs — Methodist Christianity, for example — may only be a hindrance to development; but it is not more so than Beckett's refusal to think at all. Shaw says somewhere that all intelligent men must be preoccupied with either religion, politics, or sex. (He seems to attribute T. E. Lawrence's tragedy to his refusal to come to grips with any of them.) It is hard to see how an artist could hope to achieve any degree of self-knowledge without being deeply concerned with at least one of the three."

"not only friendly to the ideals embodied in Zionism but fully conversant on the subject. Chaim Weizmann (A. W. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, 219)"

"[Lawrence and I] went up together with Mr. Churchill to Palestine… On the way we stopped at many wayside stations where Mr. Churchill was given vociferous welcomes. The first of these was at Gaza where there was a tremendous reception by a howling mob all shouting in Arabic ‘Cheers for the Minister’ and also for Great Britain, but their chief cry over which they waxed quite frenzied was ‘Down with the Jews’ and ‘Cut their throats.’ Mr. Churchill and Sir Herbert were delighted with the enthusiasm of their reception, being not in the least aware of what was being shouted. Lawrence, of course, understood it all and told me, but we kept very quiet. He was obviously gravely anxious about the whole situation… We finally got away from Gaza with a sigh of relief on the part of Lawrence and myself. Captain Maxwell Coote, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill’s Orderly Officer, later recalled a frightening moment from the Cairo conference of 1921 where Lawrence served as Churchill's advisor on Arab affairs. (A.W. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, 235-6)"

"For her, this was always a blissful time of day. She knew he didn't want to speak much until the first drink was finished, and she, on her side, was content to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house. She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel-almost as a sunbather feels the sun-that warm male glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together. She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, for the way he came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long strides. She loved the intent, far look in his eyes when they rested in her, the funny shape of the mouth, and especially the way he remained silent about his tiredness, sitting still with himself until the whiskey had taken some of it away."

"Must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?"

"Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion."

"[Closing comments] Now is the time for the Jews of the world to follow the example of the Germans and become anti-Israeli. But do they have the conscience? And do they, I wonder, have the guts?"

"[M]akes one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are. It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again."

"[Responding to criticism as to how he ended his Literary Review article] Perhaps I shouldn't have said that, but it came from my wartime experience [in the RAF], we saw almost none of them in the armed forces then. I mean if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they were always submissive."

"This I did not dare to say, but there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean Hitler, I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason..."

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that, I am sure, is why he does it."

"It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business."

"I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty and very bad and very cruel. And if they're ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That I think is fun and makes an impact."

"It began in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. They killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned. I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel ..."

"You know, I'm not frightened. It's just that I will miss you all so much."

"There's enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well!"

"“We must hurry!” said Mr. Wonka. “We have so much time and so little to do! No! Wait! Strike that! Reverse it!”"

"It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr. President," said the Postmaster General. "The country is so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number."

"“Hooray!” said the Chief of the Army. “Let's blow everyone up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!”"

"“It soon began to dawn on me He wasn’t very bright, Because when he was twenty-three He couldn’t read or write. ‘What shall we do?’ his parents sob. ‘The boy has got the vapors! He couldn’t even get a job Delivering the papers!’ ‘Ah-ha,’ I said, ‘this little clot Could be a politician.’ ‘Nanny,’ he cried, ‘Oh Nanny, what A super proposition!’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s learn and note The art of politics. Let’s teach you how to miss the boat And how to drop some bricks, And how to win the people’s vote And lots of other tricks. Let’s learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean. And most important, by the way, Is not to let your teeth decay, And keep your fingers clean.’ And now that I am eighty-nine, It’s too late to repent. The fault was mine the little swine Became the President.”"

"“I’m afraid the camera got smashed against the side of the Space Hotel, Mr. President,” Shuckworth replied. The President said a very rude word into the microphone and ten million children across the nation began repeating it gleefully and got smacked by their parents."

""A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”"

"Grown-ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets."

"A Message to Children Who Have Read This Book - When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY."

"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be."

"The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles."

""This is the repulsant snozzcumber! I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it! But if I is refusing to guzzle up human beans like the other giants, I must spend my life guzzling up icky-poo snozzcumbers instead. Or else I will be nothing but skin and groans"."

"“Words,” he said, “is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I is wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.” “That happens to everyone,” Sophie said. “Not like it happens to me,” the B.F.G. said. “I is speaking the most terrible wigglish.” “I think you speak beautifully,” Sophie said. “You do?” cried the B.F.G., suddenly brightening. “You really do?” “Simply beautifully,” Sophie repeated. “Well that is the nicest present anyone is ever giving me in my whole life!” cried the B.F.G. “Are you sure you is not twiddling my leg?” “Of course not,” Sophie said. “I just love the way you talk". “How wondercrump!” cried the B.F.G., still beaming. “How whoopsy-splunkers! How absolutely squiffling! I is all of a stutter.”"

"Dreams is very mystical things," the BFG said. "Human beans is not understanding them at all. Not even their brainiest professors is understanding them."

"Ah, but they is not killing their own kind," the BFG said. "Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind."

"One right is not making two lefts."

"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you."

"Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do. All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting. One of the things he NEVER NEVER was allowed to do, the most exciting of them all, was to go out through the garden gate all by himself and explore the world beyond."

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."

"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light."

"[Initially referring to Dahl's attitude towards Jews.] This raises the question whether this is a man whose fictions should be allowed into our children's minds. But the point is that, as he hides himself away in his hit to play with the slapstick-horrific side of a child's imagination, he also sloughs off the world. Israel, his own life, modern novelists all slip away, leaving him to create in peace and innocence. He says he does not even observe his four grand children for inspiration — it all comes over him in the hut. But this dissociation is not as neat as Dahl would like to believe. His own childhood traumas and adult misanthropy are all too obviously present in the books — passages from his autobiography read precisely like one of his stories. Life and Dahl's art do walk hand in hand, even if he has no desire or obligation to ponder the fact. The stories are not the detached fantasies he imagines. They are anti-authoritarian tracts. And the truth is that Dahl himself should disapprove of his own books, for all his attitudes are those of a hard authoritarian, disgusted by indiscipline, television and all the other seductions of the modern world."

"[After his comments to Michael Coren in the 1983 interview cited above] Firmly but not rudely I told him that my father was Jewish, that my grandfather had won all sorts of medals in North Africa and Europe, that Jews fought in enormous numbers in all of the Allied armies, were often over- rather than under-represented, and that this slimy canard of Jewish cowardice was beneath him. At which point he coughed, mumbled something about "sticking together", and then promptly ended the interview."

"There was never any apology from Dahl, clearly because he thought that there was nothing to be sorry about. The paragraph of contrition on his official website took a very long time to come, and while my interview has been quoted every few years, Dahl’s reputation has hardly been trashed."

"The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements. Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words."

"No matter how you spin it – and at times Donald Sturrock spins quite hard – Roald Dahl was an absolute sod. Crashing through life like a big, bad child he managed to alienate pretty much everyone he ever met with his grandiosity, dishonesty and spite. Tempered by the desire to be very wealthy, he was able to finesse this native nastiness into a series of compelling books for children who loved to see their anarchic inner world caught on paper."

"My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too."

"In the original text of Matilda, there is a fantasy section where the heroine "goes on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and India with Rudyard Kipling." That has now been changed, so that Matilda goes to "nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and California with John Steinbeck." I know why these have been changed. Austen is there so the authorial names aren't all men, and Kipling has been swapped for Steinbeck, as Rudyard is associated with British colonialism. But here’s the problem. Nineteenth century estates, like the ones Austen wrote about, were mainly financed by the slave trade. John Steinbeck has been portrayed as a violent misogynist by his first wife. And Hemingway, who survived the sensitivity edit, was also a misogynist, and a mad trophy-hunter of magnificent wild animals. Oh, and by the way, a writer who describes a central character in The Sun Also Rises, as a "rich Jew" and a "kike". Point being, if you dig deep enough, everyone, especially great writers and artists, is problematic. But in a universe where – sorry to say it - Jews don't count, some problems are, it seems bigger than others. These good progressive people making these edits deleting Kipling and Conrad because of their historically sinful associations are doing so to buff up the legacy of – I’m going to put this in italics - Roald Dahl."

"When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl's work, it’s always the nastiness that lingers. ... The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is "Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?" This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts."

"A few edits, though, are so contrary to the spirit of Dahl that they feel like a violation. In The Witches, for example, the protagonist's grandmother warns him to watch out for the evil women who rule the world. They are bald, and cover this up with wigs, as well as hiding their claws under gloves. The grandmother used to say: "You can't go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens." Instead, in the 2022 Puffin edition, she warns the youngster that "there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.""

"Daughter and son became gleeful co-conspirators (and devout readers) of this remarkable writer, a World War II fighter pilot who once, having suffered a fractured skull in a crash, crawled away from the burning wreckage of his aircraft in a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the heat. After that, you could surely forgive Dahl a certain impatience with polite, adult society, and a mockingly macabre attitude to life, and death. No such tolerance is to be extended, however, by po-faced Puffin. The publisher, for whom Dahl continues to make a fortune, has unleashed "sensitivity readers" – the cultural vandals formerly known as "censors" – on his work. As the Telegraph revealed, hundreds of changes have been made in Dahl's books despite ample evidence that millions of kids have grown up pretty well after being exposed to the trauma of words such as "ladies and gentlemen" (now rendered as "folks". Ugh), "fat", "hag" and "black" (even when it's the colour of a tractor, not a person, bizarrely)."

"Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed."

"He was a self confessed antisemite, with pronounced racist leanings, and he joined in the attack on me back in 1989 ... but thanks for telling me off for defending his work from the bowdlerizing Sensitivity Police."

"When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the prime minister agrees with the BFG that we shouldn’t gobblefunk around with words. I think it's important that works of literature and works of fiction are preserved and not airbrushed. We have always defended the right to free speech and expression."

"If you want excellence, you must aim at perfection. It has its drawbacks but being finicky is essential."

"To lead men, you have to lead them with affection."

"His Biographer remarked: Of course, ‘Sir, you believe in excellence.' JRD Tata) retorted sharply, 'Not excellence. Perfection. You aim for perfection, you will attain excellence. If you aim for excellence, you will go lower."

"I don't want India to be an economic superpower. I want India to be a happy country."

"While I usually came back from meeting Gandhiji elated and inspired but always a bit sceptical, and from talks with Jawaharlal, fired with emotional zeal but often confused and unconvinced, meetings with Vallabhbhai were a joy from which I returned with renewed confidence in the future of our country. I have often thought that if fate had decreed that he, instead of Jawaharlal, would be the younger of the two, India would have followed a very different path and would be in better economic shape that it is today."

"I wish, I were big enough, like Einstein, to do what he did on one occasion. A hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner was organised for him to speak, and leaders of America in all fields, particularly in the field of science, were invited to hear the great man. When his turn came, he rose and said:'I've nothing to say,' and sat down. You can imagine the consternation, quite apart from the wasted cost of the dinner! Realising the frightful effect his remarks had on the audience, Einstein got up again and said: 'When I've something to say, I'll let you know.'"

"The essence of air transport is speed, and speed is unfortunately one of the most expensive commodities in the world, principally because of the disproportionate amount of the power required to achieve high speed and to lift loads thousands of feet into the air. This is strikingly illustrated by the fact that while an average cargo ship, freight train and transport aeroplane are each equipped with engines totalling about 2,500 H.P., the ship can carry a load of about 7,000 tons, the train 800 tons and the plane only two and a half tons."

"There is today hardly any country in the world outside the communist bloc which does not have a mixed economy. In fact, even countries which call themselves socialist would object to theirs not being described as a mixed economy, for it would imply that it was a totalitarian one, while countries like Germany or Japan, usually thought of as having typically free enterprise economies, would do the same; for, otherwise, it would imply that theirs was a nineteenth century laissez-faire economy."

"The Psychology of Delay. Some of the causes of delay in coming to economic decisions in our country seem to lie in the psychological realm. There is such a thing as the psychology of power which motivates people: power of control and patronage, power to delay an application, power to hold up a file, power to keep people waiting in an ante-room, all of which are consciously or subconsciously treated as symbols of prestige and hallmarks of importance."

"At the Crossroads.The effective execution of a Plan is what counts and not mere planning on paper; it is not what we put on our plate or even what we eat that provides nourishment and growth, but what we digest."

"Road to Social Justice. The first and perhaps the most important of the factors which have contributed to our failure to make real impact on poverty expressed in terms of total number who live below the poverty line has clearly been the uncontrolled growth of our population...First, we must, at all costs, make a much more earnest effort at controlling the growth of our population. As it is, we are running out of time and there is no longer any possibility of preventing it from exceeding 1,000 million souls by the end of the century."

"Pan Am takes good care of you. Marks & Spencer loves you. Securicor cares. I.B.M. says the customer is king. At Amstrad, we want your money!"

"If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them, too."

"My history of lending money from banks is that they want to know the ins and outs of the backside of a duck."

"I don’t believe in God and all that. But I am Jewish, and very proud to be so, very proud of the culture."

"I came from an environment where I needed to succeed. There was no wealth or anything like that in the family. Not that we were paupers, but we had to fend for ourselves. Kids today are not as hungry as I was. They don’t understand how tough my generation was."

"If you take care of your character, your reputation will take care of itself."

"Now Matthew, you are an awkward character - I'm sorry to say that to you but you are an awkward character. It seems you can't help yourself...you need confrontation! That worries me, that worries me a lot! (To Matthew Palmer, shortly before his firing)."

"When it comes to bullshit, they [advertising agencies] have forgotten what you haven't already learnt about all this crap! (To Rachel - shortly before her firing, when her supposed expertise in advertising results in the failure of the advertising task)."

"Most of the people I do business with are mature businessmen like me, and they are not going to take kindly to being spoken to like a wash woman in the street!! (to Saira Khan during a boardroom showdown)."

"But I've sat here four times, and there is a message coming from above....not that I am a believer in the Lord or anything.... (Immediately before Jo Cameron's firing)."

"Syed, SHUT UP! (Lord Sugar speaking to Syed Ahmed)."

"But you were in the restaurant business before?? Marco-Pierre White or something....The Titanic – well here's another bloody disaster you're in now! (To Syed before Alexa is fired after the infamous catering task when the Invicta team lose because they bought an excessive number of chickens to make pizzas)."

"I tell you what, if any of you survive here, I promise you this: As sure as I have a hole in my bloody arse, when it gets down to the two of you, all these people who are saying nice things about you at the moment, will not! So start thinking about yourself!"

"Your back's against the wall and you're almost done for – it's Dunkirk all over again! (The Apprentice (To Paul, the ex-army Lieutenant before he is fired.))."

"You were devastated when you got a B in your GCSE French. You're gonna be even more devastated now, because you've got the big F – you're fired! (firing Nicholas de Lacy-Brown in episode 1)."

"OK, because if you're unsure, you can always pull your trousers down and we can check. (On whether or not Michael Sophacles is Jewish)."

"Sian Lloyd – what was she doing there? Why did you cast and pay for a kind of celebrity for your advert? You know, I could understand if your advert was based on weather, I could understand if your advert was based on her being upset because her boyfriend blew her out for a cheeky girl, right and she's crying, but I can't understand this. She's not even a mother, what's the point? (Episode 9)."

"We've got two very despondent gentlemen, we've got Claire, she will get her 500 rounds of bullshit out and stick it in her AK47 and deafen us all in here. (Episode 9)."

"All I've heard from you so far is a lot of hot air, so in the interests of climate change you're fired... (to Stuart Baggs in the boardroom)."

"A message needs to go back. Vincent - you're also fired!"

"My disposals get taken away in the back of a taxi! (referring to the task in week 6, which centred around waste disposal and where Edna eventually fired)."

"Robert, I don't like people who bottle out. So Robert - You're fired. (to Robert Goodwin when he was fired before the final boardroom in the second task)"

"I've got to continue the process with some candidates, some very strong candidates that are left. Let's get rid of the no-hopers. No chance. Don't waste my time. (to Ella Jade Bitton after firing Sarah Dales before the first ever triple firing in the series)."

"For remember that until one has given all, one has given nothing."

"I think it's something that dawns on you with the most ghastly, inexorable sense. I didn't suddenly wake up in my pram one day and say 'Yippee, I —', you know. But I think it just dawns on you, you know, slowly, that people are interested in one, and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility."

"You have got to choose somebody very carefully who could fulfill this particular role, because people like you, perhaps, would expect quite a lot from somebody like that and it has got to be somebody pretty special."

"I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship and faith and truth I will bear unto you to live and die against all manner of folks."

"When people are uncertain about what is right and what is wrong, and anxious about being considered old-fashioned, it seems to be worse than folly that Christians are still arguing about doctrinal matters which can only bring needless distress to a number of people."

"Delighted and frankly amazed that Diana is prepared to take me on."

"Anthony Carthew (ITN): And, I suppose, in love? Lady Diana Spencer: Of course! Charles, Prince of Wales: Whatever 'in love' means."

"I have often thought that one of the less attractive traits of various professional bodies and institutions is the deeply ingrained suspicion and outright hostility which can exist towards anything unorthodox or unconventional."

"Perhaps we just have to accept it is God's will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind is ready to receive his message: a message which he probably finds hard to explain, but which he knows comes from a far deeper source than conscious thought."

"I would suggest that the whole imposing edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes is, like the celebrated Tower of Pisa, slightly off balance."

"A large number of us have developed a feeling that architects tend to design houses for the approval of fellow architects and critics, not for the tenants."

"Instead of designing an extension to the elegant facade of the National Gallery which complements it and continues the concept of columns and domes, it looks as if we may be presented with a kind of municipal fire station, complete with the sort of tower that contains the siren. I would understand better this type of high-tech approach if you demolished the whole of Trafalgar Square and started again with a single architect responsible for the entire layout, but what is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend."

"I now appreciate that Arabs and Jews were all a Semitic people originally + it is the influx of foreign, European Jews (especially from Poland, they say) which has helped to cause great problems. I know there are so many complex issues, but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated? Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in US? I must be naive, I suppose!"

"Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart."

"There is perhaps an inherent danger from those who love to parade a kind of dogmatic arrogance without listening to the views of ordinary people. All around us we see the evidence, day after day, of the short-lived theories and fashions which can undermine our individuality, undermine our confidence and take too mechanical or untrusting a view of human nature. The result can be damaging—sometimes devastatingly so—to our confidence and the way we behave... The misnamed fashion for what people call "political correctness" amounts to testing everything, every aspect of life, every aspect of society, against a predetermined, preordained view... The intimidation is palpable. Any questioning, in a perfectly polite way, of the current fashions, usually elicits a vitriolic response—whether it is a wish to teach people the basic principles of English grammar and to rescue the idea that there is a vast difference between good and bad English, or suggesting that in certain circumstances it may be necessary and sensible to administer a smack to your child."

"There is a persistent current that flows along undermining the integrity and motives of individuals, organisations and institutions. An insidious impression is thereby created that, for instance, the police are corrupt, British justice is flawed, the BBC is moribund and public servants are time-serving wasters of taxpayers' money. Can we really believe the fashionable theorists in the English faculties of our universities who have tried to tear apart many of our wonderful novelists, poets and playwrights because they do not fit their abstruse theories of the day?"

"Mrs. Parker Bowles is a great friend of mine...a friend for a very long time. She will continue to be a friend for a long time."

"Jonathan Dimbleby: Understandably, when your marriage collapsed, you form close friendships, you re-establish close friendships, of whatever character that friendship is. Were you, did you try to be, faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage? Charles, Prince of Wales: Yes, absolutely. Dimbleby: And you were? Charles: Yes, until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried."

"Islamic culture in its traditional form has striven to preserve this integrated spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West.[...] There is the potential for establishing new and valuable links between Islamic civilisation and the West. Perhaps, for instance, we could begin by having more Muslim teachers in British schools, or by encouraging exchanges of teachers. Everywhere in the world people are seemingly wanting to learn English. But in the West, in turn, we need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn once again with our hearts, as well as our heads."

"These bloody people. I can't bear that man. I mean, he's so awful, he really is."

"After my speech, the President detached himself from the group of appalling old waxworks who accompanied him and took his place at the lectern. He then gave a kind of "propaganda" speech which was loudly cheered by the bussed-in party faithful at the suitable moment in the text."

"Such is the end of Empire."

"I believe that the proper mix of proven complementary, traditional and modern remedies, which emphasizes the active participation of the patient, can help create a powerful healing force in the world."

"Orthodox practice can learn from complementary medicine. The West can learn from the East and new from old traditions."

"[In] the ceaseless rush to modernize [...] many beneficial approaches, which have been tried and tested and have shown themselves to be effective, have been cast aside because they are deemed to be old-fashioned or irrelevant to today's needs."

"[In his Highgrove garden.] I happily talk to the plants and trees, and listen to them. I think it's absolutely crucial [...] Everything I've done here, it's like almost with your children. Every tree has a meaning for me."

"If you want to develop character, go to Australia."

"I don’t want to be confronted by my future grandchild and them say, "Why didn’t you do something?" So clearly now that we will have a grandchild, it makes it even more obvious to try to make sure we leave them something that isn’t a total poisoned chalice."

"Climate change and biodiversity loss . . . pose an even greater existential threat [than the COVID-19 pandemic], to the extent that we have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing. . . . Putting a value on carbon . . . [is] absolutely critical. . . . [W]e need a vast military style campaign to marshall the strength of the global private sector[, which has] trillions at its disposal . . . . [E]ach sector needs a clear strategy to speed up the process of getting innovations to market [and we] need to align private investment behind these industry strategies. . . . If we can develop a pipeline of many more sustainable and "bankable" projects, at a sufficient scale, it will attract greater investment. . . . CEOs and institutional investors have told me that alongside the promises countries have made, their nationally determined contributions, they need clear market signals, agreed globally, so that they have the confidence to invest without the goal posts suddenly moving. . . . [[w:Charles III#Natural environment|[W]e are working]] to drive trillions of dollars in support of transition across ten of the most emitting and polluting industries [including] energy, agriculture, transportation, health systems and fashion. . . . I can only urge you, as the world’s decision-makers, to find practical ways of overcoming differences so we can all . . . rescue this precious planet and save the threatened future of our young people."

"I speak to you today with feelings of profound sorrow. Throughout her life, Her Majesty The Queen — my beloved mother — was an inspiration and example to me and to all my family, and we owe her the most heartfelt debt any family can owe to their mother; for her love, affection, guidance, understanding and example. Queen Elizabeth was a life well lived; a promise with destiny kept and she is mourned most deeply in her passing. That promise of lifelong service I renew to you all today."

"In 1947, on her 21st birthday, she pledged in a broadcast from Cape Town to the Commonwealth to devote her life, whether it be short or long, to the service of her peoples. That was more than a promise; it was a profound personal commitment which defined her whole life. She made sacrifices for duty. Her dedication and devotion as sovereign never waivered, through times of change and progress, through times of joy and celebration, and through times of sadness and loss. In her life of service we saw that abiding love of tradition, together with that fearless embrace of progress, which make us great as nations. The affection, admiration and respect she inspired became the hallmark of her reign. And, as every member of my family can testify, she combined these qualities with warmth, humour and an unerring ability always to see the best in people. I pay tribute to my mother's memory and I honour her life of service. I know that her death brings great sadness to so many of you and I share that sense of loss, beyond measure, with you all."

"When the Queen came to the throne, Britain and the world were still coping with the privations and aftermath of the Second World War, and still living by the conventions of earlier times. In the course of the last 70 years we have seen our society become one of many cultures and many faiths. The institutions of the state have changed in turn. But, through all changes and challenges, our nation and the wider family of realms — of whose talents, traditions and achievements I am so inexpressibly proud — have prospered and flourished. Our values have remained, and must remain, constant."

"I have been brought up to cherish a sense of duty to others, and to hold in the greatest respect the precious traditions, freedoms and responsibilities of our unique history and our system of parliamentary government. As the Queen herself did with such unswerving devotion, I too now solemnly pledge myself, throughout the remaining time God grants me, to uphold the constitutional principles at the heart of our nation. And wherever you may live in the United Kingdom, or in the realms and territories across the world, and whatever may be your background or beliefs, I shall endeavor to serve you with loyalty, respect and love, as I have throughout my life."

"In a little over a week's time we will come together as a nation, as a Commonwealth and indeed a global community, to lay my beloved mother to rest. In our sorrow, let us remember and draw strength from the light of her example. On behalf of all my family, I can only offer the most sincere and heartfelt thanks for your condolences and support. They mean more to me than I can ever possibly express. And to my darling mama, as you begin your last great journey to join my dear late papa, I want simply to say this: thank you. Thank you for your love and devotion to our family and to the family of nations you have served so diligently all these years. May "flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.""

"As stewards of this precious planet, it is our actions, and our actions alone, that will determine its future."

"It has been nearly seventy years since the Sovereign first opened Parliament. In the time since, Canada has dramatically changed: repatriating its Constitution, achieving full independence, and witnessing immense growth. Canada has embraced its British, French, and Indigenous roots, and become a bold, ambitious, innovative country that is bilingual, truly multicultural, and committed to reconciliation. The Crown has for so long been a symbol of unity for Canada. It also represents stability and continuity from the past to the present. As it should, it stands proudly as a symbol of Canada today, in all her richness and dynamism."

"When my dear late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, opened a new Canadian Parliament in 1957, the Second World War remained a fresh, painful memory. The Cold War was intensifying. Freedom and democracy were under threat. Canada was emerging as a growing economic power and a force for peace in the world. In the decades since, history has been punctuated by epoch-making events: the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the start of the War on Terror. Today, Canada faces another critical moment. Democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination, and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear, and ones which the Government is determined to protect. The system of open global trade that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for Canadians for decades, is changing. Canada’s relationships with partners are also changing."

"Many Canadians are feeling anxious and worried about the drastically changing world around them. Fundamental change is always unsettling. Yet this moment is also an incredible opportunity. An opportunity for renewal. An opportunity to think big and to act bigger. An opportunity for Canada to embark on the largest transformation of its economy since the Second World War. A confident Canada, which has welcomed new Canadians, including from some of the most tragic global conflict zones, can seize this opportunity by recognising that all Canadians can give themselves far more than any foreign power on any continent can ever take away. And that by staying true to Canadian values, Canada can build new alliances and a new economy that serves all Canadians."

"When my dear late mother addressed your predecessors seven decades ago, she said that in that age, and against the backdrop of international affairs, no nation could live unto itself. It is a source of great pride that, in the following decades, Canada has continued to set an example to the world in her conduct and values, as a force for good. … As the anthem reminds us: The True North is indeed strong and free!"

"Convinced republican that I am, and foe of the prince who talks to plants and wants to be crowned "head of all faiths" as well as the etiolated Church of England, I find myself pierced by a pang of sympathy. Not much of a life, is it, growing old and stale with no real job except waiting for the news of Mummy's death? Some British people claim actually to "love" their rather dumpy Hanoverian ruling house. This love takes the macabre form of demanding a regular human sacrifice whereby unexceptional people are condemned to lead wholly artificial and strained existences, and then punished or humiliated when they crack up."

"As in the nineteenth-century reactions against industrialization, environmental concerns raise nostalgia for a bygone age. Like a medieval millenarian, Prince Charles of Britain asserts that we are running out of time to save the world. Charles has emerged as perhaps the premier "feudal critic of capitalism," as one socialist publication put it. He views free-market capitalism as a scourge upon the earth, and promotes a new kind of noblesse oblige centered on concern for the natural world and social harmony."

"Oh, the little grovelling bastard."

"[I]f we’re going to jeer at North Korea for being a de facto monarchy, we must also acknowledge the main advantage of such a system: no divisive squabbling over who has the right to rule. On my book tour for “The Cleanest Race” I used the example of my British mother: a firm supporter of the monarchy with different estimations of the various royals. She doesn’t like the idea of Charles becoming king, but accepts that it will and must happen."

"I think other companies need to stand on their own two feet, and the weak ones need to go to the wall."

"One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes."

"My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, “Oh God, I've got to do this today.”"

"I became an entrepreneur by mistake. Ever since then I've gone into business, not to make money, but because I think I can do it better than it's been done elsewhere. And, quite often, just out of personal frustration about the way it's been done by other people."

"My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around."

"Making money never was my incentive. I just want to fight big companies."

"If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."

"I was born under a lucky star, and I have nothing whatsoever to regret. I wouldn’t change a thing about my life."

"To be associated with industry no longer carries the stigma of profiteering, exploitation and of being uncaring as it did when I was at school."

"The talents of young people must not be stifled. Education is not just about getting the right grades in exams but it should encourage all students to develop their optimum capacity, whatever that may be. Schools and colleges should prepare young people for life."

"A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad."

"We're here to make space more accessible to all. We want to turn the next generation of dreamers into the astronauts of today and tomorrow. We've all us on this stage have had the most extraordinary experience, and we'd love it if a number of you can have it, too. … If you ever had a dream, now is the time to make it come true — and I'd like to end by saying welcome to the dawn of a new space age."

"On one of my last days at school, aged 15, my headmaster predicted that I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire ... So for anyone anxious about their A-level results today, I hope this brings you some encouragement!"

"Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue."

"(On performing in Costa Rica for the first time) It was like finding some weird tribe in the middle of the jungle and, you know, they all come out and go: "Fear of the Dark. Favorite Album." What?!?"

"Fans want to see people who can play; they respect certain values like professionalism, and they don't want to be treated like shit. They pay good money and they look forward to seeing some good music being played by decent musicians, who really put their soul into it."

"We tread a fine line between taking ourselves seriously and being Spinal Tap."

"Metal lives in a world of its own creation."

"It certainly isn't croquet, and it certainly isn't lawn bowls."

"It's me versus Mother Nature and me versus me. I want to see how far a human can fly with six kilograms of high-tech nylon over his head with no engine. Ultimately though, I love being able to fly like a bird."

"It's like winning Lotto 10 times in a row."

"You should also say that to the 30 other pilots who were 200m in front of her and Zhongpin, 1 of them was sucked up as well (Belgium pilot)."

"All flight is based upon producing air pressure, all flight energy consists in overcoming air pressure."

"I, too, have made it a lifelong task of mine to add a cultural element to my work, which should result in uniting countries and reconciling their people. Our experience of today's civilisation suffers from the fact that it only happens on the surface of the earth. We have invented barricades between our countries, custom regulations and constraints and complicated traffic laws and these are only possible because we are not in control of the 'kingdom of the air', and not as 'free as a bird'. Numerous technicians in every state are doing their utmost to achieve the dream of free, unlimited flight and it is precisely here where changes can be made which would have a radical effect on our whole way of life. The borders between countries would lose their significance, because they could not be closed off from each other. Linguistic differences would disappear, as human mobility increased. National defence would cease to devour the best resources of nations as it would become impossible in itself. And the necessity of resolving disagreements among nations in some other way than by bloody battles would, in its turn, lead us to eternal peace. We are getting closer to this goal. When we will reach it, I do not know."

"Artificial flight may be defined as that form of aviation in which a man flies at will in any direction by means of an apparatus attached to his body, the use of which requires personal skill. Artificial flight by a single individual is the proper beginning for all species of artificial flight, as the necessary conditions can most easily be fulfilled when man flies individually."

"The increasing size of the apparatus makes the construction more difficult in securing lightness in the machine; therefore the building of small apparatus is to be recommended."

"The difficulty of rising into the air increases rapidly with the size of the apparatus. The uplifting of a single person, therefore, is more easily attained than that of a large flying machine loaded with several persons."

"Gradual development of flight should begin with the simplest apparatus and movements, and without time complication of dynamic means."

"The sailing flight of birds is the only form of flight which is carried on for some length of time without the expenditure of power."

"The contrivances which are necessary to counteract the wind effects can only be understood by actual practice in the wind."

"The supporting powers of time air and of the wind depend on the shape of the surfaces used, and the best forms can only be evolved by free flight through the air."

"The maintenance of equilibrium in forward flight is a matter of practice, and can only be learned by repeated personal experiment."

"Experience alone can teach us the best forms of construction for sailing apparatus in order that they may be of sufficient strength, very light, and most easily managed."

"By practice and experience a man can (if the wind be of the right strength) imitate the complete sailing flight of birds by availing himself of the slight upward trend of some winds, by performing circling sweeps, and by allowing the air to carry him."

"Actual practice in individual flight presents the best prospects for developing our capacity until it leads to perfected free flight."

"To design a flying machine is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything."

"Particular honour belongs to those who believed in the possibility of mechanical flight when all the world was against them; not the visionaries because they hoped for it merely, but those who by sheer force of intellect perceived the means by which it could be accomplished and directed their experiments along the right path. … The name of Lilienthal is now among the most honoured, but curiously his own countrymen were the last to recognize the value of his work."

"Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. … It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted."

"We’re very lucky. You know, we have lots of things that we are very fortunate to have. You know, we have a house, you know? We have, you know, all these sort of nice things around us. And so, you know, we’re grateful for that because so many people don’t have that. We have, you know, relative stability and stuff like that. And, you know, lots of things that, you know, everyone would, you know, love to have."

"It (slavery) should never have happened... I know that this tour has brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future. In Belize, Jamaica and The Bahamas, that future is for the people to decide upon. But we have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with communities in all three countries, understanding more about the issues that matter most to them. Catherine and I are committed to service. For us that’s not telling people what to do. It is about serving and supporting them in whatever way they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have. It is why tours such as this reaffirm our desire to serve the people of the Commonwealth and to listen to communities around the world. Who the Commonwealth chooses to lead its family in the future isn’t what is on my mind. What matters to us is the potential the Commonwealth family has to create a better future for the people who form it, and our commitment to serve and support as best we can."

"Of course, Harry and I are both quite upset about it - that our mother's trust has been betrayed and even now she is still being exploited."

"My plans aren't quite solid. I'm hugely disorganized, you see, so once I sort it out you'll probably find out."

"I was just talking with friends and they said it was good idea and I just sort of liked the idea."

"It made a real big difference with everyone not trying to sort of snap a picture every time I was walking around the streets. I hope it just continues for Harry as well when he is there."

"We had been talking about marriage for a while so it wasn't a massively big surprise. I took her up somewhere nice in Kenya and I proposed. … I'd been planning it for a while but as any guy out there will know it takes a certain amount of motivation to get yourself going. I was planning it and then it just felt really right out in Africa. It was beautiful at the time. I had done a little bit of planning to show my romantic side."

"I'm not an expert. I've been reliably informed it's a sapphire with some diamonds. But I'm sure everyone recognises it from previous times."

"I think at first they were a bit surprised that it had happened, then they realised it was really nice and it was good fun and we got on really well, they were good friends of ours as well so we had a good giggle with them as well."

"When I first met Kate I knew there was something very special about her. I knew there was possibly something that I wanted to explore there. But we ended up being friends for a while and that was a good foundation. I do generally believe now that being friends with one another is a massive advantage. It just went from there. I knew over the years, I knew that things were getting better and better and we went through a few stumbling blocks as every relationship does, but we picked ourselves up and carried on. From were you had the odd problem when you are first getting to know each other, those have all gone and it is just really easy being with each other, it is really fun and I'm extremely funny and she loves that so it's been good."

"For Prince William at least it was decided on the day of his birth what he should do: Find a presentable wife, father a male heir (and preferably a male "spare" as well), and keep the show on the road. By yet another exercise of that notorious "magic," it is now doubly and triply important that he does this simple thing right, because only his supposed charisma can save the country from what monarchists dread and republicans ought to hope for: King Charles III. (Monarchy, you see, is a hereditary disease that can only be cured by fresh outbreaks of itself.)"

"I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth."

"The great majority of people in England and America are modest, decent and pure-minded and the amount of virgins in the world today is stupendous."

"The right diet directs sexual energy into the parts that matter."

"France is the only place where you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on your door."

"I will be voting for John Major. He is getting better and better every year. He is very, very good. He now speaks far better than he did. He's a brilliant speaker. He is learning to be a real leader. He really does speak out. Look around and who else is like the old leaders like Winston? I knew Winston when he was a little boy. He gradually got stronger and stronger. John Major came to lunch with me when he got in. He asked me what he should be doing. I said take England back to what it was. We really want lo be led, and John Major is leading as he has never before."

"The Labour Party are going to bring in a law that means you can go everywhere you want in the country. I have checked this with two people and they both said it was true. People will be able to walk into your garden and pick your flowers. It is absurd. My garden is a blaze of flowers. I don't want anyone In there."

"Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cartland's Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. In many ways her most romantic book, it was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was "all of a piece", something which I always admired."

"We shall work not on the macrocosmic scale of the literary forms, but on the microcosmic scale of the lexical forms."

"This book is therefore consecrated to the deeper and fuller study of that linguistic world in which the Hebrew Bible is set."

"The problem here is not so much a historical one, more a terminological and philosophical one."

"Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:"

"#creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience"

"#the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story"

"#Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark."

"Nothing says romance like hobos, martyrs and decapitations."

"In 1963 the BBC premiered a show about an alien Who traveled through space and time to combat the powers of evil. … The show has been running in Britain almost fifty years, with many different actors in the role of The Doctor. … One thing is consistent though and this is why the show is so beloved by geeks and nerds — It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism! Intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism! And if there is any hope for any of us in this giant explosion in which we inhabit then surely that’s it: Intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism!"

"I dont know how to add things to my own wikipedia page."

"Change is the law of God's mind and resistance to it is the source of all pain."

"In a Scottish opera, it ain't over 'till the fat lady bitch-slaps you."

"I'm a vulgar lounge entertainer, I don't need to wear a tie."

"Whaa, I'm Brad Pitt. I'll crush you." [audience laughs] "With my hand!"

"He's quiet as well, especially if you stalk him."

"As a vulgar lounge entertainer, my business relies on ridiculous stereotypes! If these people start using deodorant, I might as well just go home!"

"You die alone in your house, and your cat will eat you."

"Get well soon, Castro. [pause] Actually, no, don't; die, you bastard!"

"I don't like my politicians entertaining me and I don't like my entertainers politicianing [sic] me."

"He's German so he's Herr Ball. Herr Ball. His movies are so bad, cats choke when they hear his name."

"That's here on CBS, where the 'C' stands for 'Classy' and the 'BS' speaks for itself."

"I enjoy bathing, as many Europeans don't."

"Kids: If a bear is wearing a ranger hat, it's because he ate the ranger!"

"Oh, this isn't a talk show; it's more just filling time, really, 'til the infomercials start."

"You don't say 'we're suspending the campaign'! You can't say that! We didn't sus-, you can't, it's the democratic process! We didn't suspend it for 9/11, we didn't suspend it for Pearl Harbor, we didn't suspend it for the Nazis, we didn't suspend it for the damn British! We don't do that in America! We don't! There's no suspending the campaign! Democracy first! First, first, first! First! Democracy, FIRST!"

"I haven't had a drink in thirteen years, but occasionally I'm tempted to have one beer. The problem is that if I have that one beer, I wake up in Tijuana four days later with a tattoo and a sore ass."

"Relax, you're among friends now. The long hard day is over and the roly-poly funny man is before you."

"Just a warning: If you're a bunch of sexy teenagers at a lake where other sexy teenagers were killed 30 years ago, leave! The guy in the forest with a hockey mask... maybe doesn't play hockey."

"[to Rupert Grint] Look at the great city of LA stretched out in front of you, son: there's dangerous people living in that cardboard backdrop."

"Don't do that... By the way, this is not Oprah furniture; you jump on this, and it will be firewood... Oprah's got the real thing, this stuff...this is about as real as that [points to cityscape backdrop] right there."

"Clive Barker: It's an excuse to look at my groin. Craig Ferguson: I'm European - I don't need an excuse."

"Craig Ferguson: Do you do therapy? Hugh Laurie: I see a gentleman once a week. Craig Ferguson: I love it, I'm a great convert. Hugh Laurie: Therapy? Craig Ferguson: No, just seeing a gentleman once a week."

"I'm TV's Craig Ferguson, please sit down relax and: "take off your pants"; "dip your hand into a bowl of warm water and fall fast asleep"; etc."

"I view my own body as a Donalds hiccups I am the main attraction... And the only customer."

"[reading an email] "Dear Craig, … are your letters written by your writers?" No. "Does this make me one of your writers?" (ponders) Yes. "Why haven't I been paid?" Because you're one of my writers!"

"[to camera] Excuse me for just a second. [walks off-camera, to studio audience] Shut up!"

"[bends over] *errgh* Sorry for making that noise, but … that's what happens when you get older. One day what happens is that you bend over, and you never come back."

"Laughter separates us from despair and gives us a chance at love."

"[The Secretariat horse character reveals his true identity, and it happens to be Bob Newhart.]"

"[When beginning the cold open with another person] Please state your name for the camera."

"Another innocent victim of my pointless rage."

"I can't live by your rules, man!"

"[After the doorbell rings, right before Secretariat appears] Who's that at the door?!"

"It's a great day for America, everybody."

"Remind you of anyone?"

"[referring to himself] Where's the Scottish Conan guy?"

"Sounds like a party at Elton John's house."

"It's a JOKE!"

"[referring to a category of people he might have upset with a joke] I'm looking forward to your letters..."

"[in reference to a two-word comment from a guest] ...I used to dance under that name."

"It's okay, I'm European [referring to a preceding sexually ambiguous comment]."

"I Know!...."

"...or is it?"

"...best night of my life."

"You know who doesn't like _____? Al-Qaeda!"

"[referring to a suggestive comment aimed at the audience] You too, ladies."

"[with a fist-shake] Take that, ____."

"By the way, there's a place on Hollywood Boulevard where you can get a _____ for twenty bucks."

"By the way, _____ was a name I used to dance under."

"By the way, _____ was the name of a movie I accidentally watched in a hotel room twenty or thirty times."

"Welcome back, my cheeky wee monkeys."

"Welcome back, my filthy pigeons."

"Welcome back, my naughty monkeys. [whipcrack]"

"Welcome back, my naughty donkeys."

"Welcome back, my naughty penguins."

"Welcome back, my frisky badgers"

"Welcome back to the big show where (at this point, he references something from earlier in the show)"

"Do what you love, and what you're proud of, and you're fuckin' bulletproof. You're fuckin' bulletproof. If you do what you absolutely believe to be right, then you're fuckin' bulletproof."

"Love at first sight is not rare, in fact it is extremely common, it happens to some people a few times a year. The feeling of “what if” when meeting the eyes of a stranger can be love unrecognized."

"They could have gotten help for this infertility but they believed that interfering with the reproductive process, even if it was faulty, was anti-God. It was against His plan. It never occurred to them that God may have provided the world with a vast array of very brainy medical types for the very reason of solving problems such as theirs. However, there is one thing that the medical profession cannot do and that is save people from being idiots."

"Change is the nature of God’s mind, and resistance to it is the source of great pain."

"The devil is not abroad at night in the form of a cat or a wolf or any other animal. He lives eternally in the hearts of men."

"Fraser’s mother, Janice, was actually quite a happy soul but she had to hide it because, like all pseudo-intellectuals, she thought being cheery made her look stupid, which of course she was for believing that rubbish in the first place."

"Like most sharks, Margaret liked to think of herself as a victim of the cruel sea."

"High school is tough on anyone, an absolute rule of the Universe being that if high school is not a buttockclenchingly awkward, emotionally difficult, and unpleasant time of your life, then the rest of it will be a crushing disappointment. Academic success is desirable, popularity (the only thing that most students really desire) is not. Those who excel socially in high school are truly damned. The homecoming queen does indeed bear the mark of the beast."

"Being guilty tends to engender feelings of guilt."

"Always laugh second."

"Allowances can always be made for your friends to disagree with you. Disagreement, vehement disagreement, is healthy. Debate is impossible without it. Evil does not question itself. Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken."

"Like many of her sex, Sophie was fiercely competitive with other women, working on the crackpot theory that if she could be better in some way, men would like her more, respect her. Make her happy. She never cottoned on that the men she was attracted to, the men who found her attractive, didn’t like women."

"That’s the thing about terrorism – it works. Especially for the terrorists – they might not get what they want but it feels damn good trying."

"Confession is a sacred rite enhanced by allegory, exaggeration, and lies."

"Evil does not question itself. Only Hope questions itself."

"Time is only linear for engineers and referees."

"The problem with suicide is that it seems so flamboyant. It’s camp. You have to be a bit of a drama queen to ever seriously consider it."

"Failure is not a disgrace. It’s just a pitch that you missed, and you’d better get ready for the next one... My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don’t."

"I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn’t poison the writing that I was discovering for myself."

"Being funny is a gift, and, when done well, is an art form."

"Sober alkies are often asked: “When did you hit rock bottom?” but a more informed question might be: “How many times did you hit rock bottom?"

"Appear tougher or cooler or funnier than you feel and there is a chance you’ll make it."

"There are bound to be some lies here, but I’ve been telling them so long they’ve become truth, my truth, as close as I can get to what really happened."

"Between safety and adventure I choose adventure."

"America is, for me, an aspiration, a philosophy, a way of being, a dream."

"The trouble I have with astrophysics or quantum mechanics is the same problem I have with philosophy; which is: initially it is mind blowing, then it is fascinating, then it is disturbing, then it is almost uncomprehensible, then it's fascinating again, then you disappear up your own ass."

"The Allied airborne operation in Sicily was decisive despite widely scattered drops which must be expected in a night landing. It is my opinion that if it had not been for the Allied airborne forces (82nd) blocking the Hermann Goering Armd. Div. from reaching the beachhead, that division would have driven the initial seaborne forces back into the sea. I attribute the entire success of the Allied Sicilian Operation to the delaying of German reserves (by the 82nd ABN Div.) until sufficient forces had been landed by sea to resist the counterattacks by our defending forces, the strength of which had been held in mobile reserve."

"Hitler was very upset by the heavy losses suffered by the parachute units, and came to the conclusion that their surprise value had passed. After that he often said to me: "The day of parachute troops is over." He would not believe reports that the British and Americans were developing airborne forces. The fact that none were used in the St. Nazaire and Dieppe raids confirmed his opinion. He said to me: 'There, you see! They are not raising such forces. I was right.' He only changed his mind after the Allied conquest of Sicily in 1943. Impressed by the way the Allies had used them there, he ordered an expansion of our own airborne forces. But that change of mind came too late - because by then you had command of the air, and airborne troops could not be effectively used in face of a superior air force."

"The limitations of our strength compelled us to concentrate on two objectives - the points which seemed the most essential to the success of the invasion. The main effort, under my own control, was directed against the bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk by which the main route from the south was carried across the mouths of the Rhine. Our task was to capture the bridges before the Dutch could blow them up, and keep them open until the arrival of our mobile ground forces. My force comprised four parachute battalions and one air-transported regiment (of three battalions). We achieved complete success, at a cost of only 180 casualties. We dared not fail, for if we did the whole invasion would have failed. The secondary attack was made against The Hague. Its aim was to get a hold upon the Dutch capital, and in particular to capture the Government offices and the Service headquarters. The force employed here was commanded by General Graf Sponcck; it consisted of one parachute battalion and two air-transported regiments. This attack did not succeed. Several hundred men were killed and wounded, while as many were taken prisoner."

"I have never seen such a defiance of death."

"Kurt Student was a German professional soldier, typical of the best of his kind, totally devoted to his calling and to his country, though by no means in full sympathy with Nazi leadership."

"General Kurt Student was a German of the almost obsessively meticulous order and was determined to ensure that every unit involved in the forthcoming operation was kept fully briefed."

"They attracted Hurricanes and Spitfires as honey attracts flies."

"The fighter must seek battle in the air."

"The wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread throughout Germany. Appalling details of the great fire were recounted. The glow of the fires could be seen for one hundred twenty miles. A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces. In every large town people said, 'what happened in Hamburg yesterday can happen to us tomorrow.' Berlin was evacuated amid signs of panic. In spite of strict reticence in official communiques, the terror of Hamburg spread rapidly to the remotest villages of the Reich. After Hamburg in the wide circle of the political and the military command could be heard the words: "The war is lost"."

"During the Battle of Britain the question "fighter or fighter-bomber?" had been decided once and for all: The fighter can only be used as a bomb carrier with lasting effect when sufficient air superiority has been won."

"Never abandon the possibility of attack. Attack even from a position of inferiority, to disrupt the enemy's plans. This often results in improving one's own position."

""He who wants to protect everything, protects nothing," is one of the fundamental rules of defense."

"To use a fighter as a fighter-bomber when the strength of the fighter arm is inadequate to achieve air superiority is putting the cart before the horse."

"Superior technical achievements — used correctly both strategically and tactically — can beat any quantity numerically many times stronger yet technically inferior."

"The colossus of World War II seemed to be like a pyramid turned upside down, and for the moment the whole burden of the war rested on the few hundred German fighter pilots on the Channel coast."

"I envy you Galland, for going into action. I wish I were a few years younger and less bulky. If I were, I would gladly put myself under your command. It would be marvelous to have nothing to worry about but a good fight, like it was in the old days."

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

"We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for them to go on with the war. That is our object; we shall pursue it relentlessly."

"In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method."

"I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance."

"People talk a lot about picking out targets and bombing them, individual small targets – in the European climate? I’ve come to the conclusion that people who say that sort of thing not only have never been outside, but they’ve never looked out of a window."

"I never engaged in these idiotic pamphlet-dropping exercises. They only served two purposes really - they gave the German defences endless practice in getting ready for it, and apart from that they supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans."

"The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things."

"At the start of the Second World War, there were still some questions, at least on the Allied side, about what constituted a legitimate target (a British Cabinet minister is said to have protested in 1939, ‘But that’s private property,’ when the possibility of bombing German industry in the Ruhr came up). The all-out nature of the war swept such issues aside, although, again on the Allied side, they never completely disappeared. All the belligerents used bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight on. Ports, factories, railway marshalling yards, oil depots, dams and bridges were all targets, but so too were housing and city centres. Hermann Goering promised Hitler in the summer of 1940 that he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities, especially London. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, was convinced, and managed to persuade his superiors, including Winston Churchill, that the war against Germany could be won by the bomber and that the critical target was German morale."

"The electrification of the automobile is inevitable."

"People who fear losing their jobs start lying"

"The amazing thing about Jeep is that no one thinks of it as an American brand—it’s nationally neutral"

"The adverse impact on development productivity of requiring programmers to navigate along access paths to reach target data [...] was enormous. In addition, it was not possible to make slight changes in the layout in storage without simultaneously having to revise all programs that relied on the previous structure. [...] As a result, far too much manpower was being invested in continual (and avoidable) maintenance of application programs."

"The most important motivation for the research work that resulted in the relational model was the objective of providing a sharp and clear boundary between the logical and physical aspects of database management."

"It is no surprise that attempts such as those of CODASYL and ANSI to develop data structure language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) in separate communities have yielded many misunderstandings and incompatibilities."

"Relational processing entails treating whole relationships as operands. Its primary purpose is loop-avoidance, an absolute requirement for end users to be productive at all, and a clear productivity booster for application programmers."

"At the time, Nixon was normalizing relations with China. I figured that if he could normalize relations, then so could I."

"For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems. He originated the relational approach to database management in a series of research papers published commencing in 1970. His paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" was a seminal paper, in a continuing and carefully developed series of papers. Dr. Codd built upon this space and in doing so has provided the impetus for widespread research into numerous related areas, including database languages, query subsystems, database semantics, locking and recovery, and inferential subsystems."

"I could imagine how those queries would have been represented in CODASYL by programs that were five pages long that would navigate through this labyrinth of pointers and stuff. Codd would sort of write them down as one-liners. … They weren't complicated at all. I said, "Wow." This was kind of a conversion experience for me."

"If we die we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men."

"Do good work."

"Other women who flew were women of independent means. But I had to do something with it."

"Things like radio etc. didn't exist. You passed an aeroplane on the right and the aircraft landing had priority over the one taking off. There was no control tower, and no control. If you were going to practice flying through cloud you told someone on the aerodrome that's what you were going to do and that was enough!"

"As a four-year-old, my mother told me I was climbing the fence, jumping off and calling myself an 'eppyplane' … I bought books on aeroplanes, I followed everything in the newspapers about aeroplanes. Amy Johnson flew to Australia in 1930 - why couldn't I do something like that?"

"I want not to panic. I want to be comfortable in my body and my life. I don't want to keep thinking that I don't belong here, that I have ended up on the wrong planet, completely alienated. (from Changeling)"

"In this world, everything has a pulse or a vibration. This sound is unique to each living or non-living thing and in itself creates a music that no-one can hear. I believe that this has a very powerful resonance with, and a deep effect on, our lives. What would happen if we took this further and applied it to bigger things, more powerful things; like an entire solar system or galaxy say, what would that sound like? Musica Universalis is the ancient theory that every celestial body, the sun, the moon and the stars, has an inner music. This is a harmonic and mathematical concept derived from the movements of the planets in the solar system. The music created is inaudible to the human ear. Music of the Spheres is my interpretation of this theory. Every planet and every star; the whole universe has music within it that no-one can hear. This is what it would sound like if it was set free. This is Music of the Spheres. (from the introduction to Music of the Spheres)"

"The biggest problems were to do with... well, to get that successful when you're so young, it attracts hangers-on, parasites, people who want to feed off you. I thought people actually liked me, but they actually liked my money. I'd probably say to my younger self, get yourself a whole collection of lawyers. Which is what I have now. I don't have any friends; I just have lawyers. At the last count I had about 15 different sets of them for all kinds of problems. And you can trust them because you're paying them. I know that sounds very negative, but that's the world we live in."

"When I was younger I had an incredible sensitivity; I suppose there were too many brain cells, or they were organised in the wrong way, and they've either reorganised themselves or I've lost lots of them through alcohol and substance abuse. I can get along without being terrified now. Maybe I've just got used to it."

"Everything on Tubular Bells was done on the first take – it was lovely, so spontaneous. I had such a long time to prepare it, and I had just one little chance to do it, and now I listen to it and it has a lovely spontaneous energy. It's got mistakes, and I could easily have cut them out, but I left them on."

"If it was a horrible thing I was known for, like some horrible pop song, it would annoy me, but it doesn't. I'm proud of it."

"We're looking For the strangers With sunlight in their eyes Who lived on Earth When Man was new When Time was Just a coloured dew That grew inside their mind..."

"Hey, cool princess With your eyes hanging The milk of the moon Hey, pretty princess Take me down to your cave in the dawn And you're gonna be a queen When the stars water Heaven with tears And you gonna love me When all our Golden lands are free."

"I watch the boats go by As the evening colours of the sand The rain is bringing tears From my lover's land I watch the silver stars melt in love with the sea I cry to the wind: – Bring back my lover to me! -"

"Come, take my hand And wander in the willow river Glistening the blue bells Come, take my flesh And wander in the sunny corn That shimmer stills at snowfalls 'Cause I love you lover I love you, like I love The Four high Seasons."

"My moon shines so softly On the hair of my killer Pours flowers on his head Help me, give him some shelter! Come, lie by the river Rest your head, don't you fear Sleep softly, my baby They won't find you here."

"Don't wanna know your name You're just my lover Just wanna spend the night Walking beside you on the water You look like my lover But you're words are cold You say words like him But thinking has made you grow old."

"Little bluebird's Fluttering into my hand Sun falls in love over the land I will live forever Just you wait and see No matter want you do To my bluebird and me..."

"Sunlight falling bright Over village garden walls Moonlight shower's gold where leaving waterfalls People walk in splendour Under trees hung in starlight."

"Oh, my love You're searching For your name Beside the sea Of dwells and dreams Where Shadows're dancing For your glance... The sky would chance The granting of a dream To the restless soul That dwells within your heart..."

"Some find it strange to be here On this small planet and who knows where... But when it's strange and full of fear It's nice to be on horseback."

"The sails are unfurled And the anchor's away going home... She heels to the breeze as she gathers her way, And we're bound to the old country. Then away, love, away, going home! We're homeward bound this very day, And we're bound to the old country..."

"Speak, vision of the night, Tell me why you haunt me so... Speak, heaven morning light, Whisper all my heart would know. Dawn never finds you, Gone back to where the Shadows dwell... Speak, my beloved, speak, tho' you only say farewell!"

"With a smile of joy and gladness, with a look of exultation, as of one who in a vision what is to be, but it is not, stood and waited Hiawatha. Toward the sun his hands were lifted both the palms spread out toward it and, between departed fingers, felt the sunshine on his features. Flecked with light his naked shoulders, as it falls and flecks an oak-tree through the rifted leaves and branches."

"Can it be the sun descending o'er the level plain of water or the Red Swan floating, flying wounded by the Magic Arrow? Staining all the waves with crimson, with the crimson of its life-blood, filling all the air with splendor, filling all the air with plumage? [...] O'er it the Star of Evening melts and trembles through the purple, hangs suspensed in twilight, walks in silence through the heavens..."

"Queen and Huntress chaste and fair Now the Sun is laid to sleep Seated in the Silver Chair State in wonder Manner keep [...] Hesperus entreats Thy light Goddess excellently bright Bless us then with a wished sight Thou who mak'st the day of night..."

"The Watcher and the Tower Waiting hour by hour."

"The trees that whisper in the evening Carried away by a moonlight shadow Sing a song of sorrow and grieving Carried away by a moonlight shadow All she saw was a silhouette of a gun Far away on the other side He was shot six times by a man on the run And she couldn't find how to push trough I stay, I pray, see you in heaven far away I stay, I pray, see you in heaven one day..."

"Look down from in high places Lift up the ground Without a sound [...] Check altitude Check your heart 'n this cloudless blue 'n this starlight night..."

"Drifting a dream On a mystical sea... A wishful emotion A drop in the ocean A hush in the air You can feel anywhere In the cool twilight Of a tropical night..."

"Treat me like I'm evil Freeze me till I'm cold Beat me till I'm feeble Grind me till I'm old Wire me till I'm tired Push me like I fall Treat me like a criminal, just a shadow on the wall!"

"Taking on water Sailing a restless sea From a memory A fantasy The wind carries into white water Far from the islands Don't you know... You're never going to get to France Mary, queen of chance, will they find you! Never going to get to France... Could a new romance ever bind you?"

"Walking on foreign ground Like a shadow Roaming in far off territory Over your shoulder Stories unfold You're searching For a sanctuary..."

"I see a picture by the lamp's flicker... Isn't it strange how dreams fade and shimmer?"

"Somebody's out to get you Hiding in the shadows Poison arrows! Somebody's out to break you Hiding in narrows Poison arrows!"

"What you gonna do? Time is running out on you! Anyway you choose Anyway you're gonna lose..."

"Watching for a spark It's a moonlight show Reaching through the dark Do you have to go?"

"Voices in the dark And the lights burn low Teach yourself the art That you never know Try to put a message through To your sweetheart Won't you like to know The secrets of the heart?"

"I'm half a crazy man Waiting for confirmation; Signs keep are changing And I need some more information."

"Something tells me how Her bright blue eyes Are smiling; She turns her head and now When she wants she denies him..."

"Some are tricks of the light You'll never know Make a flickering midnight Light into a glow..."

"When you want the score When you need a helping hand And you find closed doors And you're back where you began Keeping those secrets Telling those lies... Can anybody tell me What's the big surprise?"

"How can you sleep How can you turn away Thinking so cheap? Some day you're gonna pay! You're keeping secrets I can see in your eyes: Can anybody tell me Why the big disguise?"

"Talk about your life I'd like to know It's not easy going Where no-one goes And no-one knows..."

"Do we have to be so distant How can you be so unreal? What's the reason for hiding and How this crying make you feel?"

"Saved by a bell Suffer in hell But you were too blind to tell! Saved by a bell Suffer in hell And you made it through so well!"

"Standing in a new space, Waving at the sun... So you probably back in darkness To where I belong. Just by being with you Pictures flow out of my mind... Have we danced before Long ago or in another time?"

"We are islands But never too far"

"We can never Be closer somehow For the moment that lasts Is this moment now"

"There's a new path That we found just today I was lost in the forest And you showed me the way"

"We took a place in the sun To see just what had become The warm wind blows constantly Does the answer still blow? Did you find your château In that Mediterranean fantasy?"

"On dusty roads and tracks Now it's the time to turn back The warm wind blows constantly Riding that storm Since the day you were born Is there somebody in? Now answer me"

"The writing on the wall at North Point Speaks to a silent room They shut the bars down, leave you to the gloom"

"Somewhere far above has a new day risen Way beyond the searchlight (Comes a light, comes a light) Then on a bright day at North Point The gate was open wide They chanced to look at what was inside"

"Once in a lifetime, you find that power To break out and run from the Devil's deep clutch All that you need (it's the finest hour) Is to believe in the magic touch"

"Can't believe it, like no other Love is a gift, and you take it so much! You need the blue night to discover Only true lovers have the magic touch"

"Someone who knows no fear I feel him near The child was born to be a king And the time has come"

"And now the story's just begun A thousand years to stay We wake each morning with the sun To live our dreams away"

"I was hoping Could you be my inspiration Whatever should become In the candlelight? I was dreaming Was it my imagination? Tomorrow never comes In the candlelight"

"I was listening To the wind that walks the hours I never would have heard In the candlelight I was hoping Would you shelter me from showers? I believe every word In the candlelight"

"Harmony is always when I look around me And your smile I see I can feel it surrounds me A miracle I find in your company."

"One glance is all that I need; What I was searching for I've found it..."

"Holy, to me just one glance is holy One touch of your heart to me that's holy..."

"You can't speak, you can't sleep, You daren't move, you're confused. You never talk, you can't walk You can't feel, you're not real..."

"If I open my eyes just far enough I can see what you're doing. Go on, fight to the end, it's though enough When you're on the road of ruin!"

"You're a hostage of the heart Twisted 'round the smallest finger Two burning eyes are tearing you apart Turn your soul into a cinder!"

"She takes the rain, turns it to sun, And my soul she fills it. Where once was a desert Rivers now run, and my storms she stills it..."

"She gives me hope When there's nothing but pain; I can't explain it: Two different leaves But the branch is the same... Forever let it be! She takes the rain..."

"I know you'll never stay the same In time, most of us lose it, But I'm hoping, just the same, You'll shine and learn how to use it."

"Smile to me, like the very first smile You are magnificent when you're innocent. Walk to me Like the very first walk You are from heaven sent when you're innocent."

"Save me, holy mother, please save me, I got a heart of gold... And for your love I'd go hungry and thirsty. I need a saviour and you're the one... I throw myself into the arms of mercy, There's still hope for the runaway son!"

"I've been waiting at this frontier And it seems like a hundred years, But I couldn't see past the gate I couldn't see past the hate."

"Will-power, give me back some to survive, One more hour and I'm coming alive... I can see the light! And there's blue sky breaking Through the edge of the night... I can see the light!"

"Now I climb the steps to freedom, The open gates, I can see them. Hands once I knew Beckoning me through, As the sunlight touch my face, I can feel the warm embrace; Arms surround me, My life has found me..."

"I feel a rush in the air tonight, I can feel the Earth moving. Love is beacon, a guiding light, can't you feel the Earth moving?"

"Feel the Earth move! Now I'm wrapped In a sweet love's arms, Reaching out for you..."

"Reach out, it's a leap in the dark, But there's no danger of falling. Give out, give it straight from the heart, You feel the thunder rolling..."

"To whole room her eyes are numb, As she reads from a true love story. From the pages of a book her lover comes, Her heart bleeds, it's a true love story."

"Misty path and the night is endless, She could be a queen Or a desert princess. Hero takes her hand and leads her through... Who knows what this night will do? Only in the blue night he comes to her That's when the whole night Belongs to her."

"You know it's not too late to leave tomorrow, 'cause I know where I'm going... I am building a bridge to Paradise!"

"HEALTH WARNING: This record could be hazardous to the health of cloth-eared nincompoops. If you suffer from this condition, consult your Doctor immediately. (from the back-cover)"

"Hello everyone! I suppose that you think that nothing much is happening at the moment. Ah ah ah! Well, that's what I want to talk to you all about: endings. Now, endings normally happen at the end. But, as we all know, endings are just beginnings. You know, once these things really get started, it's jolly hard to stop them again. However, as we have all come this far, I think, under the circumstances, the best solution is that we all just keep going. Let's keep going inside, never an ending. Let's remember that this world wants fresh beginnings. I feel here, in this Country, and throughout the world, we are crying out for beginnings, beginnings! We never want to hear this word "endings". I know you don't want to sit down. Of course, you're looking for the good start. Of course you're looking for a fresh start. Isn't that charming? Do you know, I really feel I could dance..."

"This is zero hour and there's no way back Can you feel that power in its arms you're wrapped All through the night-time Till the sun comes in? Now Heaven's Open Fly right in!"

"Make-make... There's no way out no way in To the hallowed halls of the inner ring You're just a face in the crowd You got no place When you're down and out."

"Monna Lisa, you can stop searching; don't you know we're not Virgin?"

"A restless flame Someone calls your name Through the empty hall Casting shadows on the wall In the sound of emptiness Isolation Nowhere left to run Now the time has come..."

"Down to the River Was this all some Cry for love? It's a cry for love: Are you a victim of That Money Bug In your blood, Mr. Shame?"

"I need my hands I need my feet Gimme my soul I'm incomplete I need my eyes I want my teeth Gimme my scope Gimme my beliefs."

"I'm a fire without a flame, desert with no rain..."

"You're the one who's nearly Breaking my heart; Had your chance You just threw it all away. Living in a world that You could never be a part of, And now is a time to walk away."

"How's it feel when There's time to remember? ...Branches bare, Like the trees in november. Had it all, Threw it all away; Now's a time to walk away."

"And the Man in the rain Picked up his bag of secrets, And journeyed up the mountainside Far above the clouds; And nothing was ever heard from him again, Except for the sound of Tubular Bells..."

"Heaven and Earth are turning Round the Earth fire is burning. Sheltered from the cruel storm Peace on Earth is new born"

"Far the horizon Hove to the wind; We're sailing the sea To the Edge of the World."

""Twas grace that taught My heart to fear, And grace my fears reliev'd; How precious did that grace appear, The hour I first believ'd!" And I want to feel sun on my face, And I feel a shadow in its place, With the sunlight shines through cloud, When we're standing free, proud."

"Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'tis grace has brought me Safe thus far, And grace will lead me home. The Lord has promis'd good to me, His Word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures."

"When the birds sing outside And you see the trees Changing into green The sun invites one To be out in the open air. When the sky is so blue, then, Oh! Then I wish for so much!."

"Amber light Of this new morning, Amber light, Clear, bright and warming. Overnight The Earth adorning... Amber light, A New Age is dawning...."

"Follow the light that glows Through your bedroom window, Tonight, the fading twilight. There's a hollow deep in the woods, Where you know you're crazy to go, Not even meant to know there are... Pictures in the dark, I see all around, Voices calling underground; And I'm watching the stars since the world was found... One, two, three..."

"And in the deepest dark You come to a maze, in the night, The fading twilight... And you shiver the glistening path Where you know you're crazy to go..."

"(Take a wish!) My wish is... ...To be free, To be wild, And to be just Like a child!"

"You're out in the cold, Sometimes, As far as you can see, Misty. You want to run Into the sun, The road is lost, Sand shifty. But suddendly, out of the blue, Some kind of magic Pushes you through! You don't know when, How or why, But someday can take off, fly!"

"When we made [Tubular Bells], Michael was a mental wreck. He would walk 'round with his eyes wet with tears nearly all the time; he was in a terrible state. He found it an enormous disquiet, … the idea of being mortal flesh … [while] what was going on his head was eternal and beautiful and everlasting. … My heart went out to him."

"BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTIC — AMUNDSEN"

"The English have loudly and openly told the world that skis and dogs are unusable in these regions and that fur clothes are rubbish. We shall see — we shall see."

"So we arrived, and planted our flag at the geographical South Pole. Thanks be to God!"

"Everything went like a dance."

"Adventure is just bad planning."

"We must always remember with gratitude and admiration the first sailors who steered their vessels through storms and mists, and increased our knowledge of the lands of ice in the South."

""Is this really a Polar ship?" people asked; ... our paper-supply which was in all respects as fine and elegant as it could be: ... From one of the largest houses in Christiania we had a complete set of kitchen utensils and breakfast and dinner services, all of the best kind. ... We carried an extraordinarily copious library; presents of books were showered upon us in great quantities. I suppose the Fram's library at the present moment contains at least 3,000 volumes."

"Everything is on a reduced scale here in the Polar regions; we can't afford to be extravagant."

"Personally, I regard alcohol, used in moderation, as a medicine in the Polar regions. ... It is another matter on sledge journeys: there ... alcohol must be banished ... on account of the weight and space. ... Two men who have fallen out a little in the course of the week are reconciled at once by the scent of rum; the past is forgotten, and they start afresh in friendly co-operation."

"We see many fine sunsets here, unique in the splendour of their colour. No doubt the surroundings in this fairyland of blue and white do much to increase their beauty."

"... the brilliant aurora australis. ... flush of daylight has moved to the north, ... but it shows nevertheless that we have daylight here at the darkest time of the year, so there is not the absolute darkness that people think."

"The holiday humour that ought to have prevailed in the tent that evening — our first on the plateau — did not make its appearance; there was depression and sadness in the air - we had grown so fond of our dogs."

"The effect of the great and sudden change of altitude made itself felt at once; when I wanted to turn round in my bag, I had to do it a bit at a time, so as not to get out of breath."

"Devil’s Ballroom"

""Oh, as usual," they shouted back; "no bottom." I mention this little incident just to show how one can grow accustomed to anything in this world."

"We reckoned now that we were at the Pole. Of course, every one of us knew that we were not standing on the absolute spot; it would be an impossibility with the time and the instruments at our disposal to ascertain the exact spot. But we were so near it that the few miles which possibly separated us from it could not be of the slightest importance. It was our intention to make a circle around this camp, with a radius of twelve and a half miles (20 kilometers), and to be satisfied with that. After we had halted we collected and congratulated each other. ... we proceeded to the greatest and most solemn act of the whole journey - the planting of our flag."

"Glad as we were to leave it behind, I cannot deny that it was with a certain feeling of melancholy that we saw it vanish. We had grown so fond of our beacons, and whenever we met them we greeted them as old friends. Many and great were the services these silent watchers did us on our long and lonely way."

"The numerous people who imagine that a long stay in the Polar regions makes a man less susceptible of cold than other mortals are completely mistaken."

"I may say that this is the greatest factor — the way in which the expedition is equipped — the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

"I have a story coming out in The New Yorker about the first women who got to Antarctica. Actually they got to the Pole first. But they didn't leave any traces...They got there just a little bit ahead of Amundsen. A small group of South American women."

"For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton."

"If you had the height, you controlled the battle."

"If you came out of the sun, the enemy could not see you."

"If you held your fire until you were very close, you seldom missed."

"Don't listen to anyone who tells you that you can't do this or that. That's nonsense. Make up your mind, you'll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible."

"Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools."

"I am not one of those who see war as a cricket match where you first give anything to defeat the opponent and then shake hands"

"If you come out of the sun, the German will never see you coming."

"I can only say that what this country does not need is another Gestapo bureaucracy like the EPA and OSHA. And we do not want that to happen to the FDA."

"I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a right to the land. This is the most important reason: Because God said so."

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment."

"Today, we will hear from federal law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who will discuss the problem of ELF and ALF and law enforcement's reaction to their dangerous and destructive tactics. It is these tactics, particularly the widespread use of arson, which makes ELF and ALF the #1 domestic terror concern over the likes of white supremacists, militias, and anti-abortion groups."

"It kind of reminds... I could use the Third Reich, the Big Lie. You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their strategy... A hot summer has nothing to do with global warming. Let's keep in mind it was just three weeks ago that people were saying, "Wait a minute; it is unusually cool.""

"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

"Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920's until the 1960's they warned of global warming. From the 1950's until the 1970's they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate's fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years."

"Those individuals from the far left, and I'm talking about the Hollywood elitists and the United Nations and those individuals want us to believe it's because we are contributing CO2 to the atmosphere, that's causing global warming. It's all about money. I mean, what would happen to the Weather Channel's ratings if all the sudden people weren't scared anymore?"

"You might remember, it was 2003 when I made the statement that the idea that manmade gases, CO2, are causing catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. I was hated at that time, but now people realize I was right. That, by the way, is the title of my book that's going to come out in January."

"We're both doing the Lord's work, Noel."

"When I was ambushed by global warming advocates recently—no, they haven't given up—they asked me the same questions they always ask: "What if you're wrong?" and "If you're wrong will you apologize to future generations?" I always answer, "What if you're wrong? Will you apologize to my twenty kids and grandkids for the largest tax increase in American history?" They usually don't have anything to say after that."

"Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that "as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night," my point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

"Do you realize I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this? I thought it must be true until I found out what it would cost."

"We don't stop and realize that we are dealing with people—the far-left doesn't think we need a military to start with, they really don't. You've heard me say this before, they really believe if all countries would just stand in a circle and unilaterally disarm and hold hands then all threats would go away, they believe that. They would never say that but they do believe that."

"In the United States at the start of the new millenium, climate skepticism was on the rise, fueled by the ascension of the George W. Bush administration, which had deep roots in the oil industry. Bush repudiated any effort at carbon control soon after taking office, and underlings in his administration routinely pressured federal scientists to alter their reports or stop talking to reporters. On Capitol Hill, no one captured the spirit of the moment more fully than Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously called global warming a "hoax" and used his position as the chair of the relevant Senate committee to block any legislation. The recipient of massive amounts of campaign funding from the oil and gas industries that dominated the Oklahoma economy, Inhofe used his position to put forward an ongoing critique of mainstream science. The reader should know that virtually all the scientific attacks the Senator makes have been answered over and over at least as far back as [Ross] Gelbspan's book"

"Among today’s conservative “Luntzspeak” practitioners, few have the lingo down better than the honorable James Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma. Recall Luntz’s advice for dealing with the issue of global warming, which includes the following precepts: (1) emphasize your commitment to “sound science”; (2) seize the remaining “window of opportunity” to challenge and dispute the scientific consensus; and (3) find experts “sympathetic to your view” and make them “part of your message.” It’s a cunning strategy, provided that you are not ashamed of following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry, and Inhofe doesn’t appear to have much shame."

"As a science abuser, Inhofe may be out of control, but he is not at all out of the Republican mainstream."

"We do all of our work in consideration of Murphy's Law."

"The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."

"The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth."

"It's the saddest moment of my life."

"If I had a chance for another life, I would certainly choose a better complexion... I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image. When he reached the age of 50, after a five-year career slump. I can only say with Edith Piaf, 'Je ne regrette rien'."

"You reach the top of the heap, but it's a circle, and you slip on the down side; maybe for years. You get scared. He said then he thought he was coming out of a slump."

"This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip."

"She can do everything…there’s nothing she can’t do...she looks after me so well. Thank God I’ve found her.’"

"My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief."

"If you're a bad actor, you don't get hired. But if you're a bad doctor, you can still practice medicine."

"The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional."

"If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it."

"When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk."

"I stayed in bed all day yesterday, for instance, while she [Elizabeth Taylor] spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room, gossiping, etc. And, of course, inevitably sipping away at the drinks... What is more frightening is that she has become bored with everything in life."

"She [Elizabeth Taylor] never reads a book, at least not more than a couple of pages at a time... I have always been a heavy drinker but now as a result of this half-life we've been leading I am drinking twice as much. The upshot will be that I'll die of drink while she'll go blithely on in her half-world."

"I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out."

"I'm afraid we are temporarily out in the cold, and fallen stars. What is remarkable is that we have stayed up there for so long."

"'Dear Long-wayaway-one,' very antisocial I am when I don't booze. And no fun when you're not around... Do you love me? Do you want to be a lazy Jane and never work again? Once I stopped boozing I have enjoyed not working. But we can't do it though."

"I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely. And it should be on the loveliest woman [Elizabeth Taylor] in the world."

"I have always felt that the camera hasn't liked me. I'm a stage animal. I have to be big and loud, and the camera needs you to be small and naturalistic and subtle; much more naturalistic. I'm as subtle as a buffalo stampede."

"Monogamy is absolutely imperative. The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore. Suppose you make love to an exciting woman other than your wife, it can’t remain enough to go bed with her there must be something else, something more than the absolute compulsion of the body. But if there is something more, it will eventually destroy either you or your marriage."

"Although I like to be thought of as a tough rugby-playing Welsh miner's son, able to take on the world, the reality is that this image is just superficial. I am the reverse of what people think."

"It's difficult for me to know where to start with rugby. I come from a fanatically rugby-conscious Welsh miner's family, know so much about it, have read so much about it, have heard with delight so many massive lies and stupendous exaggerations about it and have contributed my own fair share, and five of my six brothers played it, one with some distinction... it's difficu1t for me to know where to start so I’ll begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I'll tell you about the last match I ever played in...I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face. What if I were unfortunate enough to be on the deck in the middle of a loose maul...they murmured in dollar accents?"

"Richard Burton is now my epitaph, my cross, my title, my image. I have achieved a kind of diabolical fame. It has nothing to do with my talents as an actor. That counts for little now. I am the diabolically famous Richard Burton."

"At two years' old, Richard was scooped up by his sister Cecilia or ‘Cis’, and taken to live with her and her husband, Elfed, and their two daughters Marian and Rhianon, in Port Talbot. He remained forever grateful to Cis throughout his varied and colourful life."

"The magnificent baritone was not merely a voice. It was an orchestra of enormous range and power, its graceful sound seemed to linger on for millions who had heard it on film and stage. Homer must have known someone very much like Richard Burton."

"[He was] the 12th of 13 children of a hard-drinking but charming coal miner in the village of Pontryhydfen, South Wales...At the age of 10, he was educated under the tutorship of a schoolmaster named Philip Burton who became his guardian and young Richard took his name."

"In the Druid's Rest, Richard won the role in which he made his London debut at age 18. In a wretched part, he showed exceptional ability."

"He was a Welsh coal miner's son whose celebrity was defined as much by his rakish personal life as his remarkable acting skills...One of Britain's greatest Shakespearean stage actors by the age of 27, he offered rugged good looks, a magnetic stage presence and an incomparable voice...[His voice]'with a tympanic resonance so rich and overpowering that it could give an air of verse to a recipe for stewed hare."

"a monstrous perfectionist and a troubled spirit."

"He should have been in the same rank as Laurence Olivier, but he was very wild and had a scandal around him all the time and I think in theater circles that would not be approved of."

"a born actor...He was serious, charming, with tremendous skill...He chose a rather mad way of throwing away his theater career but obviously he became very famous and a world figure through being a film star. He was awfully good to people and generous."

"He was marvellous at rehearsals. There was the true theatrical instinct. You only had to indicate - scarcely even that."

"He has a terrific way with women. I don't think he has missed more than half a dozen."

"Throughout his life he would quote and write in his Notebooks chunks of John Donne, Edward Jones, John Betjeman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Dunbar, Shakespeare and his greatest read Dylan Thomas. Dylan became his hero. Sweetly, their paths would later cross and a good friendship would grow."

"Money was nice but it was not everything to the actor whose greatest joys were words, words, and words."

"Burton ‘was now the natural successor to Olivier."

"A brimming pool running disturbingly deep...His voice is urgent and keen... He turned interested speculation into awe as soon as he started to speak."

"Exceptional ability."

"From scandalous beginning to tormented end, theirs was the most epic love story in Hollywood history: a blaze of headlines, booze, jewels, brawls, and private jets. Marrying and divorcing twice, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton rocked the culture and each other's lives with a passion that reverberated long after Burton’s 1984 death."

"Surrounded by his thousand treasured volumes of the Everyman's Library—a gift from Elizabeth—he wrote a letter to Elizabeth and posted it to her home in Bel Air, in Los Angeles. But by the time she received the letter, Burton was dead. He had gone to bed and sometime during the night suffered a cerebral hemorrhage."

"A gifted actor who rose to fame due to a combination of raw sex appeal, talent, and his grand romance with Elizabeth Taylor. He was ruggedly handsome and blessed with a mellifluous baritone that could make the reading of a dictionary sound like poetry. Many critics lamented the fact that he didn't live up to his potential."

"Alcoholism began taking its toll on Burton and, perhaps even more insidiously, his disregard for his craft began to tell. He cared little for his movie projects except for the cash they might earn him, a fact he readily acknowledged. Yet, despite his many mediocre movies, his appeal as an actor was undeniable, and he did occasionally soar in a few of his later movies,"

"Burton's much ballyhooed affair with Elizabeth Taylor during the making of Cleopatra turned him into an international sex symbol. He was Mark Antony to Taylor's Cleopatra, and the press went wild with the story. Until then, he was considered the heir to Olivier as England's greatest actor."

"Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?" Burton's reply was, "Both.""

"But the facts are unquestioned. The aeroplane does do these things, and if the theory does not give warranty for the practice, then it is the theory which is wrong."

"Now, when we say of any occurrence that it is 'physical', we mean thereby that it is potentially describable in physical terms. (Otherwise the expression would be wholly meaningless.) So it is perfectly correct, to state that, in every happening with which our sensory nerves are associated, we find, after we have abstracted therefrom every known or imaginable physical component, certain categorically nonphysical residua."

"We have now arrived within introductory range of that very meek-spirited creature known to modern science as the "Observer". It is a permanent obstacle in the path of our search for external reality that we can never entirely get rid of this individual. Picture the universe how we may, the picture remains of our making."

"It is never entirely safe to laugh at the metaphysics of the 'man-in-the-street'. Basic ideas which have become enshrined in popular language cannot be wholly foolish or unwarranted. For that sort of canonization must mean, at least, that the notions in question have stood the test of numerous centuries and have been accorded unhesitating acceptance wherever speech has made its way."

"Reasoning is a retrospective business—the judging of a present situation in the light of past experience."

"We must live before we can attain to either intelligence or control at all. We must sleep if we are not to find ourselves, at death, helplessly strange to the new conditions. And we must die before we can hope to advance to a broader understanding."

"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system. The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors."

"It’s hard to find a political or business leader who doesn’t say they are worried about inequality. It’s even harder to find one who is doing something about it. Many are actively making things worse by slashing taxes and scrapping ."

"People are ready for change. They want to see workers paid a ; they want corporations and the to pay more tax; they want women workers to enjoy the same rights as men; they want a limit on the power and the wealth which sits in the hands of so few. They want action."

"As the Executive Director of UNAIDS, I lead the work of the United Nations to tackle AIDS. I’m also someone who has lost family members to AIDS. This is personal. Both my own family experience and our collective experience at the United Nations have highlighted the same key lesson: the struggle to beat AIDS is inseparable from the struggle for women’s rights and from the struggle against all forms of discrimination. AIDS can be beaten, but it will only be beaten if we take on the social and economic injustices that perpetuate it and spur more scientific innovations to address the real needs of women and girls and people living with and vulnerable to HIV."

"Worldwide, AIDS remains the biggest killer of women aged 15–49 years. To end AIDS by 2030, we must end gender-based violence, inequality and insecurity and we must ensure that women and girls have equal access to education, health and employment. We need to transform our societies so that no one is second class and everyone’s human rights are respected. AIDS cannot be beaten while marginalized communities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, people who inject drugs and sex workers, live in fear of the state or of socially sanctioned violence and abuse. Beating AIDS depends on tackling all forms of discrimination. I want to thank all the brave and determined social justice movements who are the true leaders in this work. I salute you."

"Feminism, human rights and zero discrimination are values deeply rooted across the world: they express our humanity, our recognition that I am because you are. And they are central to the struggle to beat AIDS. Let us beat AIDS. It can be done."

"Those are the jobs we've been told about, that globalization is bringing jobs. The quality of the jobs matter. It matters. These are not jobs of dignity. In many countries, workers no longer have a voice. They are not allowed to unionize, they are not allowed to negotiate for salaries. So we're talking about jobs, but jobs that bring dignity. We're talking about health care. The World Bank has told us that 3.4 billion people who earn $5.50 a day are on the verge, are just a medical bill away from sinking into poverty. They don't have health care. They are just a crop failure away from sinking back into poverty. They don't have crop insurance. So don't tell me about low levels of unemployment. You are counting the wrong things. You're not counting dignity of people. You're counting exploited people."

"When the world’s richest 1% own as much as the poorest 50%, we have a problem."

"Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone "trash" his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional "faces," if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts."

"In Moscow, the warrant officer radio operator removed his headphones and nodded toward the teleprinter. "Faint but clear," he said. The printer began to chatter, sending out a screed of paper covered with a jumble of meaningless letters. When it fell silent, the officer beside the radio tore off the sheet and fed it through the decoder, already set to the formula of the agreed one-time pad. The decoder absorbed the sheet, its computer ran through the permutations, and it delivered the message in clear. The officer read the text and smiled. He telephoned a number, identified himself, checked the identity of the man he was addressing, and said: "Aurora is 'go.'""

"The man with ten minutes to live was laughing."

"The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy."

"Martin laughed. "President Bush," he said, "and all the people around him will act according to their upbringing. Which is based on the Judeo-Christian moral philosophy supported by the Greco-Roman concept of logic. And Saddam will react on the basis of his own vision of himself.""

"Uh-unh. Islam has nothing to do with it. Saddam doesn't care a fig for the hadith, the codified teachings of the Prophet. He prays on camera when it suits him. No, you have to go back to Nineveh and Assyria. He doesn't mind how many have to die, so long as he thinks he can win."

"Not really. There's a quantum leap in moral philosophy when you cross the Jordan."

"What you are saying," suggested Martin, "is that Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they'd go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed."

"You got it, son. People forget—the old Model-T Ford may be old, but it worked. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down."

"They also drew their £1000 in five gold sovereigns and the "goolie chit." This remarkable document was first introduced to the Americans in the Gulf War, but the ritish, who have been flying combat in those parts since the 1920s, understood them well. A goolie chit is a letter in Arabic and six kinds of Bedouin dialect. It says in effect, "Dear Mr. Bedou, the presenter of this letter is a British officer. If you return him to the nearest British patrol, complete with his testicles and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with £5000 in gold." Sometimes it works."

"I lost my health and the trouble returned. A doctor, urgently summoned, wanted to operate at once, but once again my wife was convinced that this would be the wrong thing to do. It was then that I met Dr. Gordon Latto, who had become so impressed by the efficacy of nature cure methods that he had switched over almost completely from his orthodox practice to natural healing. He said that he could stop the gallstone from forming, but that I must go on a strict vegetarian diet for a year, besides knocking off drink and tobacco (which he said was worse than drink). This was a tough regime; the gallstones could not survive it. I did, however, and at the end of the period I found that I was also cured of smoking, and that the vegetarian diet suited me so well that I have preferred it ever since."

"I mention this because, for a long time, the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. . . . I can assure you, Gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples."

"[F]or excellent reasons, [the government] has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call 'Military Targets'. I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples!"

"All three [directing officers] were new in their appointments that year [1936]. Of them all, Portal was obviously the clearest thinker and speaker although I cannot remember him exercising any distinct "Air" influence on either his colleagues or on the students."

"I cannot remember that he ever did anything that helped us."

"Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles Portal pointed out next day that the aim of bombing had not been "to terrorise the civilian population", and he redrafted the memorandum at Churchill's invitation, removing references to "terror"."

"Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal had calculated that bombing civilians could kill 900,000 in 18 months, seriously injure a million more, destroy six million homes, and “de-house” 25 million, creating a humanitarian crisis that, he believed, would speed up the war."

"Hope is the possibility of always having something to achieve."

"Coming into San Diego we saw a beautiful golden ship in the sunset, but brighter than the sunset. I had ten-power binoculars with me, and was able to study it for half a minute from the halted car. It slowly faded out, the way they do... We have been given their simple philosophy. It runs parallel with the original teachings of Jesus."

"Of all the contactees, Adamski attracted the most controversy and odium; and none but a man of his strength of character could have survived the onslaught."

"Why should they risk a public landing? Their ship would be impounded for evasion of custom duties. Their clothes would be torn off and sold as souvenirs."

"Out of nowhere I have appeared. They see me for the first time. No longer the image, but reality. They see and they hear me. I raise my arms, and the gasps and babble die down. I begin to speak the words we knew and decided long ago. Each hears me in his own tongue. (p.200)"

"How do you speak that all men may hear you in their own tongues? It is an art known and practiced by teachers of old."

"I do not judge them, criticise nor take sides. I address them as representatives of the human race, nothing more. Then I project a picture of the world divided against itself into countless pockets of insanity, and with it the question why this should be so? Why should semi-rational beings behave worse than those with no reason at all- Why ?"

"I ask... What would they do if every nation had unlimited electrical power-power for the taking-power costing nothing to obtain and available to all men equally?"

"Now let us see what he can do with it. Let us see if, under easier conditions, he is able to build the planetary paradise he has always desired, or will abuse his new leisure to the destruction of his soul. Let us see if godly power will make him a little more godlike. (p. 201)"

"I see here some foolish ones fidgeting and wondering why the guards do not remove me from the floor. Save your energy, for the guards cannot touch me. Nor can you so much as rise from your seats to lay hands on me. Try it, if you do not believe me."

"This power, I tell them, shall change the face of the Earth. No more shall small groups, nor even single men, be able to rule multitudes through hunger in their bellies; for there shall no more be hunger nor want nor cold; and in time again there shall be no more disease, for as man learns to live in harmony with nature, instead of continually struggling against it, he will destroy the cause of disease. (p. 206)"

"For this we have lived; for this we have planned; for this have many died and suffered. You were told and you scoffed, that the meek shall inherit the Earth. But I say to you the day has come when the man of peace and brotherhood shall Inherit the kingdom he will build. But those who oppose it shall never again tread this long-suffering Earth. Those who wish to live shall live; but those who cannot live without destroying, shall themselves be destroyed, till the end of time. It is for you, and you alone, to make the choice. Think well, for the great heritage is yours."

"Only minutes were required to impress these thoughts indelibly on their minds, for a thought is instantaneous and its grasping depends on its strength and clarity.(p. 211)"

"It seems that a lot of people have forgotten about George Adamski. In the 1950s he was one of the very first people to speak out about his contacts. He wrote a very famous book he coauthored with an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Desmond Leslie, called Flying Saucers Have Landed, which was published in 1953. It’s mainly a historical overview, a study by Desmond Leslie, of the flying saucer phenomena."

"Perhaps you are wondering if I myself believe in flying saucers? Yes I do. I have thought it all out, and, from what I have learned from my husband, I think there is no doubt that they do exist... Until Desmond had had actual contact with the men from the other worlds I doubted their existence. But his letters are full of facts which have amazed and shaken me. What is more, I share my husband's belief that the present "cold war" conditions in the world may flare up at any time, and that the saucer men may be our only means of salvation."

"Desmond Leslie, who has died aged 79, was a celebrated Irish eccentric and self-styled "discologist" best known for his book The Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), which became a key text of the New Age movement. The prevailing scientific materialism of Leslie's time held no appeal to him, and he turned his attention instead to the world of mysteries. Attracted to ancient history, archaeology and esoteric philosophy, he saw in them evidence of a world view quite different from that of more soberly academic contemporaries. To Leslie, ancient monuments and artefacts were proof of a sophistication of culture and technology that could not be attributed to the people of their times. The makers, he concluded, were evidently super-human - or came from elsewhere... Leslie joined forces with another Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Brinsley le Poer Trench, who as the 8th Earl of Clancarty later promoted a debate on UFOs in the House of Lords. Together they founded Flying Saucer Review. Contributors included C G Jung, who published his own book on flying saucers in 1959.Thereafter, Leslie continued to preach the message of the space people. Their intentions, he was at pains to explain, were wholly peaceable."

"Desmond Leslie was born in London in 1921 and educated at Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, but, throughout his childhood and later, he spent idyllic summers and other periods at Castle Leslie (of which his elder brother, Jack, was the heir). After a couple of terms at Trinity College Dublin, and simultaneous tuition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he reacted against “the constraint of orthodox harmony”, Desmond joined the RAF to fight as a Spitfire pilot during the second World War. His experiences at this time formed a basis for his first novel, Careless Lives. A sense of humour was one of Desmond Leslie’s assets, though it chimes a bit oddly with a few of his outre obsessions. He was, for example, a flying-saucers devotee, and co-wrote a book on the subject that became a best-seller in the early 1950s. He was also, in defiance of his Catholic upbringing, an adherent of an esoteric religious group called the White Eagle Lodge, founded in 1936 by a spiritualist"

"For the heartless attitude towards my fate, as a former officer-pilot of party and Soviet bodies, from authorities of the city of Simferopol, first secretary of the city committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine comrade M.V. Revkin and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Comrade Comrade Lozovoy, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, if upon refusal to permit my residence, on 6 or 7 November 1967, I shall end my life by self-immolation. — Hero of the Soviet Union Reshidov, former commander of the air regiment."

"On that small blue and white planet below is everything that means anything to you: all of history and music, poetry and art, death and birth, love, tears, joy and games... All on that little spot in the cosmos. National boundaries and human artifacts no longer seem real. Only the biosphere, whole and home of life."

"The Crown is not a symbol of the past, but a unique representation of our Independence, Sovereignty and Unity. The Crown is a reflection of the state and the nation. The Crown has strengthened Romania through Loyalty, Courage, Respect, Seriousness and Modesty. I do not see Romania today as an inheritance from our parents, but as a country that we borrowed from our children. So Help us God! Michael I R’"

"Because tens of millions of people have been destroyed practically, gone through absolute hell, and then suddenly they say, 'Well, it's all finished, let's forget it.' You don't forget it."

"The last 20 years have brought democracy, freedom and a beginning of prosperity."... "The time has come after 20 years to... break for good with the bad habits of the past", such as "demagogy, selfishness and attempts to cling to power"... "It is within our power to make this country prosperous and worthy of admiration."

"What - and leave the country in the hands of a child?"

"Concern about outside pressure was greatly accentuated by the war. For the Soviets, Eastern Europe served not only as an economic resource and an ideological bridgehead, but also as a strategic glacis. The Soviet determination to dominate Eastern Europe was a key cause of tension, both local and international, not least because domination meant the imposition, through force and manipulation, of Communist governments. The Soviets were not satisfied by the nuances of influence. The 1946 Polish elections in which the Communists did well were fraudulent. Force played an important role in the extension of Communist control. For example, King Michael of Romania abdicated on 30 December 1947 after the royal palace in the capital, Bucharest, was surrounded by troops of the Romanian division raised in the Soviet Union."

"Michael is the only person who may be able to pull the country through the coming months and save it from anarchy or communism."

"I would like to pay tribute to his role when, in 1997, he undertook a tour of European capitals to promote Romania's entry into the European Union. Twenty-two years later, his beloved country will, for the first time in the first half of 2019, hold the presidency of the European Union. This will be an important moment for Romania and an important moment for the future of our Union. The memory of King Michael, who went through the most tragic periods of European history of the 20th century, will then be more than ever present in our thoughts..."

"It is amazing that His Majesty King Michael I waited seventy years for the crown to be placed on him. It was very touching to hear the huge crowd chanting loudly ‘monarchy, kingdom…’. His Majesty was a great man who was deeply respected by everyone."

"King Michael I was simply exceptional…his strength, his dignity, his moral fibre..his devotion to his people left a huge mark and inspiration on many generations of Romanians."

"As Churchill and Roosevelt were overselling Yalta to the West, the agreements made there broke down in Eastern Europe during the month after the conference. The Soviets dragged their feet on repatriating prisoners of war. They did not send representatives to London to start up the new Control Commission for Germany. In Romania they forced the king to appoint a new government dominated by communists. In Poland they allowed the communist provisional government to veto candidates for its own “reconstruction” and to exclude Western observers, while potential rivals in Poland were butchered or sent to the camps. Stalin also said that Molotov was too busy to come to San Francisco and that the Soviet delegation to the UN founding conference would be led by Andrei Gromyko, then a midlevel diplomat. This was taken not only as a blatant snub but also as a real threat to the whole structure of postwar cooperation."

"Romania posed a particular challenge for Soviet policies. It, too, had been a German ally, imitating the Nazis by murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma. It switched sides only in August 1944, when the war was going very badly for Hitler. The Communist Party there was weak and faction-ridden and did not have a key leader such as Dimitrov in Bulgaria. Worse, in Stalin’s view the Romanian party was dominated by “non-Romanians”—basically, Jews and Hungarians—who would not be recognized as “national” leaders. By the end of the war the Red Army had full military control, with a million Soviet soldiers stationed in Romania. But where to turn for effective local leadership? The Soviets decided to install a coalition government, as in Bulgaria, with the Communist Party in control of the ministry of justice and therefore the police. The young Romanian king, Michael, protested. Michael was regarded as a national hero after dismissing the pro-German leadership, but the Soviet emissary Andrei Vyshinskii gave him no choice. “You have two hours and five minutes to make it known to the public that [the government] has been dismissed,” the Soviet deputy foreign minister barked at the king. “By eight o’clock you must inform the public of [the] successor.” In November 1945 the Communist-led coalition won an election through widespread intimidation and fraud. Two years later it forced the king to abdicate. The government announced that a new People’s Republic of Romania was up and running."

"Reaching the goal is a matter of patience."

"Until late, the frank Gallic gaiety will resound in the stately night of the Niger."

"The air's grip on the wings rips our wheels free from the earth and we pass in the nick of time over the tops of the trees."

"I put on my uniform and waited, my heart pounded with emotion, Leopoldville was waiting for my arrival. The security forces had to direct almost three hundred cars belonging to the colonials, a crowd gathered around the Sabenahangars of the airport."

"The Negro race is not amenable to progress, they venerate and fear us."

"Though he didn't sneer at the honour, to those who knew him, Thieffry remained the simple man he's always been. With him, excesses of behavior or speech had been banned with the same intransigence as boasting. An endearing companion to his comrades, he loved sincere and loyal friends and abhorred impostors and talkers."

"He was never seen boasting, haughty, or boasting of his victories. He was sincere and combative, earnest in action, alternately fiery and spiritual in his response, which was the secret of his endearment."

"(India looks) Better than the whole world (from up here in space)."

"My life is forever connected with aviation. I cannot live without the sky. I continue to improve my flying skills on modern domestic aircraft, I dream that, perhaps, I will have to lift a peaceful aircraft into space."

"Sharp drops from a high altitude to a small one, minute overload, from which sometimes it darkens in the eyes - all this is easily tolerated by a physically hardened person. Sometimes in battle, performing a cascade of figures, you lose consciousness for a moment. You will come to your senses, now you are included in the combat situation and again you act at any height, at any speed, in any position."

"The victory belonged to those who knew their planes and weapons inside out and had the initiative."

"Young pilots often ask how they can learn to fly a fighter quickly; I came to the conclusion that the main thing is to master the technique of pilotage and firing. If a fighter pilot can control his plane automatically, he can correctly carry out a maneuver, quickly approach an enemy, aim at his plane precisely and destroy him. It is also important to be resourceful in any situation. At the first stage of combat skill, I dreamt of downing an enemy plane–the tactics of an air battle were theory to me. The second stage began with the training at the front before the Battle of Kursk. The fighting near the Kursk bulge was a new stage. The battle for the Dnieper was yet another."

"Aviation is said to be the cradle of cosmonautics, and with good reason."

"There are greater historians than I who believe that there are large currents in history and that it is just a matter of time until they occur. But originality of leadership is called for on the part of one leader or more to ride these historical waves in order to realize them. Otherwise, this moment of realization may move to a later period. And if it is correct to view history as a flowing river, it will continue to flow."

"It is the duty of all and of all the parties involved to continue believing in peace and to do our utmost to attain peace in our region."

"If you don't keep giving the Arabs a bloody nose from time to time, the Arab balloon will blow up. We are going to live like this, hacking at each other, for some time to come."

"Do I have to preach to my children that I have the right to the land of Israel only where there are no Arabs? Or do I preach to my children that I have a right to this land because it is mine of right?"

"It was fate that delivered me and my contemporaries into this great era, when the Jews returned to and re-established their homeland. I am no longer a wandering Jew who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. But all Jews in every generation must regard themselves as if they had been there, in previous generations, places, and events. Therefore, I am still a wandering Jew, but not along the far-flung paths of the world. Now I migrate through the expanses of time, from generation to generation, down the paths of memory."

"Memory shortens distances. Two hundred generations have passed since my people first came into being, and to me they seem like a few days. Only two hundred generations have passed since a man named Abraham rose up and left his country and birthplace for the country that is today mine. Only two hundred generations have elapsed from the day Abraham purchased the Cave of Makhpela in the city of Hebron to the murderous conflicts that have taken place there in my generation. Only one hundred fifty generations have passed from the Pillar of Fire of the Exodus from Egypt to the pillars of smoke from the Holocaust. And I, a descendant of Abraham, born in Abraham's country, have witnessed them all."

"Just as memory force us to participate in each day and every event of our past, so does the virtue of hope force us to prepare for each day of our future. After all, in the past century alone we have been suspended between life and death, between hope and despair, between displacement and rootedness. Ours is the terrible century of death, in which the Nazis and their assistants destroyed a large portion of us in the Holocaust, but it is also the mind-boggling century of revival, of independence, and -- recently -- of a chance for peace."

"I express my gratitude and blessings for the friendship and cooperation that prevail between Israel and Germany today, as reflected in many diverse spheres of economic, security, and cultural affairs, along with one that is especially close to my heart -- scientific research. German and Israeli researchers are sharing their expertise and skills, and German assistance in Israeli scientific research is one of the factors that Israeli citizens appreciate most highly."

"The peace process is the most important process that has surfaced since the establishment of the Jewish state. And we are now in its very midst."

"For more than a century of Zionist endeavor, we have hoped for this peace and struggled to achieve it. We did not return to our borders in warships; we did not march home waving spears. We returned in convoys of dreamers and in boats of oppressed refugees. We returned, and, like our forefather King David who purchased the Temple Mount, and our patriarch Abraham who bought the Cave of Makhpela, we bought land, we sowed fields, we planted vineyards, we built houses, and even before we achieved statehood, we were already bearing weapons to protect our lives."

"Time and again we stretched out our hands, and time and again we were rejected. Time and again we went to war; time and again we killed and were killed. Time and again we left our homes, offices, universities, and orchards for the battlefields. Time and again we discovered that beyond even the greatest victories, only crises and losses lurked."

"We deal with this fragile, delicate process of peace suffused with hope and, I am sure, with sang-froid and wisdom. Terrorist organizations and extremist Islamic states wish to sabotage the process, as do extremist elements in our midst. The atmosphere is charged; things are not easy -- not only because murderous extremism is striving to destroy this peace, but also because even those who love peace are apprehensive, and both camps still have unhealed wounds and fresh memories. The blood still cries out to us."

"Many peace treaties have been signed in the course of history. They speak of economic relations and security arrangements, compensation and borders. When I was Defense Minister in the Government of Israel, I took part in the peace negotiations with Egypt, and I can tell you that in peace treaties in the Middle East, we are strict about these matters but not only about them."

"We are trying to achieve a peace that will propel us into the twenty-first century. But ancient Crusader maps hang on the wall, and ancient Biblical memories hover in the atmosphere, and primeval prophecies strive to fulfill themselves."

"We respect our neighboring countries and the culture that surrounds us, and we wish to take up our position among them, but in our own way and with allegiance to our values and culture."

"We and our language are alive. We who have arisen from the ashes, and the language that waited in the shrouds of Torah scrolls and between the pages of the prayerbooks, are alive. The language that was whispered in prayer only, that was read only in synagogues, that was sung only in liturgy, that was shrieked in the gas chambers -- in the prayer "Shma Yisrael" -- has been revived."

"Today's Israel, with its large influx of immigrants, its economic momentum, the peace accords, should and can reclaim its position as the predominant cultural center of the Jewish people."

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are a people of memory and prayer. We are a people of words and hope. We have neither established empires nor built castles and palaces. We have only placed words on top of each other. We have fashioned ideas; we have built memorials. We have dreamed towers of yearnings -- of Jerusalem rebuilt, of Jerusalem united, of a peace that will be swiftly and speedily established in our days. Amen."

"While foes portrayed him as a spy, a madman and a danger to the public, supporters preferred the image of a fireman who could douse any conflict. Arguably, his notorious impetuosity condemned him to end his political life in a neutered office, away from the leadership role his talents deserved."

"We laid him in a cool and shadowed grove One evening in the dreamy scent of thyme Where leaves were green, and whispered high above— A grave as humble as it was sublime;There, dreaming in the fading deeps of light— The hands that thrilled to touch a woman's hair; Brown eyes, that loved the Day, and looked on Night, A soul that found at last its answered Prayer. ...There daylight, as a dust, slips through the trees. And drifting, gilds the fern around his grave— Where even now, perhaps, the evening breeze Steals shyly past the tomb of him who gaveNew sight to blinded eyes; who sometimes wept— A short time dearly loved; and after,—slept."

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. ...Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew— And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, —Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

"(To those who gave their lives to England during the Battle of Britain and left such a shining example to us who follow, these lines are dedicated.)They that have climbed the white mists of the morning; They that have soared, before the world’s awake, To herald up their foeman to them, scorning The thin dawn’s rest their weary folk might take; Some that have left other mouths to tell the story Of high, blue battle, quite young limbs that bled, How they had thundered up the clouds to glory, Or fallen to an English field stained red. Because my faltering feet would fail I find them Laughing beside me, steadying the hand That seeks their deadly courage— Yet behind them The cold light dies in that once brilliant Land. ... Do these, who help the quickened pulse run slowly, Whose stern, remembered image cools the brow, Till the far dawn of Victory, know only Night’s darkness, and Valhalla’s silence now?"

"The girl Markham was left to run wild with Kipsigis boys, wearing a cowrie shell on a leather thong around her wrist to ward off evil spirits. She ate with her hands, her first language was Swahili, and she could hurl a spear […] Markham practically grew up in the saddle; she told a friend that she felt better on a horse than on her feet."

"Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it. Racial purity, true aristocracy, devolve not from edict, nor from rote, but from the preservation of kinship with the elemental forces and purposes of life whose understanding is not further beyond the mind of a Native shepherd than beyond the cultured fumblings of a mortar-board intelligence."

"So far as I know I was the only professional woman pilot in Africa at that time period I had no freelance competition in Kenya, man or woman."

"Moreover, it seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of town, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit."

"Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one--and I always found one."

"The cruel girls we loved Are over forty. Their subtle daughters Have stolen their beauty; And with a blue stare Of cool surprise, They mock their anxious mothers With their mothers' eyes."