253 quotes found
"Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education."
"The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest, and not inferior to either in her mission."
"When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them."
"We can only instill principles, put the student in the right path, give him method, teach him how to study, and early to discern between essentials and non-essentials."
"To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all."
"I have had three personal ideals: One to do the day's work well and not to bother about tomorrow. You may say that is not a satisfactory ideal. It is; and there is not one which the student can carry with him into practice with greater effect. To it more than anything else I owe whatever success I have had — to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it well to the best of my ability, and letting the future take care of itself. The second ideal has been to act the Golden Rule, as far as in me lay, toward my professional brethren and toward the patients committed to my care. And the third has been to cultivate such a measure of equanimity as would enable me to bear success with humility, the affection of my friends without pride, and to be ready when the day of sorrow and grief came, to meet it with the courage befitting a man. What the future has in store for me, I cannot tell — you cannot tell. Nor do I care much, so long as I carry with me, as I shall, the memory of the past you have given me. Nothing can take that away."
"No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition."
"Shakespeare gets to the root of the alcohol question in his well-known statement—'Good wine is a good, familiar creature if it be well used.'"
"The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well."
"In the history of medicine, there are few instances in which a disease has been more accurately, more graphically or more briefly described."
"There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians."
"Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science."
"One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong."
"In a true and perfect form, imperturbability is indissolubly associated with wide experience and an intimate knowledge of the varied aspects of disease. With such advantages he is so equipped that no eventuality can disturb the mental equilibrium of the physician; the possibilities are always manifest, and the course of action clear. From its very nature this precious quality is liable to be misinterpreted, and the general accusation of hardness, so often brought against the profession, has here its foundation. Now a certain measure of insensibility is not only an advantage, but a positive necessity in the exercise of a calm judgment, and in carrying out delicate operations. Keen sensibility is doubtless a virtue of high order, when it does not interfere with steadiness of hand or coolness of nerve; but for the practitioner in his working-day world, a callousness which thinks only of the good to be effected, and goes ahead regardless of smaller considerations, is the preferable quality. Cultivate, then, gentlemen, such a judicious measure of obtuseness as will enable you to meet the exigencies of practice with firmness and courage, without, at the same time, hardening "the human heart by which we live.""
"Let me recall to your minds an incident related of that best of men and wisest of rulers, Antoninus Pius, who, as he lay dying, in his home at Loriam in Etruria, summed up the philosophy of life in the watchword, Aequanimitas. … Natural temperament has much to do with its development, but a clear knowledge of our relation to our fellow-creatures and to the work of life is also indispensable. One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell."
"The critical sense and sceptical attitude of the Hippocratic school laid the foundations of modern medicine on broad lines, and we owe to it: first, the emancipation of medicine from the shackles of priestcraft and of caste; secondly, the conception of medicine as an art based on accurate observation, and as a science, an integral part of the science of man and of nature; thirdly, the high moral ideals, expressed in that most "memorable of human documents" (Gomperz), the Hippocratic oath; and fourthly, the conception and realization of medicine as the profession of a cultivated gentleman."
"We may indeed be justly proud of our apostolic succession. Schools and systems have flourished and gone, schools which have swayed for generations the thought of our guild, and systems that have died before their founders; the philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of to-morrow; through long ages which were slowly learning what we are hurrying to forget — amid all the changes and chances of twenty-five centuries, the profession has never lacked men who have lived up to these Greek ideals."
"There seems to be no limit to the possibilities of scientific medicine, and while philanthropists are turning to it as to the hope of humanity, philosophers see, as in some far-off vision, a science from which may come in the prophetic words of the Son of Sirach, "Peace over all the earth.""
"Nationalism has been the great curse of humanity. In no other shape has the Demon of Ignorance assumed more hideous proportions; to no other obsession do we yield ourselves more readily. For whom do the hosannas ring higher than for the successful butcher of tens of thousands of poor fellows who have been made to pass through the fire to this Moloch of nationalism ? A vice of the blood, of the plasm rather, it runs riot in the race, and rages today as of yore in spite of the precepts of religion and the practice of democracy. Nor is there any hope of change; the pulpit is dumb, the press fans the flames, literature panders to it and the people love to have it so. Not that all aspects of nationalism are bad. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is ? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood."
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism."
"Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease."
"Surrounded by people who demand certainty, — and not philosopher enough to agree with Locke that "Probability supplies the defect of our knowledge and guides us when that fails, and is always conversant about things of which we have no certainty," the practitioner too often gets into a habit of mind which resents the thought that opinion, not full knowledge, must be his stay and prop. There is no discredit, though there is at times much discomfort, in this everlasting perhaps with which we have to preface so much connected with the practice of our art. It is, as I said, inherent in the subject."
"There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language."
"Though a little one, the master-word looms large in meaning. It is the open sesame to every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone, which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold. The stupid man among you it will make bright, the bright man brilliant, and the, brilliant student steady. With the magic word in your heart all things are possible, and without it all study is vanity and vexation. The miracles of life are with it; the blind see by touch, the deaf hear with eyes, the dumb speak with fingers. To the youth it brings hope, to the middle-aged confidence, to the aged repose. True balm of hurt minds, in its presence the heart of the sorrowful is lightened and consoled. It is directly responsible for all advances in medicine during the past twenty-five centuries. Laying hold upon it Hippocrates made observation and science the warp and woof of our art. Galen so read its meaning that fifteen centuries stopped thinking, and slept until awakened by the De Fabrica, of Vesalius, which is the very incarnation of the master-word. With its inspiration Harvey gave an impulse to a larger circulation than he wot of, an impulse which we feel to-day. Hunter sounded all its heights and depths, and stands out in our history as one of the great exemplars of its virtues With it Virchow smote the rock, and the waters of progress gushed out while in the hands of Pasteur it proved a very talisman to open to us a new heaven in medicine and a new earth in surgery. Not only has it been the touchstone of progress, but it is the measure of success in every-day life. Not a man before you but is beholden to it for his position here, while he who addresses you has that honor directly in consequence of having had it graven on his heart when he was as you are to-day. And the master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts and bind it upon your foreheads. But there is a serious difficulty in getting you to understand the paramount importance of the work-habit as part of your organization. You are not far from the Tom Sawyer stage with its philosophy "that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." A great many hard things may be said of the work-habit. For most of us it means a hard battle; the few take to it naturally; the many prefer idleness and never learn to love labor."
"Every one of you will have to face the ordeal of every student in this generation who sooner or later tries to mix the waters of science with the oil of faith. You can have a good deal of both if you only keep them separate. The worry comes from the attempt at mixture."
"The search of science for the spirits has been neither long nor earnest; nor is it a matter of surprise that it has not been undertaken earlier by men whose training had fitted them for the work. It is no clear, vasty deep, but a muddy, Acheronian pool in which our modern spirits dwell, with Circe as the presiding deity and the Witch of Endor as her high priestess. Commingling with the solemn incantations of the devotees who throng the banks, one can hear the mocking laughter of Puck and of Ariel, as they play among the sedges and sing the monotonous refrain, "What fools these mortals be!" Sadly besmirched, and more fitted for a sojourn in Ancyra than in Athens, has been the condition of those who have returned from the quest, and we cannot wonder that scientific men have hesitated to stir the pool and risk a touch from Circe's wand. All the more honour to those who have with honest effort striven to pierce the veil and explore the mysteries which lie behind it."
"Though his philosophy finds nothing to support it, at least from the standpoint of Terence the scientific student should be ready to acknowledge the value of a belief in a hereafter as an asset in human life. In the presence of so many mysteries which have been unveiled, in the presence of so many yet unsolved, he cannot be dogmatic and deny the possibility of a future state; and however distressing such a negative attitude of mind to the Teresian, like Pyrrho, he will ask to be left, reserving his judgement, but still inquiring. He will recognize that amid the turbid ebb and flow of human misery, a belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come is the rock of safety to which many of the noblest of his fellows have clung; he will gratefully accept the incalculable comfort of such a belief to those sorrowing for precious friends hid in death's dateless night; he will acknowledge with gratitude and reverence the service to humanity of the great souls who have departed this life in a sure and certain hope but this is all. Whether across death's threshold we step from life to life, or whether we go whence we shall not return, even to the land of darkness, as darkness itself, he cannot tell."
"Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith — the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible. Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating nor jot nor tittle of its potency. Well indeed did St. Paul break out into the well-known glorious panegyric, but even this scarcely does justice to the Hertha of the psychical world, distributing force as from a great storage battery without money and without price to the children of men. Three of its relations concern us here. The most active manifestations are in the countless affiliations which man in his evolution has worked out with the unseen, with the invisible powers, whether of light or of darkness, to which from time immemorial he has erected altars and shrines. To each one of the religions, past or present, faith has been the Jacob's ladder. Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines."
"A man must have faith in himself to be of any use in the world. There may be very little on which to base it — no matter, but faith in one's powers, in one's mission is essential to success. Confidence once won, the rest follows naturally; and with strong faith in himself a man becomes a local center for its radiation. St. Francis, St. Theresa, Ignatius Loyola, Florence Nightingale, the originator of every cult or sect or profession has possessed this infective faith. And in the ordinary everyday work of the doctor confidence, assurance (in the proper sense of the word) is an asset without which it is very difficult to succeed."
"Faith is indeed one of the miracles of human nature which science is as ready to accept as it is to study its marvellous effects. When we realise what a vast asset it has been in history, the part which it has played in the healing art seems insignificant, and yet there is no department of knowledge more favourable to an impartial study of its effects, and this brings me to my subject — the faith that heals."
"Literature is full of examples of remarkable cures through the influence of the imagination, which is only an active phase of faith."
"While in general use for centuries, one good result of the recent development of mental healing has been to call attention to its great value as a measure to be carefully and scientifically applied in suitable cases. My experience has been that of the unconscious rather than the deliberate faith healer. Phenomenal, even what could be called miraculous, cures are not very uncommon. Like others, I have had cases any one of which, under suitable conditions, could have been worthy of a shrine or made the gem of a pilgrimage."
"We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life."
"Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever."
"Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today … The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty."
"My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age."
"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals."
"A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient."
"Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility."
"To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals — this alone is worth the struggle."
"One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine."
"Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability."
"Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants."
"The "Theatre of the Absurd" has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement — and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world. Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise."
"The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation."
"The Theatre of the Absurd … can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time.  The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war."
" "Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous," but this is not the sense in which Camus uses the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. . . . Cut from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.""
"The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre or Camus express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed. In some senses, the theatre of Sartre and Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus — in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms — than the Theatre of the Absurd."
"The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart — the difference between theory and experience."
"The "poetic avant-garde" relies on fantasy and dream reality as much as the Theatre of the Absurd does; it also disregards such traditional axioms as that of the basic unity and consistency of each character or the need for a plot. Yet basically the "poetic avant-garde" represents a different mood; it is more lyrical, and far less violent and grotesque. Even more important is its different attitude toward language: the "poetic avant-garde" relies to a far greater extent on consciously "poetic" speech; it aspires to plays that are in effect poems, images composed of a rich web of verbal associations. The Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. The element of language still plays an important part in this conception, but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters. In Ionesco's The Chairs, for example, the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play does not lie in the banal words that are uttered but in the fact that they are spoken to an ever-growing number of empty chairs."
"In an age of increasing specialisation, he had a refreshing breadth of vision, while his penetrating mind could quickly comprehend when something new and important was happening in the arts. He could explain the complex in a straightforward and lucid manner, and his judgments were invaluable. His book The Theatre Of The Absurd was the most influential theatrical text of the 1960s."
"Maybe I was brave, I don't know. At the time I was just doing the job, I didn't have time for other thoughts."
"You're very special ... It's been rather a long time since I've awarded one of these.— Her Majesty"
"Some days you['re] the bug, some days you['re] the windshield Private Johnson Beharry, VC."
"I was overshadowed today by Private Beharry, and quite rightly so – it was an honour to stand alongside him."
"When I first started doing self-portraits – and I didn’t start until I was in my 40s, quite late – I did these portraits where my hand was kind of stretched out toward the canvas, as if about to paint…I suppose I was imitating those famous poses of Goya or Rembrandt. But something felt so false about that. Somehow women don’t have a secure place in the history of art and to portray myself in this way standing squarely, about to paint, it wasn’t right."
"From the earliest memory every day started with prayer and ended with prayer…And it is still in my bloodstream, even though I am not conventionally religious. I am not good at belonging to groups. But doesn’t everyone think about God?"
"When I first met Lucian he wasn’t that famous. He was notorious, but he did not have a big international reputation or anything. He was a genuinely Dostoevskian character it seemed to me, living much more on the edge. And then later he became more a national treasure and was quite seduced by that."
"Everyone was saying that painting was dead, and really believing it. It was a very difficult time for me. I felt unsupported and isolated…"
"There has been a way of seeing Africa in terms of poverty and conflict which has become a kind of shorthand for the continent that still persists today."
"Achebe gave a voice to Africans for generations to come, including my own."
"If situations arise where people feel that they have grievances, such grievances should be dealt with in the appropriate way with full transparency, using all the proper governance structures at hand."
"If you are always guided by passion and compassion, you will truly have a life of meaning."
"For a long time it was the view that because Africa didn't always write, or have written document for his history that means Africa didn’t document its history. That is not true"
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head"
"I am so speechless right now. I didn't know what my reaction would be, and then that just happened. I'm so, so grateful for all the support I had today. This is by far the biggest court I've played on. I think I coped quite well in the beginning, I just tried to hold my nerve. When I was packing to come into the bubble, my parents said, 'Aren't you packing too much match kit?' I think I'm going to have to do some laundry tonight."
"Felt like the hardest thing in the world."
"You say, "I want to win a Grand Slam." But to have the belief I did, and actually executing, winning a Grand Slam. I can't believe it. My dad is definitely very tough to please. But I managed to today."
"I really respect Nigel, and me and Nigel got on great. I think very very highly of him, but I think at this stage of my development a fresh voice, and fresh eyes are sometimes good"
"I need someone who has experience at the high levels"
"Torben is a great guy. I really enjoyed my time with him on and off the court. He is one of the nicest people I've met so obviously it was a tough one to split with someone like that. But I feel like right now I'm very comfortable with my current training. I'm feeling very confident in what I'm doing and how I'm working. I think Torben has been great for me because when I wanted someone with tour experience, I think for my first six months on the tour, it was very valuable."
"We didn’t agree on the terms and there were some red flags that just couldn’t be ignored."
"I have really enjoyed Seb's coaching and working with him, it's unfortunate that circumstances made it unfeasible for both of us to continue right now and we have decided to part ways."
"I'd like to thank Nick for a great partnership over the last year and a bit, especially post-surgeries. I wish him all the best in his next chapter and no doubt we'll stay in touch."
"Emma and Vlado have parted ways. Emma has utmost respect for Vlado and the work they started but it wasn't quite heading in the right direction. Emma is now focused on doing as well as she can here in Miami after a solid start today and will continue looking for the right coach.""
"The way we stopped working together was totally amicable. My job at the start with her was going to be just Miami. Then obviously it became longer through to Wimbledon, and then obviously she had three days with Francis Roig, Rafael Nadal’s former coach, after Wimbledon and that went well. But he couldn’t start due to other commitments until Cincinnati. So, around the work stuff that I have, we stayed in contact, and I helped her up in Montreal as best I could. But eventually my commitments were going to be too much to be a lead person for her in that environment."
"Thank you for our time together. You have been more than a coach to me and I will cherish the many good times we spent together on and off the court. While we have come to the conclusion together that we ought not to move forward, please know I am very grateful for all you have taught me and fond of our time shared."
"If a film does well, other people want to work with you."
"Many people have the misconception that a pretty girl can only be a ‘vase’ in a film. I want people to consider me not just to be a film star, but someone who knows about acting."
"I have done all kinds of scripts, but I prefer working on dramas. They give me room to really act. Comedies are fun to work on, but I don’t get much satisfaction from them."
"Comedies are written for men, and the women just stand around. But I do like the audience reaction to comedies. When they laugh, I feel good. You don’t get that sort of pleasure from making dramas."
"I have nothing against commercial films, but if you’re in a movie, [and] you feel the script and everything else about it has no meaning – it’s just another production that the boss can add to his list – I don’t think you should do it."
"My first dream was to be a hairdresser, then a model."
"I’m very honest to my work, to myself and my audience. I never pretend I am something I am not. And when I play a part, I always give it as much as I can. That’s honesty too. I’m proud of being me."
"Well I don't think any two different people can be compared, because for me as you see on my list I've worked with so many different kinds of directors, that I never try to compare two people. I think they are individuals, and because of their upbringing and background they become the way they are and it also affects what they want to say in a movie, I think that's the interesting part, to see the differences in them."
"I mean for me, sometimes I can just picture things that I can't explain, and I think a snake just sort of wriggles along the way."
"No matter where I'm going, I feel like I'm leaving something behind. Every time I get on a plane, I cry. The flight attendants on Cathay Pacific must think I'm mad."
"You experience a lot more pain than normal people—your mom dies, your dad dies, your boyfriend chucks you, you live in the street, and you're really going through these emotions. You're trying to know what it feels like to watch a man die in front of you, as if you've really lived it. Once that division is gone, it gets blurry—you look back at a shoot and think, was I really that sad because in the film my boyfriend didn't like me—or was it something else, something real?"
"We were in Los Angeles. And we could go anywhere. No one had any idea who I was."
"I think I started to have thoughts to really want to be serious about my work when I was about twenty five and I just kind of started to look into that direction and moved into it. But it didn't seem as though it was going anywhere because, you know, films without action or comedy are rare to find in Hong Kong, especially if the main character is a woman. But along the way, I've had a few good breaks."
"Well first of all, in Hong Kong, I think they're still interested in the action films and I think in some ways in action films we still do it better than the Americans. I think that's the first interest that people have still on Hong Kong movies and, you know, the world is smaller now and it's time to open your eyes to other things."
"I have no regrets as an actress, even though I have been one for 15 years and don't think that all the films I've done are that good."
"I like the idea of writing and directing something. That would be my goal in life. But that would not be in the near future. I would have to write and direct at the same time because I don't think anyone could give me a script that I would want to direct."
"To be honest, I really think a lot of Hong Kong actors/actresses aren't interested in European movies."
"I used to be an actress. After being away from film sets for 12 years, I no longer deserve to be called an actress!"
"Yet “Maggie” (as her fans affectionately call her) stands out against western clichés about Chinese actresses. No Orientalist fantasy, she is a modern Hong Kong woman, a complex mirror image of post-colonial dilemmas: displacement, racist misrepresentation and partial loss of cultural identity (she speaks English better than she can read Chinese characters). Unlike such mainland stars as Gong Li and Siqin Gaowa, she has never formally trained as an actress and her acting depends more on emotion than technique."
"At that time, she didn’t have much ambition for her acting career, because of the kind of roles she was offered. I noticed that, if given a lot of dialogue, she would become very nervous; then I cut most of her lines, so she could concentrate on her body language, which is something she was very good at."
"What if the powerful can use ‘information abundance’ to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideal of freedom of speech to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability?"
"But if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? Why would you want them if they tell you that your children will be poorer than you? That all versions of the future are unpromising? And why should you trust the purveyors of facts – the media and academics, think tanks, statesmen? And so the politician who makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive. That enough Americans could vote for someone like Donald Trump, a man with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any very stable meaning, was partly possible because voters felt they weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s OK. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense."
"Conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audience with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov called ‘white jamming’."
"This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge. What’s unsettling isn’t so much that ‘they’ know something about me that I considered private, hidden… more disconcerting is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am – one’s complete dissipation into data that is now being manipulated by someone else."
"Forty years have passed since my parents were pursued by the KGB for pursuing the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, in which censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what academics call an era of ‘information abundance’. But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century – between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police – have been turned upside down. We now have more information than ever before, but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected."
"I don’t want to write trauma for trauma’s sake. I want to write it in a way that leads to empathy. To action."
"It is so critical to understand that speaking up transcends the ability to help just the person speaking up, but knowing that whenever we use our voices, we are doing so for many others who have suffered the same experiences or injustices. It is about starting crucial conversations that would hopefully lead to positive change. It is about refusing to be complacent, to accept what is seen as the norm."
"It’s so heartbreaking that we’re killing talent. We’re killing intelligence. We’re killing future leaders. We’re killing brains, inventors. We’re killing so much by not allowing these girls to be educated."
"When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important."
"You must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well."
"We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the time to listen well."
"Not his-story. My own will be called her-story."
"“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping.“"
"I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all that putting inside a house and locking Him there. I want her to know that the only way to know if a person find God and keep Him in their heart is to check how the person is treating other people, if he treats people like Jesus says--with love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness."
"Now I know that speaking good English is not the measure of intelligent mind and sharp brain. English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense."
"Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? So, I nod my head yes, because it is true, the future is always working, always busy unfolding better things, and even if it doesn’t seem so sometimes, we have hope of it."
"“Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice."
"I feel a free that I didn't feel in long time. And when I smile, it climb from inside my stomach and spread itself on my teeth."
"If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than men?"
"Write your truth, Ms. Tia say. Your truth."
"“Your dead mother and me, we are age-mates. God forbid for me to share my husband with my own child. God forbid that I am waiting for you to finish with my husband before I can enter his room. Ah, you will suffer in this house. Ask Khadija, she will tell you that I am a wicked woman. That my madness is not having cure.”"
"“When you begin to born your children, you will not be too sad again,” she say. “When I first marry Morufu, I didn’t want to born children. I was too afraid of having a baby so quick, afraid of falling sick from the load of it. So I take something, a medicine, to stop the pregnant from coming. But after two months, I say to myself, ‘Khadija, if you don’t born a baby, Morufu will send you back to your father’s house.’ So I stop the medicine and soon I born my first girl, Alafia. When I hold her in my hands for the first time, my heart was full of so much love. Now, my children make me laugh when I am not even thinking to laugh. Children are joy, Adunni. Real joy.”"
"She open her eyes, give me a sad smile. “I wish I am a man, but I am not, so I do the next thing I can do. I marry a man.”"
"I am leaving Ikati. This is what I been wanting all my life, to leave this place and see what the world outside is looking like, but not like this. Not with a bad name following me. Not like a person that the whole village is looking for because they think she have kill a woman. Not with one half of my heart with Kayus and the other half with Khadija. I hang my head down, feeling a thick, heavy cloth as it is covering me. The thick cloth of shame, of sorrow, of heart pain."
"When she come out, she draw deep breath and her chest, wide like blackboard, is climbing up and down, up and down. It is as if this woman is using her nostrils to be collecting all the heating from the outside and making us to be catching cold. I am standing beside Mr. Kola, and his body is shaking like my own. Even the trees in the compound, the yellow, pink, blue flowers in the long flowerpot, all of them too are shaking."
"I didn’t tell Ms. Tia that I ever marry Morufu or about all the things he did to me in the room after he drink Fire-Cracker. I didn’t tell her about what happen to Khadija. I didn’t tell her because I have to keep it inside one box in my mind, lock the box, and throw the key inside river of my soul. Maybe one day, I will swim inside the river, find the key."
"I tear to pieces the paper, and throw it to the floor. Then I swim deep inside the river of my soul, find the key from where it is sitting, full of rust, at the bottom of the river, and open the lock. I kneel down beside my bed, close my eyes, turn myself into a cup, and pour the memory out of me."
"“Fifteen years ago, I was selling cheap materials from my boot, going from place to place, looking for customers. I wasn’t born into wealth. I have worked hard for my success. I fought for it. It wasn’t easy, especially because my husband, Chief, he didn’t have a job. If you want to be like me in business, Adunni, you will need to work very hard. Rise about whatever life throws at you. And never, ever give up on your dreams. Do you understand?”"
"But there are words in my head, many things I want to say. I want to tell Ms. Tia I am sorry I made her come here. I want to ask why the doctor didn’t come too. Why didn’t he come and get a beating like his wife? If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?"
"Trees, they die dead like people too. They need care too. The earth around us needs care. We come from earth, we eat from earth, and one day we must go back to earth, so why are we treating it so bad?"
"Kike picks up her basket, sets it on her head, leaves it to balance by itself. The girls in our village learn how to do this from when they are first growing two teeth. They know how to use every part of their body to work so that their hand can be free to do even more work."
"“In our land, a sad wife is better than a happy woman with no husband.”"
"That’s the disgusting reality about the human ability to adapt. At first the shock, the repulsion, is all in 3D — sights and sounds and smells. You recoil and gag and wish for a bath and cry at the devastation. Time passes. You live in it. You spend time in it. You blend, and everything fizzles to normalcy, and that which once repulsed slowly becomes natural, acceptable if you do nothing. That, I realize, is what culture is: doing things a certain way until you get used to it."
"“But you were blind to your wife’s depression and silent resentment. She hid it from you because she loved you. And you were blind to it because society offers you that blindfold, that thick cloth of entitlement, patriarchy, at birth.”"
"In other words, we can – and to survive, we must – transform and even end within the next ten years the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse earth’s life support systems and with them, human civilisation. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits; one that nurtures ‘soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity’;6 one that delivers social and economic justice."
"The reality is that, today, all states are embedded in, governed by and subject to the international system of mobile, volatile, private financial markets – a system that has indebted and impoverished the many and raised political tensions, as reflected in the rise of nationalism. Millions of voters understand the nature of globalization, even while dimly aware of the monetary, fiscal or trade theories on which the system is built. This public awareness explains why some electorates have backed the election of “strong men” – politicians who offer “protection” from the very global markets that have stripped economies of jobs and income, while enriching rentier capitalists."
"Social democracy’s blind spot for the international financial architecture and its power over domestic policy-making has had other consequences. Not only does neglect of the international system let globalized capital markets off the regulatory hook, but globalization has also led to the rise of economic nationalisms."
"Globalization represents the tragic reversal of all that Keynes hoped to achieve at Bretton Woods: an international framework that would end nationalisms, international trade competition, high levels of domestic unemployment, low levels of aggregate demand and the consequent debt deflation. It was an attempt by Keynes and other economists to prevent the return of nationalisms and fascism by developing policies that increased domestic demand not by boosting exports and raising demand externally but by raising living standards at home: an inter-national system that would restore policy autonomy to democratic states and stability to the world’s economies."
"Nothing is more wearing morally, than a weak husband."
"She was free-spirited and committed to women's equality - not someone who would easily consent to a marriage arranged by her family in India"
"Bonarjee was also a supporter of women's suffrage"
"Her triumph in the college Eisteddfod in 1914 prompted a burst of poetic creativity which has now been celebrated in the first ever collati0n of her verse."
"(How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another."
"It's a lovely feeling to know you can do exactly as you like."
"The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult."
"I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth."
"When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy. 'Do you think think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes."
"I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real."
"One is born either to go with or to go against."
"She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. ("The Insect World")"
"Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up. (beginning of "Heat")"
"There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")"
"One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")"
"He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed. 'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)..."
"...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace ("Outside the Machine")"
"...What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. ("Till September Petronella")"
"'Mein Lieb, Mon Cher, My Dear, Amigo,' the letter began (beginning of the story "Tigers Are Better-looking")"
"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)"
"I thought if I told no one it might not be true."
"I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing."
"So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)"
"I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some."
"She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it."
"It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'."
"Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow."
""...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else."
"'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?' There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse. I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life."
"I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this. This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . ."
"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)"
"I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)"
"...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)"
"It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running. (Part two, 1st section)"
"She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)"
"It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe. (chapter 3)"
""It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)"
"She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)"
"When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)"
"The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)"
"When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)"
"'They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still...' 'Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking..."
"She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child. You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you."
"no good ever comes from being too polite. (p40)"
"They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures. (beginning of "Trio")"
"One of those cold, heavy days in spring - a hard sky with a glare behind the cloud, all the new green of the trees hanging still and sullen. (beginning of "The Grey Day")"
"Funny how it's slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots. (beginning of "Vienne")"
"the search for illusion a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of [her] life. ("Illusion")"
"It was obvious that this was not an Anglo-Saxon: he was too gay, too dirty, too unreserved and in his little eyes was such a mellow comprehension of all the sins and the delights of life. He was drinking rapidly one glass of beer after another, smoking a long, curved pipe, and beaming contentedly on the world. The woman with him wore a black coat and skirt; she had her back to us. I said: 'Who's the happy man in the corner? I've never seen him before.'"
"One shuts one's eyes and sees it written: red letters on a black ground: Le Saut dans l'Inconnu. . . . Le Saut... Stupidly I think: But why in French? Of course it must be a phrase I have read somewhere. Idiotic. I screw up my eyes wildly to get rid of it: next moment it is back again. Red letters on a black ground. One lies staring at the exact shape of the S."
"I wonder too if I am terribly excited about something that has been done ages ago (1964)"
"Very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same. (1955)"
"I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line. (1953)"
"Everyone does seem very pessimistic about the future of writing and art in general. But hasn't it always been a fight? I remember how very bitter most of the English in Paris were about that very subject ages ago. (1953)"
"I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else. (1953)"
"Writing can be (among other things), a safety valve. (1949)"
"I like emotion, I approve of it-in fact am capable of wallowing in it. (1946)"
"I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well... if it were my last breath I'd say HELL TO IT and to the people who do it- (1936)"
"You see I don't even know myself and am really trying to argue it out with myself - anyway it isn't very important. (1934)"
"I am always being told that until my work ceases being "sordid and depressing" I haven't much chance of selling. (1931)"
"When I moved to Scotland, I discovered Jean Rhys, and she became a haunting influence on my work...As in the case of Jean Rhys, writers who moved to Britain in their youth struck a special chord with me as outsiders grappling with issues similar to my own—Abdulrazak Gurnah, Buchi Emecheta, Ahdaf Soueif."
"It was in the States that I saw my first ever copy of Jean Rhys. It was her book, Voyage in the Dark. It was the simplicity and beauty of the prose that I loved. But it was a horrible book, really, for a young girl to read. Jean Rhys felt she was a victim. I tried to tell her that. I only met her once, in London, with her husband. Her style was so pure but she wrote about impure things."
"of the five collected novels, the one that hit home the hardest was Voyage in the Dark. Reading it was a painful voyage into my own cluelessness and powerlessness, a voyage that many young women of my generation, on the cusp of the women's movement, had embarked upon...Rhys's portrayals of young women who fall prey to rapacious situations, canaries in the mine shaft of patriarchy, smart girls with nowhere to go but the wrong man's arms or Anna Karenina's train tracks, spoke to many of us embarking on our journeys...by allowing her female characters a full range of feelings and not airbrushing them into simple virtuous victimhood, Rhys liberates us all from the danger of a single, monochrome self and story...That ability to imagine a life so intimately and richly is Jean Rhys's gift to us. For that she should have been knighted. Instead, I'd like to imagine her even rather happy (perhaps!) with what her stories have become: food to nourish all our souls."
"I admire Jean Rhys, especially Wide Sargasso Sea, but she is too limited by her pathology."
"A reader new to Rhys usually puzzles over her viewpoint looking both ways across the channel and the Atlantic, she seems for and against both perspectives. Her insider-outsider's treatment of England, France and the Caribbean gnaws at comfortable ethnocentricisms.... Looking for some kind of familiar ground, the reader tries to fit Rhys into available models of contemporary fiction, and fails. She belongs to no recognizable school, fits into no ready-made slot. Rhys's fiction belongs, as she did, to worlds whose mutual understanding has "the feeling...of... things that... couldn't fit together." The dissonances of seemingly different worlds inform the Rhysian novel, finding coherence in her art...All her work is charged with a sense of belonging in many wheres at once."
"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."
"Jean Rhys maddens me because she's got this wonderful art-deco prose style, and all it does is paint the same picture of the thwarted woman who's got out of an unbearable relationship but who sees nothing before her except the possibility of another unbearable relationship which she'll be in just as long as she can bear it, and then she'll be back sitting in the corner of this cafe with some single glass of absinthe that she has to make last for four hours because she can only afford one glass. This is after leaving Mr. Mackenzie and before meeting Mr. Somebody Else. I think, "Oh, Jean, for God's sake" - this is so empty and so self-regarding, an exquisite piece of nothing. Just paper cutouts."
"...Jean Rhys, I think, wrote the best West Indian novel...Wide Sargasso Sea."
"Wide Sargasso Sea has 190 pages of words, and each one was weighed and considered in relation to every other in a way that I have never seen except in a poem. It is a poem, and, to paraphrase its author, all her life was in it. How much this is literally true can be seen from her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979). From the portrait of her mother and their antagonistic relationship, to her descriptions of Black people, and her own feelings of being an outcast among white and Black, even to the vegetation, the parrot, the patchwork quilt-the West Indian terrain of Wide Sargasso Sea is shown to be drawn from her own life there. Ms. Rhys, from childhood in the West Indies and adulthood in Europe, had many scores to settle and her creation of Antoinette was for the purpose of settling them. She wanted to burn down all that Rochester symbolized on her own behalf as a West Indian woman, and she wanted us to know. In the original Brontë story of Jane Eyre, the first Mrs. Rochester's maiden name was Mason. Ms. Rhys gives Antoinette another name so that both her mother and father are Creole and the European Mason is the stepfather. The name she gives her is Cosway or causeway, the bridge between the Third World and Europe, between one race and another, a causeway from defeat to victory. I believe it is a triumph for us as women, for all of us as citizens of the world."
"No one captured epic sadness as well as Jean Rhys, and none of her books captured it as unapologetically as Good Morning, Midnight"
"Miss Rhys's work seems to me to be so very good, so vivid, so extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion, and so true, that I wish to be connected with it."
"somebody who has confirmed my vision of literature is Jean Rhys...when I read Jean Rhys’s first novel, I never imagined that she was inventing. It fascinated me, I liked it because she breaks with the vision of woman in literature as a docile, noble creature, influenced by her family and everything. I read all of her works, and I thought that I knew her very well, until I finally realized that she had invented herself completely, so much so that she forbade them to write her biography because she didn’t want the public to see that she was different from the protagonists she had created. I was very pleased because I felt that rather than being a strange phenomenon I was somebody connected to another writer in a different country."
"That fire you lit our beacon to safe harbour in the islands."
"...Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. There's too much freedom in them."
"...she was very serious about writing. She was a funny woman, and very vain and coquettish about her appearance...she was a very truthful person...She had a far more interesting life than appears in those unfinished memoirs."
"Definitely the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square. I was determined to fill that empty plinth! It took five years of campaigning with my committee at the Royal Society of Arts, but we did it."
"My restaurant in the Seventies and Eighties was the place to be. I’ve cooked for most of the Royals, Elton John, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Alec Guinness… the list goes on. They all loved my food – at least, I hope they did!"
"while cooking for 300 at Vintners Hall, I mistakenly thawed beetroot puree instead of raspberry for the vanilla ice cream. I added sugar and lemon juice, used it anyway, and guess what? Nobody noticed!"
"Every school child should learn 10 basics: Shepherd’s Pie, Spag Bol, Pizza, Curry, Salad Nicoise, Omelette, Quiche, Ratatouille, Trifle, and Apple Pie. These recipes will make you a hit at uni and set you up for life!"
"Our first job was to deal with the concrete. The previous tenant farmer couldn’t make money out of his farm"
"If you’ve had a quarrel, a walk in the garden calms things down"
"I had to wrestle with myself – I fell in love with that show. I’ll miss it, but I was ready to move on"
"It’s loud. But it’s very cool and exciting to be in the middle of this huge thing – there’s haters, there’s lovers, it’s all going on"
"I would love to have the energy and the youth to be able to do this full time for the rest of my life, but my knees are telling me it’s time"
"You know when you get cast, at some point you are going to have to hand back that sonic screwdriver and it is all going to come to an end, but nothing quite prepares you for it"
"The fans are truly the final character and beating heart of this show"
"What the internet has truly changed is not political dissent, but rather social dissent. We must protect it as a safe space where people can experiment with gender and sexual identities, explore what it means to be gay or a single mom or an atheist or a Christian in the Middle East, but also what it means to be black and angry in the US, to be Muslim and ostracized in Europe, or to be a coal miner in a world that must cut back on greenhouse gases. The internet is the only space where all different modes of being Palestinian can meet. If I express this precariousness in symbolic violence, will you hear me out? Will you protect me from both prosecution by the establishment and exploitation by the well-funded fringe extremists?"
"can we get back to killing zionists please? they seem to be more violent when we stick to non violence."
"Unfortunately, the Iranian nuclear project isn't dedicated to the extermination of the white man; Bin Laden's odds are higher."
"Dear Zionists, please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all Zionists including civilians, so f--- off."
"So the brilliant British dogs and monkeys really think terrorists will reveal their plans on Twitter."
"there was no genocide against Jews by the Nazis – after all, many Jews are left."
"Now my real criticism of these post-police murder riots is the wrong focus, go burn the City or Downing Street, or hunt police fools."
"police are not human...They don’t have rights, we should just kill them all."
"I consider killing any colonialists and specially zionists heroic, we need to kill more of them."
"Now all I can think of is joining Bin Laden and killing a few Americans."
"I’m telling you that I hate white people."
"And you talk to most of them, and they come out telling you they're the ones who's oppressed and victims. I seriously, seriously, seriously hate white people, especially those of English or Dutch or German descent."
"May I start by raising the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah? As the Prime Minister knows and has said, he is a British citizen jailed for the crime of posting on social media and has been imprisoned in Egypt for most of the last nine years; he has been on hunger strike for the last six months. The Prime Minister just said that he raised this case with President Sisi; what progress did he make in securing Alaa's release?"
"I’m delighted that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones, who must be feeling profound relief... Alaa's case has been a top priority for my government since we came to office."
"Mr El-Fattah is a British citizen. It has been a long-standing priority under successive governments to work for his release from detention, and to see him reunited with his family in the UK."
"By his own public posts, Mr Abd El-Fattah has endorsed killing ‘zionists’ and urged more of it. He has also been widely reported as having called for the killing of Israelis, in terms so extreme that his nomination for a major European human rights prize was withdrawn when the post came to light. He has since sought to explain himself. That only underlines the point: this is not ancient history. It is a live controversy about incitement and hatred."
"Tweet the wrong thing in Britain and you’ll serve 13 months. Tweet the wrong thing in Egypt and we’ll bring you here, put you up, pay for your son’s special school - while you call us apes and boast of hating white people."
"Liberalism, the dominant ideology of our time, has been dangerously distorted by the impact of economism. It is that impact which has knocked the citizen off his pedestal and replaced him with the consumer."
"The institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from existing national parliaments. Indirectly elected Senators would retain their national parliamentary careers, while acquiring closer knowledge of European institutions and the habit of co-operating with each other. Such Senators ought to be leading national politicians, politicians with an experience and stature not typical of European MPs today."
"If we want to understand the distinctive constitution of Europe, we must go back to its religious foundations. For the moral beliefs which Christianity fostered still underpin civil society in Europe, the institutions that surround us."
"The failure of utilitarianism to address a will in which it does not altogether believe stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream of liberal thought represented by the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, liberalism was first and last about the will....Like Christianity, Kantian liberalism identifies the greatest need of humans, as self-conscious beings, as the need for a rule of conduct, the means of governing oneself as a free and responsible agent.Modern economism's failure is that it does not face up to this question of self-government or address the issue of what is required to make the empire of the will legitimate. For the utilitarian maxim that pleasure or happiness should be maximized fails to acknowledge the need to govern the empire of the will. It provides instead an aggregative criterion for public decision-making, a criterion which is defective because it does not provide for the claims of justice. But that failure over justice reflects, in turn, utilitarianism's failure to distinguish between persons as separate and autonomous agents, as rational agents who need a rule by which to regulate their own wills. Utilitarianism merely aggregates satisfactions, looking upon society as a kind of collective self."
"We have become victims of our own success. For we are in danger of taking this primacy of the individual as something ‘obvious’ or ‘inevitable’, something guaranteed by things outside ourselves rather than by historical convictions and struggles. Of course, every human has his or her own body and mind. But does this establish that human equality is decreed by nature rather than culture?Nature, in the form of genetic endowment, is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. A legal foundation for equality, in the form of fundamental rights for every person, is also required....Widespread complacency about the victory of an individualized model of society reflects a worrying decline in historical understanding."
"The Jewish sense of time was...unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events."
"Only the pride of the intellect could suppose that the human will can be completely self-determining. The incarnation revealed that something more is needed. ‘My mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report.’ Augustine’s conception of the self became a subtle mixture of autonomy and dependence."
"In the twelfth century, reason began to lose the ontologically privileged position it had been accorded by an aristocratic society. Its propositions were open, at least in principle, to equal scrutiny, grounded in a shared faith. (Did not St Bernard complain that under Abelard’s influence matters of the faith were being discussed at the crossroads?) The role of reason was being democratized. Reason ceased to be something that used people, and became something people used."
"Paul and Augustine transformed Jewish belief in a divine will directed at a ‘chosen’ people. They universalized the claims of that will and internalized it, making it available to all of humanity. In doing so, they created the potential for ‘Christian liberty’, a rightful power for individuals. By combining the assumption of human equality with the need to discover the divine will, a new relationship with deity became possible, one that was personal rather than tribal. Yet if Paul and Augustine conjured up a vision of moral freedom, it was the twelfth-century canonists who converted that vision into a formal legal system founded on natural rights."
"Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universalism that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary. They followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in ‘two cities’ at the same time."
"What is the crux of secularism? It is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make his or her own decisions, a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of classical liberalism: the commitment to ‘equal liberty’. Is this indifference or non-belief? Not at all. It rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others.This is also the central egalitarian moral insight of Christianity. It stands out from St Paul’s contrast between ‘Christian liberty’ and observance of the Jewish law. Enforced belief was, for Paul and many early Christians, a contradiction in terms. Strikingly, in its first centuries Christianity spread by persuasion, not by force of arms — a contrast to the early spread of Islam."
"The pandemic exposes weaknesses of current leadership of global public health systems, inequities of resource allocation to Africa, and broken promises by wealthier nations for vaccine equity and resource allocation. This status quo is unacceptable."
"The transformation has been profound, illustrated by advances in the development and roll-out of rapid diagnostics, new drugs, and shorter and safer treatment regimens through capacity building of laboratory and trial sites, and empowerment of a younger generation of African and European investigators."
"The urgent priority now is to get TB control efforts back on target in light of the setbacks incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
"This is the start of a much-needed step-up change in African leadership and increased resources, which will motivate young African researchers to build their careers within Africa and advance front-line research."