174 quotes found
"That consecrated combination of private interests and public plunders."
"Faced with the alternative of saying goodbye to the gold standard, and therefore to his own employment, and goodbye to other people's employment, Mr. Churchill characteristically selected the latter course."
"We propose first to expand credit in order to create demand. That new and greater demand must, of course, be met by a new and greater supply of goods, or all the evils of inflation and price rise will result. Here our Socialist planning must enter in. We must see that more goods are forthcoming to meet the new demand."
"The ranks of the City are now divided. The advanced section, headed by Mr McKenna and Mr Keynes, face the orthodox and reactionary ranks which are led by Mr Montagu Norman and the heads of the Treasury. To the uninitiated it...seems a little unfortunate that the ex-Labour chancellor should appear...to be an ardent supporter of Mr Montagu Norman. It will be little less than a disaster if in this struggle Labour support is accorded to the reactionary elements in the City."
"If you love our country you are national, and if you love our people you are a socialist."
"The declared object of deflation was the restoration of the gold standard at pre-war parity. Its actual effect has been to create unemployment by the restriction of industrial credit. By the lever of unemployment it has forced down wages and has thus facilitated the return to gold through the reduction of prices. An incidental effect has been to transfer purchasing power from the workers, whose wages have been reduced, to the bondholders, whose interest has remained the same. It has also doubled the real burden of Debt since 1920, and was largely responsible for the mining lock-out last year, by the reduction in terms of sterling of the money which we receive for coal sold abroad. Deflation, in fact, has been responsible for a sinister catalogue of disasters which can be substantiated in detailed argument that has never yet been rebutted."
"We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers."
"Feudalism worked in its crude and inequitable fashion until the coming of the Industrial Age. Today the Feudal tradition and its adherents are broken as a political power and in most cases are ignobly lending their prestige and their abilities to the support of the predatory plutocracy which has gained complete control of the Conservative Party. In modern times the old regime is confronted with two alternatives. The first is to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor. The other alternative is to become flunkeys of the bourgeoisie. It is a matter of constant surprise and regret that many of my class have chosen the latter course."
"Together in Britain we have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish. Guard that sacred flame, my brother Blackshirts, until it illuminates Britain and lights again the paths of mankind."
"A fight between several parties of the British people: Nothing of the kind! A fight between two or three big money combines, that and nothing else. Without the weight of money behind the party machines, in an electoral battle today determined purely by principle and by the number of active workers...British Union could fight and beat today the old parties over the whole electoral field. But you know and I know, the battle is nothing of the kind. The battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. Or when they speak democracy, they don't mean government by the people...they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money."
"Living financially and economically on American charity, selling up the house to the Yanks when he won't pay any more charity out. Are you content to be occupied and protected by American aeroplanes? Are you content to be in the position of an old woman, jipped by her young relations? You who were the greatest power on earth fifty years ago, and still can be! Why do I say, 'you still can be'? Because, my friends, I know you, I know the British people! I know that twice in my lifetime in the world war I fought in, in the world war the younger men fought in. We the British have put our effort, our energy of valor, of heroism, unequalled in the history of mankind."
"[Fascism] was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly."
"I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics."
"...the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes."
"Great men of action never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job."
"A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity; it is an occupational risk."
"Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong 'un and they will find it out."
"Mosley is the only man I have ever known who could have been the leader of either the Conservative or Labour party...he might have been a very great Prime Minister."
"Capable of becoming either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister."
"No rising star in the political firmament ever shone more brightly than Oswald Mosley, none promised more surely to soar to the heavens – and none fell to earth with so deadening a thud. Never were such rich talents so wretchedly squandered. Never did success turn to failure so inscrutably."
"Did he not appear to you to be a public man of no little courage, no little candour and no little ability."
"He is too 'logical' and if he had his way would attempt to presently 'Russianize'...our government."
"It was a very able document and illuminating."
"I like the spirit which informs the document. A scheme of national economic planning to achieve a right, or at least a better, balance of our industries between the old and the new, between agriculture and manufacture, between home development and foreign investment; and wide executive powers to carry out the details of such a scheme. That is what it amounts to. ... [The] manifesto offers us a starting point for thought and action. ... It will shock—it must do so—the many good citizens of this country...who have laissez-faire in their craniums, their consciences, and their bones ... But how anyone professing and calling himself a socialist can keep away from the manifesto is a more obscure matter."
"[David Lloyd George] said that Mosley was one of the worst tragedies he knew. If Mosley had stuck it, he was just the type that was needed at the moment. He was just the sort of fellow who could talk to this crowd. You needed a fellow today like Mosley, who could have cheeked them."
"I had many conversations with him during the next few months [in 1930], and was struck both by his acute intelligence and his energy. There was a moment later in the year when I was myself tempted to work with his New Party, for there were many points of his programme which seemed to me at once reasonable and constructive. ... I deeply regretted the course that Sir Oswald Mosley later took. Even his loyal friends...left him when they saw his movement beginning to develop into a form of Fascism, with everything which that implied. This whole story was something of a tragedy. Great talents and great strengths of character were thrown away in vain."
"He is the only living Englishman who could perfectly well have been either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister."
"He was the only English politician who might easily have become Prime Minister as Conservative, Liberal or Socialist."
"I heard Mosley speak here on Sunday. It sickens one to see how easily a man of that type can win over and bamboozle a working class audience."
"One would have had to look a long time to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism must not offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme from Italy and the salute from Germany, with the Jew-baiting tacked on as an afterthought, Mosley having actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent followers."
"Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was one of the most interesting failures, not least because Mosley probably had the greatest intellectual gifts and the strongest social connections of all the fascist chiefs. As a promising junior minister of the Labour government of 1929, he put forward a bold plan in early 1930 to combat the Depression by making the empire a closed economic zone and by spending (into deficit, if need be) for job-creating public works and consumer credit. When the leaders of the Labour Party rebuffed these unorthodox proposals, Mosley resigned and formed his own New Party in 1931, taking a few left-wing Labour MPs with him. The New Party won no seats, however, in the parliamentary election of October 1931. A visit to Mussolini persuaded the frustrated Mosley that fascism was the wave of the future, and his own personal way forward."
"Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (October 1932) won some important early converts, like Lord Rothermere, publisher of the mass-circulation London Daily Mail. Mosley’s movement aroused revulsion, however, when his black-shirted guards spotlighted and beat up opponents at a large public meeting at the Olympia expedition hall in London in June 1934. Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, at the end of the same month, provoked the departure of 90 percent of the BUF’s fifty thousand members, including Lord Rothermere. At the end of 1934, Mosley took an actively anti-Semitic track and sent his Blackshirts to swagger through London’s East End, where they fought with Jews and Communists, building a new clientele among unskilled workers and struggling shopkeepers there. The Public Order Act, passed soon after the “Battle of Cable Street” with antifascists on October 4, 1936, outlawed political uniforms and deprived the BUF of its public spectacles, but it grew again to twenty thousand with a campaign against war in 1939. Mosley’s black shirts, violence, and overt sympathy for Mussolini and Hitler (he was married to Diana Mitford in Hitler’s presence at Munich in 1936) seemed alien to most people in Britain, and gradual economic revival after 1931 under the broadly accepted National Government, a coalition dominated by conservatives, left him little political space."
"Mosley was a disciple of Keynes in the 1920s; and Keynesianism was his great contribution to Fascism. It was Keynesianism which in the last resort made Mosley's Fascism distinctively English, though it was not an Englishness which most English pundits were then prepared to recognise, being as remote from the Keynesian thinking as they were from the problems which gave birth to it."
"To Jo Grimond he epitomizes the aristocratic bully."
"The resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley did not come as a surprise... I doubt, indeed, if anybody would be able to work with Mosley unless he were prepared to meekly follow him... I never had any faith in the sincerity of Mosley's professions of Socialism. I was always suspicious of a rich man who came into the Socialist Movement and at once became more socialist than the Socialists... My views of Mosley's sincerity were very generally shared by the Labour members... It was felt that he was a man on the make, and was using the Labour Movement as an instrument for satisfying his ambition... If ever Mosley had the powers of a Hitler or a Mussolini he would be more ruthless and merciless, because weaker and vainer, than those two dictators."
"The greatest comet of British politics in the twentieth century...an orator of the highest rank. He produced, almost unaided, a programme of economic reconstruction which surpassed anything offered by Lloyd George or, in the United States, by F. D. Roosevelt...He has continued fertile in ideas...A superb political thinker, the best of our age."
"Today 'nationalism' is out of fashion among the opinion-formers. Thanks to a superficial misreading of history, it is accused of having been responsible for two world wars and has widely come to be regarded as a political sin of the first magnitude, fortunately found only in such antiquated and obsolete figures as General de Gaulle. In fact the real danger comes from ideologies not nationalism; for while a nation may properly respect the nationhood of others, an ideology knows no frontiers... Once [the Tories] lose their claim to be, in the fullest sense, the 'national party', they are left, as they are in danger of being left today, either as the party of the 'individual' – a noble but to most people an austere and forbidding creed – or else as the party of the middle classes, which condemns them to a permanent minority."
"A national currency lies at the very heart of national sovereignty. A common currency is something that can only properly follow political union: it cannot precede it. It is significant that whereas the Zollverein or customs union paved the way to the German Federation a century ago, it was only after Prussia and Bismarck had achieved a political union, with blood and iron, that a common German currency could be born."
"The time has come for a wholly new approach to economic policy in Britain. The overriding need is for a long-term stabilisation programme to defeat inflation, recreate business confidence and provide a favourable climate for economic growth. At the head of such a programme must lie a firm commitment to a steady and gradual reduction in the rate of growth of the money supply, until it is consistent with our best guess at a potentially sustainable rate of economic growth. Only in this way can inflation be wrung out of the system. But this alone is not enough... An equally important part of a long term stabilisation plan has to be a reduction in the present Budget deficit... Indeed, something akin...to the old balanced Budget discipline needs to be restored: the secret of practical economic success, as overseas experience confirms, is the acceptance of known rules. Rules rule: OK?"
"The Conservative Party has never believed that the business of government is the government of business."
"No industry should remain under State ownership unless there is a positive and overwhelming case for it so doing. Inertia is not enough. As a nation, we simply cannot afford it."
"The successful sale of British Telecom...reveals a vast and untapped yearning among ordinary people for a direct stake in the ownership of British enterprise. Investment in shares has begun to take its place, with ownership of a home and either a bank or building society deposit, as a way for ordinary people to participate in enterprise and wealth creation. We are seeing the birth of people's capitalism."
"Economically and politically, Britain can get along with double digit unemployment."
"Those who, in the nineteenth century, argued the dangers of a mass democracy in which a majority of the voters would have no stake in the country at all, had reason to be fearful. But the remedy is not to restrict the franchise to those who own property: it is to extend the ownership of property to the largest possible majority of those who have the vote. The widespread ownership of private property is crucial to the survival of freedom and democracy. It gives the citizen a vital sense of identification with the society of which he is a part. It gives him a stake in the future—and indeed, equally important, in the present. It creates a society with an inbuilt resistance to revolutionary change."
"The acid test of monetary policy is its record in reducing inflation. Those who wish to join the debate about the intricacies of different measures of money and the implications they may have for the future are welcome to do so. But at the end of the day the position is clear and unambiguous. The inflation rate is judge and jury."
"It is here that Britain's weakness lies. The plain fact is that labour costs per unit of output in British business and industry continue to rise faster than is consistent with low unemployment and faster than our principal competitors overseas. Productivity is, certainly rising quite rapidly, but pay is rising faster still. It is this—and not our alleged dependence on oil—that constitutes the Achilles' heel of the British economy."
"Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that we have a choice between cutting tax and cutting unemployment, for the two go hand in hand. It is no accident that the two most successful economies in the world, both overall and specifically in terms of job creation—those of the United States and Japan—have the lowest level of tax as a proportion of GDP. Reductions in taxation motivate new businesses and improve incentives at work. They are a principal engine of the enterprise culture, on which our future prosperity and employment opportunities depend."
"It is worth recalling that during the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, Britain's growth rate was the lowest of all the major European economies. By contrast, during the 1980s, our growth rate has been the highest of all the major European economies. This greatly improved growth performance has been accompanied by falling inflation, which at 3½ per cent. in 1986 reached the lowest figure for almost 20 years."
"During the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, growth in manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom was the lowest of all the seven major industrial countries in the world. During the 1980s, our annual rate of growth of output per head in manufacturing has been the highest of all the seven major industrial countries."
"But despite the undoubted success so far, there is still a barrier along Scotland's road to prosperity. That barrier is the pervasive presence of a hostile attitude to wealth creation, to the enterprise culture on which economic success in a free society depends. That is not to say there is no enterprise in Scotland: of course there is. Rather that it is frequently swamped by an overriding sense of dependence on the state. Large areas of Scottish life are sheltered from market forces, and exhibit the culture of dependence rather than that of enterprise."
"...this Budget represents a continuation of the policies which we have pursued consistently for nearly nine years, and which we will continue to pursue—a continuation of the steps that we have taken in nine previous Budgets, and of the major reforms that we have introduced in other fields, too, all of them designed to encourage and reward enterprise and so to liberate the energies of the British people. The tax changes in this Budget consolidate Britain's move from a high-tax country to a low-tax country, at all levels. Since 1979, the top rate of income tax has been cut from 83 per cent. to 40 per cent. The basic rate has been cut from 33 per cent. to 25 per cent. The corporation tax rate has been cut from 52 per cent. to 35 per cent. The small companies' rate has been cut from 42 per cent. to 25 per cent., and the 15 per cent. additional tax on savings income has been abolished altogether."
"...it is already clear that the policies that we have been pursuing have brought about a profound cultural change in this country. That, indeed, is what it is all about. For that cultural change is the only route to the economic success that we all wish to see, and which is no longer promise but reality. No longer do people accept that economic policy should be about regulating everyone's lives and imposing penal tax rates, in the illusion that that will benefit those on lower incomes. Instead, it is now widely recognised except on the Opposition Benches that one cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor and that there are enormous benefits in getting the state off people's backs, in transferring decision-making from the state to the people. And it is now abundantly clear that giving greater freedom and greater incentives has removed the shackles that have held back Britain for so many years and has liberated a great surge in enterprise."
"The policy that we have been pursuing has already brought economic success. This country is now experiencing an economic miracle, comparable in significance to that previously enjoyed by West Germany and still enjoyed by Japan."
"We had to dispel the notion that the way to economic success lies through a sort of fiscal levitation. That was the abiding post-war delusion—that governments could spend and borrow their way to prosperity, and fine-tune the performance of the economy through something known pretentiously as demand management... It used to be an establishment nostrum that you need a budget deficit to get economic growth. That was the belief which lay behind the notorious letter by 364 economists in March 1981. We have given the lie to that, decisively. There can no longer be any argument about it. Everyone—or almost everyone—now accepts that the proper role of macro-economic policy is to keep downward pressure on inflation and to maintain a stable framework in which the private sector can expand."
"Our achievement...has been to show that you can build far greater, and far more lasting, prosperity by letting people co-operate in the freedom of the market place than by making them submit to the coercion of Government regulations and state bureaucracy. If you look around the world today, East and West, even in Soviet Russia and Communist China, you will see that lesson being taken to heart... The truth is that a prosperous world based on free and open markets is a world of co-operation and interdependence between the people of all nations. By contrast, a world of closed, State controlled economies is a world disposed towards confrontation and conflict."
"The fears of recession in the aftermath of Black Monday have turned to fears of the economy racing ahead too fast, with inflation edging up and a substantial current account deficit...people understandably feel more confident about their future than they've done for decades, but as a result they have been borrowing more and saving less...coming on top of a massive income investment boom, it's all been just a bit too much of a good thing."
"Economic and monetary union...is incompatible with independent sovereign states with control over their own fiscal and monetary policies. It would be impossible...to have irrevocably fixed exchange rates while individual countries retained independent monetary policies...such a system could never have the credibility necessary to persuade the market that there was no risk of realignment. Thus EMU inevitably implies a single European currency, with monetary decisions...taken not by national Governments and/or central banks, but by a European Central Bank. Nor would individual countries be able to retain responsibility for fiscal policy. With a single European monetary policy there would need to be central control over the size of budget deficits and, particularly, over their financing. New European institutions would be required, to determine overall Community fiscal policy and agree the distribution of deficits between individual Member States... It is clear that Economic and Monetary Union implies nothing less than European Government...and political union: the United States of Europe. That is simply not on the agenda now, nor will it be for the foreseeable future."
"To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern."
"The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood."
"While the strength of demand in the British economy should have elicited higher interest rates from early 1987 onwards, Lawson was so fixated with his DM-shadowing policy that he not only refused to raise rates but actually cut them, first in October 1987 and then again in February and March 1987... By the early spring of 1988, Mrs Thatcher was growing increasingly worried about Lawson's attempts to hold sterling down. A row erupted in March, when the Prime Minister rightly criticized Lawson's intervention tactics, saying at Prime Minister's Question Time in the Commons that "you can't buck the market." With the weight of foreign buying growing ever greater, and his Prime Minister by now very much alive to the problem, a reluctant Lawson was forced to call a halt to intervention. Sterling surged through the top range of DM2.90 to DM3.00 that he had imposed. In mid-May, in an effort to stem the rise in the pound without again resorting to intervention, the Chancellor cut interest rates one last time (the Labour Party, one should not forget, was pressing for even bigger cuts). But even Lawson could no longer ignore the mounting evidence of inflationary pressure (in the form of rapid increases in demand and output, in house prices and – as unemployment fell very rapidly – in wages and labour costs). Having reduced interest rates to 7.5% in mid-May to restrain sterling, at the end of May he raised them to restrain inflation, apparently unwilling to recognize that the inflationary pressure was the result of his DM-shadowing policy. Sir Alan Walters, in a radio interview, presciently remarked that the Chancellor, by having delayed far too long in tightening policy, had condemned Britain to much bigger increases in interest rates in the future."
"Nigel Lawson was certainly, in so far as anyone can be qualified in advance, the best qualified Chancellor of the postwar epoch. His memoirs are an outstanding record of life at the Treasury in the 1980s."
"The combined efforts of Government policy since 1979 have been not to improve but substantially to worsen our competitive position. We have gone from a huge manufacturing surplus of £5.5 billion in 1980 to a 1986 third quarter deficit of £8 billion a year... Even with oil production continuing for some time, the current account has gone from a £3 billion surplus to a deficit predicted by the Chancellor of £1.5 billion... Sadly, the Government's great contribution, having refused to stimulate the economy by more respectable means, is a roaring consumer boom, which there is not the slightest chance of their moderating before an election. A roaring consumer boom does not, to any significant extent, mean more employment. In our competitive position, worsening under the Government, it means overwhelmingly higher imports, a still worse balance of payments position and a classic path to perdition. To have produced, after seven and a half years, the combination of total monetary muddle, a worsened competitive position, a widespread doubt in other countries as to how we are to pay our way in the future, a desperately vulnerable currency and the prospect of an unending plateau of the highest unemployment in a major country in the industrialised world is a unique achievement over which the Chancellor is an appropriate deputy acting presiding officer."
"It was in the autumn of 1983...[that Lawson] replied, when I asked how he would wish to be remembered, that he would like to be seen as 'the British Erhard' – a reference to the man credited with the West German 'growth miracle' after the war."
"Something always goes wrong when Nigel goes abroad."
"I made Nigel Lawson Chancellor of the Exchequer – an enormous and to most people unexpected promotion. Whatever quarrels we were to have later, if it comes to drawing up a list of Conservative – even Thatcherite – revolutionaries I would never deny Nigel a leading place on it. He has many qualities which I admire and some which I do not. He is imaginative, fearless and – on paper at least – eloquently persuasive... I had by now come to share Nigel's high opinion of himself."
"I also said, 'You're in a dreadful position with wages going up at 8.4 per cent or more and inflation only by 3.5 per cent. We're pricing ourselves out of all the markets'. He [Lawson] said, 'Yes but it's very good electorally', to which I said, 'Yes but that's not the right view to take in the long run for the country'."
"Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax."
"Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness."
"I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it."
"By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do."
"As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive."
"Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs."
"I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains."
"Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds."
"There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while."
"Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of."
"Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before."
"These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and ... and it was too late."
"And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody."
"What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?"
"I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing... Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.""
"But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it."
"And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into."
"I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it sometime. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes."
"I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' Hose, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?"
"For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time."
"They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts — and rather portly withal."
"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."
"The British bourgeoisie Is not born And does not die, But, if it is ill, It has a frightened look in its eyes."
"The Daily Herald is unkind. It has been horrid About my nice new war. I shall burn the Daily Herald."
"Our General Had to restore "Law-and-Order" At Amritsar; For he knew That if he failed To shoot Two thousand natives They would have laughed at him. To laugh at a General, Is, of course, very rude."
"Heroic figures are now obsolete, So Demigod and Devil find retreat In minds of children — as rare beasts and men, Elsewhere extinct, persist in hill or fen From man protected — where each form assumes Gigantic stature and intention, looms From wind-moved, twilight-woven histories: For them each flower teems with mysteries."
"For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood, That scarlet tree within, which has the power To make dull words bud forth and burst in flower."
"Educ[ated]: during the holidays from Eton."
"How simple-minded of the Germans to imagine that we British could be cowed by the destruction of our ancient monuments! As though any havoc of the German bombs could possibly equal the things we have done ourselves!"
"Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out."
"They loved him, I think, because, with all his merits, he showed them to be rich: looking at his portraits, they understood at last how rich they really were."
"The Rich Man's Banquet, which was to last for a decade, had now begun: the feast, it was recognised, went to the greediest."
"Hell has a climate, but no situation. It lies in the spirit, and not in space."
"The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it."
"The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy…to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted."
"I consider myself a pretty rounded guy. I've done pretty elite things in business, sport and academics and all of a sudden I woke up one morning and I'm a 'big, black, British, gay guy'. That was frustrating at times"
"You are axes, in a world of wood. And the wood remembers when it has been cut, even if the axe forgets."
"The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd – one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like – one writes novels about it."
"Parents – especially step-parents – are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fufill the promise of their early years."
"He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful."
"Self-love seems so often unrequited."
"[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing."
"Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed."
"People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding."
"Now that the April of your youth adorns The garden of your face."
"Sleep, Nurse of our life, Care’s best reposer, Nature's high'st rapture, and the vision giver."
"Our life is but a dark and stormy night, To which sense yields a weak and glimmering light, While wandering Man thinks he discerneth all By that which makes him but mistake and fall."
"Let then no doubt, Celinda, touch, Much less your fairest mind invade: Were not our souls immortal made Our equal loves can make them such."
"I must no less commend the study of anatomy, which whosoever considers, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxal, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature."
"He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself, for every man hath need to be forgiven."
"There [is] no little vigour and force added to words, when they are delivered in a neat and fine way, and somewhat out of the ordinary road, common and dull language relishing more of the clown than the gentleman. But herein also affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself, than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn."
"A good rider on a good horse, is as much above himself and others, as this world can make him."
"Sum up at night what thou has done by day."
"Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose."
"Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape."
"I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea."
"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."
"Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light."
"It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality."
"Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?"
"Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it."
"I have never eaten a boiled egg, but I have had a soldier or two."
"Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been trying to clarify in myself and which one way or another existed in everyone. The corpse-eater was still in fantasy feeding on the parents. We discussed these ideas and decided to eat no more meat, no more animal products of any kind (such as milk, cheese, eggs) and to discard mineral salt. Apart from a few extreme applications of our position, when I tried to eat such nauseous things as raw potatoes, we found that we felt very much better in health."
"As I am not a member of any community, no society can answer for my irregular conduct; neither do I wish to apologize to the world for my procedure; as I believe the Lord is my Shepherd, and Bishop of my soul. Duty to my Maker, excites me to faithfulness, knowing that life is the time to work for God; that I may be counted worthy to reign with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in "the city of the Living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem.""
"Before I was born, my father was priest, And built to Christ Jesus, a house for the least, To worship Jehovah, the True Living God, Who gave us His favour, and Shed forth His Blood.The Fountain is open, for you and for me, That word it is spoken, and always will be, While sinners are living, in flesh on this earth, And Jesus is praying, and giving them birth."
"In Christ you will find, a very dear Friend; Who is of this mind, to love to the end; Yet satan is seeking, His sheep to devour; And God He is making some whole this bright hour."
"Whoever can feel, the love I do tell, Would take by the heel, poor sinners from hell; As downward they're going, to bring them above; To sing of Christ's dying, a Heaven of love."
"In this city I must visit the abodes of sorrow: but as yet no way has opened: no person offered to go along with me, which has made me determine to do nothing but what connot be avoided of a public nature. O that my little labour of love were finished, and comfortably completed to the joy of such who might hail me a welcome stranger on Zion's happy Coast, where my mansion of bliss awaits me, after all the storms of life are past."
"Perhaps the most extraordinary woman in the world. We need say no more than the truth about her …"
"Rory Stewart: One of the advantages of this deal, to be honest, and the reason why 80% of the British public support this deal, is because what it does... Emma Barnett (Interviewer): 80% of the British public support this deal? The draft deal? How on earth do we know that yet? Rory Stewart: OK, let me back on that, my sense is, sorry, let me get the language right on that. My sense is that if we have an opportunity to explain this the vast majority of the British public would support this. Emma Barnett: Where did 80% come from, I'm a bit confused. Rory Stewart: I'm producing a number to try to illustrate what I believe."
"I began this race believing I should be a truth-teller on principle - ironically I have discovered that it is very popular - and the only way to avoid an election and win the next one is by being straight with people. No more unicorns, no more red lines, no more promises we can't deliver. That's how we get Brexit done, defeat Corbyn and unify the country."
"is not remembered much outside Romania these days. Now 58 and the bishop of , in March 1989 he was a parish priest in Timosoara facing eviction from his church apartment. His crime was to have preached against the policy of "systemisation" - the restructuring of his country's towns and villages ordered by the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Ethnically Hungarian, Tökés had a long history of criticising the regime and so when he refused to quit his home, it became a cause célèbre and drew the attention of Ceausescu's secret police, the notorious Securitate. By December 1989, it was not only his parishioners who were standing guard to protect his flat, linking hands around the property, but ethnic Romanians who swelled into a crowd that filled the surrounding streets. What followed over the next few days is better known than Tökés 's personal tale: the mass protests in Timosoara which led, in quick order, to the fall of the once-mighty Ceausescu regime. If this story of one man and his country sounds familiar, that is perhaps because it is."
"A large part of the problem of understanding how modern rebellions come about is the reporting of them. Euphoric moments are condensed to slogans on one hand and on the other into vivid narratives of the crimes of the fallen regime. What falls through the cracks is the process by which the actions of an often small dissident circle are translated into a mass movement involving a sufficient cross-section of society to sweep away a tyrant. If that clouds our understanding, so too does the tendency to limit our examination of rebellions to the facts of the revolutionary moment itself. Instead, what we should be doing is examining why populations ever accept dictatorships. In doing so, we may comprehend more about why they are then rejected, often so suddenly."
"At its simplest, "coup-proofing" is the way in which regimes consolidate a small mafia-like inner core made up of cronies, family, tribal or ethnic interest while using incentives to encourage the security forces, both military and police, to protect the regime while monitoring each other. The unintended consequence of this, however, is paranoid, inward-looking and detached regimes often isolated from the reality of what their people think, reinforced in their own view of their invulnerability and importance by a cadre of yes-men. This, perhaps, explains why dictatorial regimes, regarded as stable and invulnerable by outside observers can collapse as quickly as they can, not least when a key element like the military - as happened in Egypt and Tunisia - removed its support."
"In the end, however, the success of a rebellion depends on the crossing of a fear barrier by enough people, not simply the small group of dedicated dissidents. A judgment that the risk is worth it and the rebellion might actually succeed. [...] It is at this point, when fear is gone, that whole nations say no. And it is when tyrants fall."
"The growing confrontation in the Gulf between the US and its Saudi-led allies on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other is now focused on the spate of recent mine attacks on oil tankers, which have been blamed by the US on . This is a standoff that has been coming. It is incontestable that Iran has been guilty of destabilising overreach in the Middle East in recent years, as it has moved to build a crescent of Shia influence from Damascus to Baghdad and Lebanon to Yemen. But Iran’s actions can hardly be said to have occurred in a vacuum. [...] In tandem with the US moves, Saudi Arabia – one of the countries seen as pushing US policy – has increased its oil production to sell to former buyers of Iranian oil, while at the same time vocally supporting moves to strangle . It is not hard, then, to see how these moves might be viewed in Tehran: as part of an escalating offensive from multiple sources threatening its own home front in a campaign of designed to weaken the regime. The , John Bolton, has been an advocate of regime change in Iran in the past. [...] All of which suggests that far from being the work of an irrational actor on the world stage, the recent attacks on the oil tankers are entirely explicable: a calculated demonstration of the vulnerability of the flow of oil to the world’s biggest economies, including to the EU, India and China. So should the attacks be interpreted as a sign of Iran’s desperation, or as evidence that Tehran has internalised the idea that it is dealing with a weak US administration with little international support for its policies in the Gulf, and is gaming its response accordingly? If the answer is the latter, then that is a judgment which has been encouraged by the wildly inconsistent messaging from Trump himself. The US president has appeared to threaten conflict and then just as quickly rule it out. The tanker attacks – if proved to be the work of Iran – are serious. But they would not represent the most potent move available to Tehran in this standoff. That remains the prospect of the country restarting uranium enrichment beyond the limits agreed in the JCPOA, a move it has already threatened, and which would inevitably trigger an in which the US would be only one actor and Europe would inevitably become embroiled. Clues as to where the crisis goes from here might be found in asking who has most to lose. For Iran’s leadership, for which the survival of the clerical regime is an existential priority that looms above all others, capitulation on US-Saudi terms would not appear to be an option. The depth of the US stake in this increasingly dangerous game is far harder to judge, given the usual confusion of Trump’s flip-flopping and the machinations of Bolton, who may be freelancing his own agenda. All of which leaves us to contemplate the most frightening element of all in a complex crisis: that the current occupant of the White House lacks any of the skills required to successfully defuse it."
"I don't think the Conservative Party could win an election in 1,000 years on this ultra right-wing programme."
"We are all in agreement about the principles of the national health service ...it should be provided free at the point of treatment, according to clinical need and largely funded out of taxation."
"The referendum is not binding."
"All political careers are a rollercoaster."
"When we negotiate trade agreements in the future, we will be pressing other countries to open up their public procurement processes to genuine, fair, international competition. It would be totally ridiculous to abandon that principle now to give into not only constituency pressures, which I understand, but otherwise nationalist nonsense that ought to be ignored."
"If a Brexiteer majority still wishes to persist in leaving, once we have made some progress and it’s obvious we’re getting there, you can invoke Article 50 again and leave fairly rapidly. To me, that seems the only rational way in which we can precede. But common sense has gone out of the window."
"[On Margaret Thatcher] She was a bizarre character. She was one of the most unlikely human beings I ever met. If you'd told me that this woman would become Prime Minister, I mean no dislike of her at all, I'd have thought that was ridiculous."
"I don’t want the new leader to make me parliamentary under-secretary for nuts and bolts."
"At the moment I save the House of Commons from having Dennis Skinner as father of the house by 25 minutes"
"If the Conservative Party cannot think of anything else to do it has a leadership contest."
"I wouldn't reject it if it was the only way forward."
"No one has officially told me that I have lost the Tory whip. The fault’s probably mine. I’m notorious for only using my mobile phone for outgoing calls: nobody knows my London number and I certainly don’t do anything online. So there may somewhere be an email or text message or something telling me, but I gather from the media that there’s no doubt that I’ve lost the whip. My status otherwise is completely unclear."
"She was almost glowing with resolution. She realized that to display moral qualities demands practice, just as much as intellectual and manual qualities."
"She had rather looked down on such shops and on such clothes, but that had been ignorance and the wrong kind of sophistication."
"I don’t spend all day reading the newspapers. It can get hold of you as poisonously as the television, if you once let it."
"Upon the passage to truth, cross-currents are to be expected."
"The idea came to him, not for the first time, that most of the things which people buy in the belief that they are luxuries are really poor substitutes for luxury."
"It was, in any case, quite useless, and, like most useless things, useless almost immediately."
"'I didn't find it in the least difficult,' said Grigg. 'Those meant to succeed at a thing never do find the thing difficult.' 'Meant? Meant by whom?' 'By the life of which they are a part, whether they know it or not.' 'It is very mystical,' said Grigg."
"The recognition of the sanctity of treaties is surely the most vital of all British interests. But in signing the Covenant we pledged ourselves to do more than defend British interests. We undertook to uphold a common law of honour and good faith among nations. It is true that some signatories have since left the League, but in spite of their defection we have remained, and our obligations, backed by our signed word, remain with us... I believe that war can be prevented now if every nation still within the League is prepared to carry out its obligations. War is inevitable sooner or later if this cold-blooded experiment in international anarchy is successfully carried through before a watching world. It is an example which some will not be slow to follow, and Europe may be their playground instead of Africa."
"After the war I was one of those who thought, who hoped, who believed that Force had had its day, that Armies and Navies and Air Forces would dwindle away and disappear – discarded like broken toys that men had outgrown. But to-day – look at the world. To-day we see a world which has put back the clock, a world which is reeling backwards away from law, away from freedom, back to the triumph of the aggression of Italy – and the agony of its victim. In that struggle the public opinion of the whole civilized world was solidly ranged against the aggressor. What was the use? Public opinion proved powerless against poison gas. And I think the lessons we have learned from these defeats of law is that it is no good passing judgement unless you are ready to enforce it. It is no good giving a great moral lead if it is to be followed by a rapid physical scuttle. Justice cannot rule this world armed with the scales alone – in her other hand she must hold a sword. Unless we, the free democracies of the world, who are still loyal members of the League, are prepared to stand together and to take the same risks for Justice, Peace and Freedom as others are prepared to take for the fruits of aggression – then our cause is lost – and the Gangsters will inherit the earth."
"We meet in a very dark hour. The events of the last 3 weeks have shattered what remained of that new world-order which some of us have hoped & worked & striven to build for 20 years. They have done more. They have broken a great & honourable tradition of English foreign policy to which this country has adhered through changing Governments & changing parties for centuries. The keystone of that policy has been the refusal to truckle to the strong at the expense of the weak. We have consistently thrown the whole weight of our power behind justice for the weak – against the domination of any single power. This policy which the smaller states of Europe have owed their freedom & their existence has been renounced to-day. When the Prime Minister signed the Munich Agreement he renounced for us all claims to moral leadership. We ceased to be the trustee of a standard of justice & decency in international relationships. We made our formal submission to the rule of Force – & that rule with the acquiescence & sanction of our Government is the only rule that runs in Europe to-day. All this is hailed as a triumph by its supporters. I do not believe that any Peace worthy of the name can be built upon an act of flagrant injustice backed by Force."
"I am one of millions who watching the martyrdom of Hungary and listening yesterday to the transmission of her agonized appeals for help (immediately followed by the description of our "successful bombing" of Egyptian "targets") have felt a humiliation, shame, and anger which are beyond expression. At a moment when our moral authority and leadership are most direly needed to meet this brutal assault on freedom we find ourselves bereft of both by our own Government's action. For the first time in our history our country has been reduced to moral impotence. We cannot order Soviet Russia to obey the edict of the United Nations which we ourselves have defied, nor to withdraw her tanks and guns from Hungary while we are bombing and invading Egypt. To-day we are standing in the dock with Russia. Like us she claims to be conducting a "police action." We have coined a phrase which has already become part of the currency of aggression. Never in my life-time has our name stood so low in the eyes of the world. Never have we stood so ingloriously alone. Our proud tradition has been tragically tarnished. We can restore it only by repudiating as a nation that which has been done in our name but without our consent—by changing our Government or its leadership."
"The political activities of Henry Asquith's daughter, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, are of course well-known. Her father—old, supplanted in power, his Party broken up, his authority flouted, even his long-faithful constituency estranged—found in his daughter a champion redoubtable even in the first rank of Party orators. The Liberal masses in the weakness and disarray of the Coalition period saw with enthusiasm a gleaming figure, capable of dealing with the gravest questions and the largest issues with passion, eloquence and mordant wit. In the two or three years when her father's need required it, she displayed force and talent equalled by no woman in British politics. One wildfire sentence from a speech in 1922 will suffice. Lloyd George's Government, accused of disturbing and warlike tendencies, had fallen. Bonar Law appealed for a mandate of ‘Tranquillity.’ "We have to choose," said the young lady to an immense audience, "between one man suffering from St. Vitus's Dance and another from Sleeping Sickness." It must have been the greatest of human joys for Henry Asquith in his dusk to find this wonderful being he had called into the world, armed, vigilant and active at his side. His children are his best memorial, and their lives recount and revive his qualities."
"that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before Christianity awoke them to the consciousness of sin, of suffering, and of immortality."
"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist. Lessing's initial creative roots lie in this ..."
"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute."
"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales ... He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womanizer — this I had always known about him ... He was also, interestingly enough, very much a sort of a disappointed writer ..."
"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , excuses for getting out of the (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. ... He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable."
"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that the communicants got watered-down from Boots the chemist in , over the border."
"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."
"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life."