People from New Zealand

"...neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power."

"That the Macedonians were of Greek stock seems certain. The claim made by the Argead dynasty to be of Argive descent may be no more than a generally accepted myth, but Macedonian proper names, such as Ptolemaios or Philippos, are good Greek names, and the names of the Macedonian months, although differed from those of Athens or Sparta, were also Greek. The language spoken by the Macedonians, which Greeks of the classical period found unintelligible, appears to have been a primitive north-west Greek dialect, much influenced by the languages of the neighboring barbarians."

"To my mind, having a care and concern for others is the highest of the human qualities."

"Each year in Africa about two and a half million people go blind...and they just go blind... they sit around in their huts."

"Every eye is an eye. When you are doing surgery there, that is just as important as if you were doing eye surgery on the Prime Minister or King."

"He knows all the vulnerable spots of the human anatomy as well as the most erudite surgeon in the business and has a greater variety of effective blows than any fighter who ever lived."

"For courage, for power, for skill, for fighting will, there is nothing on record that holds a candle to Fitz."

"Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right! A conference should be held at once for the U. S. A. to pay back the money Europe owes her."

"The scum of the earth, I believe?" "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?"

"Very well, alone."

"Gad, sir, Churchill is right. The Govt. has evidently made an irrevocable decision to be guided by circumstances with a firm hand."

"That is all right. I had them on my list too."

"I have never met anyone who wasn't against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves."

"Strube is a gentle genius. I don't mind his attacks because he never hits below the belt. Now Low is a genius, but he is evil and malicious. I cannot bear Low."

"It may well be, that the future historian, asked to point to the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars will reply without hesitation, "Colonel Blimp"."

"[Winston Churchill]...detested David Low's politics, while admiring his skill. Low was a New Zealand Communist who was a favourite of Beaverbrook's. I found his employment inexplicable. In his own quirkish way Beaverbrook was a true patriot, yet he employed people like Frank Owen, Michael Foot and, appropriately below all, Low. Competent and talented they undoubtedly were, but the harm they did in opposing Britain's rearmament programme against Hitler is appalling. One of Low's cartoons depicted Colonel Blimp, his favourite Tory butt, exclaiming over our belated, inadequate but desperately needed arms programme of the late 1930s: 'Gad Sir, if we want to keep our place in the sun, we must darken the sky with our planes.' I would like to have confronted these gentlemen with the sight of one of our stricken airfields in the Battle of Britain. Would they have adopted for their own use Churchill's earlier saying: 'I have often eaten my own words and found them on the whole a most nourishing diet'? I doubt it."

"It was the calm and silent night! Seven hundred years and fifty-three Had Rome been growing up to might, And now was queen of land and sea. No sound was heard of clashing wars, Peace brooded o’er the hushed domain; Apollo, Pallas, Jove, and Mars Held undisturbed their ancient reign In the solemn midnight, Centuries ago."

"An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred."

"To be conservative in politics is to take one’s bearings not from the latest bright idea about how to make a better world, but by looking carefully at what the past reveals both about the kind of people we are and the problems that concern us. As we get older, we often become conservative in our habits, in our family practices, and in our recognition of the richness of our civilization, but this evolution of our character into a set of habits in no way blocks adventurousness. The old no less than the young may be found starting new enterprises, sailing around the world, and solving arcane academic questions. But it is in the ordinary business of life that we find our excitement, not in foolish collective dreams of political perfection."

"Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself."

"In a despotic government, the ultimate principle of order issues from the inclinations of the despot himself. Yet despotism is not a system in which justice is entirely meaningless: it has generally prevailed in highly traditional societies where custom is king and the prevailing terms of justice are accepted as part of the natural order of things. Each person fits into a divinely recognized scheme. Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call 'the mandate of heaven', but life for the peasant changes little. Everything depends on the wisdom of the ruler."

"Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time."

"the radical feminist revolution is nothing less than a destruction of our civilization...We are no longer what were were. The West has collapsed."

"false and eccentric assumption of male and female isomorphism"

"create a totally androgynous (and manipulable) world where men and women would become virtually indistinguishable."

"replace achievement with quota entitlements."

"is its openness to talent wherever found, the feminist demand for collective quotas has overturned the basic feature of our civilization."

"bent on destroying the autonomy of the institutions of civil society"

"a network of powerful bureaucracies"

"radical doctrines to bear on all areas of governmental concern"

"There has been a revolution, then, but a silent one. It has taken place with such stealth, and so gradually, that people have become accustomed to it little by little. I am reminded of the famous Chinese executioner whose ambition it was to be able to cut off a head so that the victim would not realize what had happened. For years he worked on his skill, and one day he cut off a head so perfectly that the victim said: "Well, when are you going to do it?" The executioner gave a beatific smile and said: "Just kindly nod.""

"My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us."

"Our rulers are theoretically 'our' representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving 'messages' from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority -- they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism."

"We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new problem by demanding that the government should act. That we should be constantly demanding that an institution we rather despise should solve large problems argues a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of times past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to help 'ordinary people' solve daily problems in their lives. This strange aspiration is a very large change in public life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded with derision to politicians seeking power in order to solve our problems. Today, the demos votes for them."

"The evident problem with democracy today is that the state is pre-empting – or 'crowding out', as the economists say – our moral judgments. Rulers are adding moral judgments to the expanding schedule of powers they exercise. Nor does the state deal merely with principles. It is actually telling its subjects to do very specific things. Yet decisions about how we live are what we mean by 'freedom,' and freedom is incompatible with a moralizing state. That is why I am provoked to ask the question: can the moral life survive democracy?"

"For it is a conspicuous feature of democracy, as it evolves from generation to generation, that it leads people increasingly to take up public positions on the private affairs of others. Wherever people discover that money is being spent, either privately or by public officials, they commonly develop opinions on how it ought to be spent. In a state increasingly managed right down to small details of conduct, each person thus becomes his own fantasy despot, disposing of others and their resources as he or she thinks desirable. And this tendency itself results from another feature of the moral revolution. Democracy demands, or at least seems to demand, that its subjects should have opinions on most matters of public discussion. But public policy is a complicated matter and few intelligent comments can be made without a great deal of time being spent on the detail. On the other hand, every public policy may be judged in terms of its desirability. However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary society."

"... Kenneth Minogue, a renowned authority of the nature and influence of ideologies..."

"He was Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics from 1984 to 1995, and became widely known there as a central figure in a group of prominent conservative political philosophers and commentators that included , and Bill Letwin. He sat on the board of the Centre for Policy Studies (1983-2009), and from 1991 to 1993 was chairman of the Euro-sceptic Bruges Group."

"In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class. The marshals, diplomats, and financiers of the Revolution may be discerned again in the Republic of Augustus as the ministers and agents of power, the same men but in different garb. They are the government of the New State."

"Without a party a statesman is nothing. He sometimes forgets that awkward fact."

"Security and aggression are terms of partisan interpretation."

"The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the Commonwealth."

"The political cant of a country is naturally and always most strongly in evidence on the side of the vested interests. In times of peace and prosperity it commands a wide measure of acquiescence, even of belief. Revolution rends the veil."

"At Rome all men paid homage to libertas, holding it to be something roughly equivalent to the spirit and practice of Republican government. Exactly what corresponded to the Republican constitution was, however, a matter not of legal definition but of partisan interpretation. Libertas is a vague and negative notion—freedom from the rule of a tyrant or a faction. It follows libertas [liberty], like regnum [kingship] or dominatio [despotism], is a convenient term of political fraud."

"Making it (COVID-19) a notifiable disease would give them (Auckland Regional Public Health Service) more powers to isolate and quarantine people who might have been exposed (to the virus as they enter New Zealand), as well as monitor their health."

"w:Pākehā television writers are afraid to write realistic parts for Māori characters. Māori are down in the dirt in real life and we have to show them like that on television"

"All the Māori on Open House are so nice, nice, nice"

"I found I couldn't write about imaginary things, they had no interest for me."

"Praised in the deserts of Tobruk,"

"Yes, this is where they came from, the men in khaki,"

"Habib later met Māori actor and film director Don Selwyn at teachers' college. When Selwyn got involved with the Māori Theatre Trust in the 60s, Habib began coming along to rehearsals. He encouraged Selwyn to direct, weary of watching Pākehā directors telling Māori actors how to play Māori"

"Volcanic ash, despite the name, is dense as rock and can cause significant damage to structures, power lines and communications. It is also toxic because it contains chemicals such as sulfur, chlorine or fluorine, and it can therefore affect water supplies."

"When (volcanic) ash falls into the ocean, it brings with it nutrients. For example, It can bring iron, which is usually quite low in the ocean. It can suddenly create a bloom of plankton, which then go through the food chain, creating a population boom later on the fish and other lives too."

"It's increasingly clear now that there is a move among some public health officials and politicians to create an ultra-cautious biosecurity state, copying the likes of China."

"[I]n Liz we must now Truss."

"The globalist remoaner coup continues. The excellent and brave Home Secretary Suella Braverman is being replaced by Grant Shapps. This is an anti-democratic disgrace. Shame on Liz Truss. We backed you to keep them out. They're now in control."

"Even though Meghan [Markle] doesn't plan to attend, she wants to cause maximum damage to the royal family."

"This gutless woman has downgraded her criticism to unconscious bias and admitted that the person who she claims to be the royal racist actually wasn't racist at all. I think there are many issues with this letter...she still wants to bring down the royal family...[but] she will be unsuccessful."

"These past few days I have been the target of a smear campaign by nefarious players with an axe to grind."

"I, like all fallible human beings, have made errors of judgement in the past. But the criminal allegations being made against me are simply untrue. I would like nothing more than to address those spurious claims – I could actually spend the next two hours doing so – but on the advice of my lawyers, I cannot comment further. But I have been thinking much over the past few days about the current state of social media, where any allegation can be made in an attempt to get someone cancelled, but it is impossible to defend yourself against thousands of trolls."

"Being in the middle of this witch hunt has made me think a lot about the sort of journalist and broadcaster I aspire to be – one focused on the massive political threats facing this country, not on personal attacks."

"There are dark forces out to try and take this brilliant channel down. And that's because GB News is the biggest threat to the establishment in decades, and they will stop at nothing to destroy us."

"I want to reiterate my regret over last night’s exchange with Laurence [Fox] on GB News. Having looked at the footage, I can see how inappropriate my reaction to his totally unacceptable remarks appears to be and want to be clear that I was in no way amused by the comments. I reacted as I did out of shock and surprise in an off guard moment while working out how to respond as he continued to speak by searching for tweets Ava had sent earlier in the day while having them read out in my ear at the same time. However, I should have intervened immediately to challenge offensive and misogynistic remarks. I apologise unreservedly for what was a very unfortunate lapse in judgement on my part under the intense pressure of a bizarre exchange. I know I should have done better. I'm devastated that I let down the team and our supportive GBN family. We seek to tackle the issue and not the person, which I intend to stress again on air tonight."

"You can imagine them freaking out in the gallery!!!!!"

"All in all, the spectacle of Dan Wootton begging for nuance and empathy is the heat death of irony. The two crucial things about people like Dan is that they are, without exception, monstrous hypocrites – and they also reduce the world. Their entire business is making human experience smaller. There are about six or seven basic story templates into which they believe all other people's lives must be squeezed, whether or not they want them to be. So to find the high priest of the reductive suddenly asking for an acknowledgment of complexity feels a little much."

"To make it super simple for Dan: GB News is not "anti-establishment". It is a London telly channel owned by a hedge funder and an investment firm. The deputy chairman of the governing Conservative party is one of its presenters, as is a recently knighted former cabinet minister whose father was a long-serving editor of the Times."

"I will not be appearing on Dan Wootton Tonight without Dan Wootton. Dan Wootton had a significant part to play in building GB News."

"He invited me along pre-launch, he also brought so many people onboard. Behind the cameras as well as on-screen talent."

"Including the careerist ambitious ones who are currently gunning for his job. These people are worse than the woke mob, because these vultures are giving the mob ammunition and essentially escalating the channel's demise."

"Standing up for Dan is standing up for the very idea of GB News. If he falls, we all fall."

"The greatest thing that my parents ever gave me was to dream big and that nothing is impossible."

"For my Dad to go and play for the All Blacks, he was a dad at 16, married at 17, coming from a really small town. He never really gave up on his dreams and that's what my parents have always instilled in me. Anything is possible if you work hard, dream big and chase everything."

"I still feel that love and passion for it and when you've got teams like the Black Ferns Sevens girls and the Black Ferns 15s girls, they make it so enjoyable that you really don't want to leave. You want to ride until the wheels fall off!"

"I keep moving between peace and terror, especially when I look at the future only known to God. Trust is an easy word, but difficult to live. I find it hard to believe that the Lord wants me to do this, I pray that I do not disappoint him too much."