Columnists

"All of the members of my new team have displayed in their work a strong sense of pragmatism that I promote. … While the backgrounds of principal officials are diverse, they all share a common commitment to our country, our territory and our people and agree with my governing philosophy."

"I should focus on other important issues like people's livelihoods and the economy."

"In order to reach universal suffrage we need to build trust."

"Die hbs-scholier die we hebben heeft goede ideeën, maar komt niet geloofwaardig over. Ik denk dat er eerst een wijf overheen moet voor hij volwassen wordt."

"Michelle Pfeiffer. Dat vind ik een lekker wijf. Maar ik moest genoegen nemen met Miss Gouda 1962."

"Je bent geen ondernemer geworden om fulltime formulieren in te vullen."

"Ik ben niet links, ik ben niet rechts. Ik ben recht-door-zee."

"You have to face facts. We have not brought quality in. One or two have done all right but not enough to take the team onto the next level. We can't gamble on players who have scored six goals in six games in the fucking Pontins League or in Belgium. I know a lot of the supporters are umming and ahhing about whether to buy their season tickets. They go out and work hard. It is a lot of money to buy a season ticket at our place and they are not getting value for money."

"Little has been heard, to date, from writers once happy to overlook a whole anthology of Barton attacks, including his stubbing a cigar out in another player’s eye, attacks on and off the pitch, and a six-month prison sentence (another was suspended) for common assault and affray. His supporters may even think it proves Barton’s “wokeism” point that, while sustained, occasionally criminal violence barely dented his prospects, some abusive tweets about prominent women will now have ended any he might have had in mainstream sport or cultural appreciation."

"I've felt under threat this week. I've felt like something is going to happen to me. And I don't say that for anyone to feel sorry for me – I say that for people to understand the reality and the impact that hate speech has, the impact that racism has, the impact that sexism has, the impact that misogyny has on all of us females in the game, in sports broadcasting."

"England did nothing in the World Cup, why are they bringing books out? 'We got beat in the quarter-finals, I played like shit, here's my book'. Who wants to read that? I don't."

"I was able to string a sentence together and debate issues that went beyond Nuts magazine — and, yes, also capable at the time of mindless acts of violence."

"It's alright, I'm not going to steal your breakfast you fat prick."

""When things go wrong and will not come right,"

"Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night's porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon. Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain pattern of it in his head, be the hokey he takes to his bed and dies. He dies like a poisoned sheepdog. There is nothing so dangerous you can't smoke it, nobody will give you tuppence halfpenny for the half of it, and it kills you in the wind-up. It is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap."

"The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads."

"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."

"Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses."

"Often in the theatre I can hardly hear myself talking or assuring my doxy that so-and-so is the same fellow that played so-and-so in so-and-so, he's very good, he's a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, I met a sister of his in Skerries, and so on. Actors should conduct themselves like the rest of us and practise the unobtrusive intonation of the gentleman."

"Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country."

"If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower."

"It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive."

"Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand."

"You told me what the first rule of wisdom is," I said. "What is the second rule?" "That can be answered," he said. "There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first...If you follow them," said the Sergeant, "you will save your soul and you will never get a fall on a slippy road."

"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"

""Who is Fox?", I asked."

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."

"My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."

"Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon."

"I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about."

"I am completely half afraid to think."

"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."

"After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?"

"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."

"One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."

"Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man."

"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind."

"Gays should be fought against."

"Once I appealed to distinguish words "gay" and "homosexual" (...). "Gayship" is a political homosexualism, a sort of left-wing ideology based on a bias against traditional lifestyle (...). Homosexualism is a sexual preference."

"[talking about word "homophobia":] I myself don´t like "gays" - and let me stress that I don't consider that word a synonym for "homosexual" - in the same way that I don't like Communists and Feminists as advocates of a harmful and stupid ideology. But have no fear of them."

"I once had to dispense with a literary agent because she drank too much. She was very surprised but I pointed out to her, quite logically I thought, that one of us had to be sober and it certainly wasn't going to be me."

"I could stuff a pillow with the amount of confetti I have had thrown at me. And could I sleep easily on that? No."

"As for asking me have I ever felt remorse after drinking, I have been living with remorse for years now. She wakes me up every morning. She puts me to bed at night and yea though I run through the valley of Oxford St to the Coach & Horses she is by my side."

"[On the Feminist Dale Spender] It staggers me. In fact I have not been so staggered since I last wore 8oz gloves."

"In 1950 when I was boxing I wanted to put on 3lb so my trainer made me put a teaspoon of powdered gelatine into the cup every time I took tea. It was fairly revolting & might possibly explain the final hammering I took."

"Since 1960 or thereabouts, when the Beatles and feminism came to power and destroyed the civilisation I was rather fond of..."

"During one of my annual visits to the great Fred Winter's yard I said to him, 'Good God, Fred, your horses look magnificent. Beautifully fit.' Of course they do, you twit,' he said. 'They don't sit up all night drinking gin and tonic and playing cards.'"

"When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate."

"I'd very much like to wake up one morning with a cow of the Friesian variety and walk her down to Soho to the Coach and Horses, stopping on the way to buy twenty Players, ply her with vodkas until closing time, whip her off to an Indian restaurant, take her up to the Colony Room till 5.30 and then to the Yorkminster, Swiss Tavern, Three Greyhounds, get beaten up by Chinese waiters at midnight, have a row with the taxi driver, set the bed on fire, put it out with tears and then wake up on the floor. Could you then milk said cow? I doubt it."