Journalists From England

"No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there."

"London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London."

"Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward."

"I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned."

"Harcourt was the last of that long train of reasoners, debaters, orators, law-makers, great from Somers and Sir Robert Walpole onwards. New elements of feeling were edging their way into the public mind. The old plain, hard, secular, commonsense, after the Reform Bill of 1832 had revolutionised the foundations of parliamentary aristocracy, has become deepened and enriched, but changed. Harcourt was the last stout-hearted representative of the parliamentary polity of a long and not inglorious era."

"As militant pamphleteer Harcourt was of the first order—as good as Junius or Swift or Bolingbroke, in weight, scorn, directness, trenchant stroke. When any ecclesiastical pretensions irritated the Erastianism that was the deepest and most undying of his political tenets, his pen made prelates and their crosiers shake."

"Harcourt had many advantages as a speaker: a commanding presence, a classical style, a caustic humour, considerable erudition, and a wide knowledge of affairs. I heard him make many powerful speeches, but he was not naturally eloquent. I doubt if he ever moved an audience either to deep feeling or to tears—which might serve as a definition of oratory; and he failed to convince his hearers of sincerity or conviction—an impression which was encouraged by some of the circumstances of his political career. In satire, raillery, and scorn, not always highly refined, he was proficient. I remember calling upon him once in his rooms at Cambridge, where he was Professor of International Law, in 1879. He handed me a copy of a speech in this vein which he had just delivered at Southport in Lancashire—a place I was later to represent in Parliament—with the remark: "That speech will make me Home Secretary in the next Administration"—and so it did. Though he was very effective in improvised retort,—more so I think than when prepared—he became in later years so much a slave to his MS., that he lost all appearance of spontaneity."

"His literary knowledge gave a fine flavour to his speeches, and he made by far the best adaptation of a quotation that I heard in the House of Commons."

"Socialism is the legitimate and inevitable corollary of Mr. Bright's doctrine. If want is the crime of the Government, then the duty of the Government must be to provide against want. This is Socialism pure and simple. It begins with national workshops, and ends with what Mr. Carlyle calls a "whiff of grapeshot." Mr. Bright may pretend to direct his attacks against the aristocracy alone, but it is the possessors of capital, the employers of labour, the great middle class of this country who have real cause to dread his revolutionary language."

"If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world."

"It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested."

"As regards the principle of the Bill, I, for one, am entirely in accord with it... Why, it is the great principle of the "three acres and a cow" which we fought out at the Election of 1885. ... The principle of the Bill, as I take it, is to be this—that the Local Authority is to have power by compulsion to acquire land for the advantage of the community in letting it out, or otherwise disposing of it to individuals. ... This was the great charge of Socialism which was brought against my right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham; but, happily, we are all Socialists now."

"We are supreme and irresistible in our force. We can do what we like. We can crush these Dutchmen in the Transvaal, and you will have to crush the Dutchmen all over South Africa. You may send out a corps d'armée and you can do that; of that there is no doubt. But that, I hope, is not the question. For us it is not what we can do, but what is right we should do and what we ought to do. That is the only supremacy which I claim for the English nation."

"With infinite choice at our fingertips, we don't have to expose ourselves for an instant to anything that challenges our views if we don't want to. So the walls of the echo chambers grow stronger and stronger, until we only hear from the echo chamber next door when the shouty extremists are shouting, and their absurd views only make us more convinced of our own righteousness."

"Religion should be something you keep within the confines of your own head, and we should all recognize how pointless it is to try and make other people see the fairies that live in your brain."

"I'm not a great judge of my own work, me. I'm constantly referring to the ZP Wikiquote page to find out for myself what the funniest line that week was."

"It's easy to make games for kids, they're dumb little shits."

"Consider how The Dark Knight got away with a rating of PG-13 in the US by skilfully not showing any blood. Does that make it any more suitable for children? Or will there be a generation of youngsters haunted by visions of white-faced sadists brandishing pencils?"

"Since I long ago decided that I hated kids and never wanted to have them, my reproductive instinct has transferred to my creativity, I've always wanted to create works that will ensure I'm remembered after I die. I don't think I've done that yet, though."

"You're never alone when you're totally self-absorbed."

"Evoking fear is, in itself, an art form – and nothing in the entire history of storytelling has explored it better than video games."

"I seem to have gathered a reputation for being a jerk in real life, because frankly fans make me uncomfortable. Complete strangers come up and talk to me like they've known me their whole lives, and for that reason I can seem a bit stand-offish... No, the whole "fan" thing confuses me."

"...at the end of the day, nothing makes me feel more positive than something I can get really pissed off about."

"If you don't give a shit then you can only be pleasantly surprised, and I've been burnt too often by disappointment to fall for it again."

"'Medium,' 'Large' and 'King Size'? What the fuck is that? How the fuck can 'Medium' be the smallest? Do you even know what the word 'Medium' means? This is why you're all so fat, you bunch of road sign-shooting Yankee pillocks."

"I’d like the power to make things die with the power of my mind. Not because I have any specific use in mind for it; I just think it’d be useful to have for difficult social situations. Like, if you’re trying to sleep on a plane and a bloke three seats down is laughing really loudly at a film. Or if someone’s trying to make me say something nice about their hideous baby, it would be a good way to change the subject. But then again, that’s really just replacing one awkward social situation with another."

"At this time I was hesitant to venture into the greenery, because I wasn't keen on the possibility of having spiders the size of basketballs drop onto my face from overhead branches and refuse to let go. (...) Hunger pains were moving to the 'excruciating' stage by mid-morning. After a last-ditch attempt to extract nutrients from filling my mouth with sand, I decided that, if a big spider the size of a basketball dropped onto my face and tried to eat it, I would eat it back and we could turn the whole thing into an exciting competition. (Chapter Two)"

""I'm going on a picnic," went Penfold. "And I'm taking anthrax, beer, coffee, doughnuts, estrogen, flamingoes, glue, horses, ink, jelly, Knackwurst, lemonade, murder and Nurofen." (Chapter Fifteen)"

"My secret? Hm. Well, I think the secret is this. Don't come up with a really ambitious twelve-CD monster for your first project, because it'll be doomed very quickly. For your very first release, make something small. Put as much effort into it as you can muster, but don't feel pressured. Then, for every subsequent release, push yourself just a little bit harder to make a better product. By the time you've churned out your sixth or seventh, you'll have a pretty solid reputation."

"Games should be remembered, not remastered."

""Those shells don't look very comfortable, miss." - Edited from the original script of the Little Mermaid (Chapter Eleven)"

"Maybe it was the quest that mattered most, not the outcome. (The Last Bit)"

"I rolled my eyes at Rose, but she returned the look with a scowl which suggested that, if we ever got out of this alive, she would have some issues to address with myself and my polaroid camera. (Chapter Nine)"

"The curtains were drawn, and the only source of light - indeed, the object to which my attention was suddenly exclusively drawn - was a lit candle on the kitchen table, that had probably originally been shaped like Snoopy but was now a mass of melted rivulets, as if Snoopy had fallen victim to some kind of flesh-eating virus. (Chapter One)"

"I've made a lot of box art do a lot of horrible things over the years in the name of critique. SOPA could stop my dirty foreigner ways. (18 January 2012)"

"It was as we were sailing out onto the wide chinchilla sea that I noticed how every chinchilla looked exactly like Marlboro, the chinchilla I had owned as a ten-year-old and which I had put inside a popcorn machine to see what would happen. Then the boat ran aground on the biggest chinchilla ever. (Chapter Two)"

"Ctrl+Alt+Del is the Rubbish King, sitting proudly on a throne of rotting meat."

"Winning the lottery is like slipping your hand into the bra of the most beautiful woman in the world, then getting it stuck and having to saw it off at the wrist. (Chapter Eight)"

"Rest assured, Mogworld's not being entirely released online. Just the first part. I would still like your money. That would be lovely. (16 December 2010)"

"But as any sixteen-year-old sweatily bringing a Playboy up to the counter of a newsagent's expecting everyone in the room to suddenly point and start screaming like the guy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers will tell you, titties become considerably more satisfying when you have to work for them. (26 December 2010)"

"The strippers in Duke3d iPhone don't get their tits out. Fuck off. That's like cutting Aeris' death out of Final Fantasy 7. (24 November 2010)"

"Thinking about morality. If you had to choose, would you save one baby or five old people? What if the baby had a Hitler moustache? (31 December 2010)"

""Hey, mister professional game critic, have you ever heard of this obscure game called 'Deus Ex'?" This is why I hate reading my email. (12 September 2010)"

"So I'm eating Subway this evening when a beetle flies down and burrows into my sandwich. Never a bad time to start losing weight, is there. (6 October 2010)"

"If you honestly need the calendar to instruct you to show affection to your partner then what kind of loveless nightmare are you trapped in (14 February 2011)"

"Valentines card idea: "You are my iron lung. Let me come inside you and breathe heavily." (10 October 2010)"

"I feel bad when I'm the only person on the bus. It's like I'm the only person who showed up to the driver's birthday party. (28 June 2010)"

"I'm not misogynist. I resent that. I hate women, yes, but only because I hate everyone. (25 June 2010)"

"There's something oddly satisfying about coughing up a particularly big mouthful of phlegm. Could almost let you skip breakfast. (1 April 2010)"

"A comment on Mogworld's Amazon page has already declared it to be terrible. Proof that future time travellers are among us? (12 July 2010)"