Diarists

"The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker."

"Dr Johnson is the only conversationalist who triumphs over time."

"To be a good diarist, one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind."

"Kennedy reminds me of Lindbergh and I suspect him of wishing to have a tough foreign policy and to worry about prestige. On the other hand, he is on the left, will be nicer to Negroes than to Big Business and has promised to appoint Adlai Stevenson as secretary of state. So it works out 50/50 by me."

"Clemenceau, Lloyd George and President Wilson.... It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake...."

"For seventeen years, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps."

"The Dell, (Bodnant Garden) is the most extensive, most varied and most tasteful piece of planting I have ever seen. I have no doubt at all that this is the richest garden I have ever seen. Knowledge and taste are combined with enormous expenditure to render it one of the wonders of the world."

"Nye Bevan dies at 4.15 in the afternoon. I regret the loss of this splendid coloured figure and a great parliamentarian and patriot. When I was once being scolded for being malicious in my descriptions of people, Nye protested, "Harold is not malicious at all, He is the angel of pity"."

"He was very difficult to work with. When he felt like it, it was just bliss. But he could be hideous."

"Oh – what's the bloody point?"

"Living with someone always means a denial of self in SOME way and I suppose I have always known it was something I couldn't accomplish. So I've always stayed on the sidelines. Getting the pleasure vicariously. It's not wholly satisfactory, but then of course no lives are, and you know what I think about indiscriminate sex and promiscuous trade. I think it's the beginning of a long, long road to despair."

"All problems have to be solved eventually by ONESELF, and that's where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis, A MAN IS AN ISLAND"

"It's frightening to think with modern medicine and all the technique available to them they can't really help you. In the old days, you know, you were better off because nowadays, they are all specialists. Everyone's becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone's going to be superb, at nothing."

"[ John Aubrey, 1667] He was a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased."

"We are very happy to be here. Can I say that as well? This is a happy place to work. I enjoy coming in here and have done since I began coming in."

"In my wife's view, there is too much clutter. She has declared that the moment I die, she has the local skip company on rapid dial and everything will go."

"Lewis Carroll is somebody who wore different hats. He was a clergyman, a mathematician, a teacher. He wrote serious books, and amazing children's books. He was a photographer. So like most people, he was many people in one skin. Creatively, he made a greater impact than almost any other Victorian, and yet we know next to nothing about him, we just fall back on the old cliché."

"After I lost my seat, Michelle [his wife] said, "Come on, you know when one door closes ... it is shut. What do you want to do now?" And that is when I thought, I want to do a musical."

"It's different now, it's different now. Now I can speak the truth. I can tell you that the one thing I really, really couldn't bear when I was an MP were my constituents. [laughter] Let's face it: the people have contempt for the politicians; it is as nothing to the contempt we have for you. [laughter] All over this country, there are politicians on their way to the Labour Party conference, coming away from the LibDem one, getting ready to go to the Conservative one, thinking "God, at last he's said it. He's said what we all feel, that happiness is the constituency in the rear-view mirror.""

"I describe what I do on the day that I do it. The nice thing for me is that I do lots of different things on lots of different days."

"[On the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government] I think it should be made clear that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, they have not got into bed together; they are merely sharing a room."

"If you'd spent your life being called "Gyles Brandreth", you would crawl across broken glass to achieve the bliss, the simplicity, the purity, the joy of simply being called "Bob"."

"I had to pull about twenty pieces of broken glass out of my hand using tweezers and antiseptic cream. I'm never going to have a game of arm wrestling with Michael Howard again."

"I get to my desk at eight in the morning and I leave it at seven in the evening and I just work away. I'm a work machine."

"One of the interesting things about writing a play is that when you've finished it you have to give it away."

"I've been keeping a diary since I was about 11. If you don't keep a diary everything washes away. And you can live everything three times: you live it when you live it, you live it when you write it down, and you live it a third time when you re-read it. Though I have to say rereading my diary for publication was a depressing experience. You shouldn't look back."

"I don't think people know actually what it's like to be an MP. MPs are cowed, they don't stand up for themselves, they don't tell you what hell it is. All that finger food. Photocalls at the old folks homes. MPs don't kiss babies because they want to!"

"Dodgson was overcome by the beauty of Cologne Cathedral. I found him leaning against the rails of the Choir and sobbing like a child. When the verger came to show us over the chapels behind the Choir, he got out of the way, he said that he could not bear the harsh voice of the man in the presence of so much beauty."

"The truth is I suppose that a tour lays in a great stock of thought and spirits for the future; the fatigue and drawbacks of actual travelling are forgotten and a bright residuum remains."

"Liberalism itself is, on all matters connected with Church and Education, only a kind of corporate and 'respectable' ungodliness."

"Augustine of Hippo used to say that, but for God's grace, he should have been capable of committing any crime; and it is when we feel this sincerely, that we are most likely to be really improving, and best able to give assistance to others without moral loss to ourselves."

"A deliberate rejection of duty prescribed by already recognized truth cannot but destroy, or at least impair most seriously, the clearness of our mental vision."

"What we do upon a great occasion will probably depend upon what we already are; what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline, under the grace of Christ, or of the absence of it."

"If Christianity has really come from heaven, it must renew the whole life of man; it must govern the life of nations no less than that of individuals; it must control a Christian when acting in his public and political capacity as completely as when he is engaged in the duties which belong to him as a member of a family circle."

"Prayer is the act by which man, detaching himself from the embarrassments of sense and nature, ascends to the true level of his destiny."

"Look to the end; and resolve to make the service of Christ the first object in what remains of life, without indifference to the opinion of your fellow-men, but also without fear of it."

"The life of man is made up of action and endurance; and life is fruitful in the ratio in which it is laid out in noble action or in patient perseverance."

"It is only Jesus Christ who has thrown light on life and immortality through the Gospel; and because He has done so, and has enabled us by His Atoning Death and Intercession to make the most of this discovery, His Gospel is, for all who will, a power of God unto salvation."

"Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality: men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator's hands, and the purchase of the Redeemer's Blood, before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God."

"The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the Apostles has been a history of spiritual movements."

"A traveller in Cornwall, when gazing at the masses of mighty rock which defy, and look as if they might defy for ever, the continuous onslaught of the Atlantic, has expressed a thought which comes to most men at some time in their lives. The magnificence and the awe of nature fills him with an oppressive sense of the relative insignificance of man. A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close."

"As all true virtue, wherever found, is a ray of the life of the All-Holy; so all solid knowledge, all really accurate thought, descends from the Eternal Reason, and ought, when we apprehend it, to guide us upwards to Him."

"The real difficulty with thousands in the present day is not that Christianity has been found wanting, but that it has never been seriously tried."

"Resignation,—not to a whirlwind of inexorable forces, not to a brutal fate or destiny, not to powers who cannot see or hear or feel, but to One Who lives forever, and Who loves us well, and Who has given us all that we have, ay, life itself, that we may at His bidding freely give it back to Him."

"Depend upon it, my younger brethren, the bright, self-sacrificing enthusiasms of early manhood are among the most precious things in the whole course of human life."

"Thus the word reveals the Divine Essence; His Incarnation makes that Life, that Love, that Light, which is eternally resident in God, obvious to souls that steadily contemplate Himself. These terms, Life, Love, Light—so abstract, so simple, so suggestive—meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ. They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy; they belong to the mystic language of faith more truly than to the abstract terminology of speculative thought. They draw hearts to Jesus; they invest Him with a higher than any intellectual beauty."

"The question of Christ's Divinity is the question of the truth or falsehood of Christianity."

"The Divine Christ has died on the Cross a Victim for the sins of the world: what is He doing now? Did His redemptive love exhaust itself in the days of His flesh? The past has been forgiven; but has any provision been made for the future? Have we been reconciled to God by the death of His Son, but is there no salvation through His risen life?"

"The Divine Logos is God reflected in His own eternal Thought; in the Logos God is His own Object. This infinite Thought, the reflection and counterpart of God, subsisting in God as a Being or Hypostasis, and having a tendency to self-communication,—such is the Logos. The Logos is the Thought of God, not intermittent and precarious like human thought, but subsisting with the intensity of a personal form. The very expression seems to court the argument of Athenagoras, that since God could never have been ἀλογος, the Logos must have been not created but eternal."

"God would never be cruel enough to create a cyclone as terrible as that Argonne battle. Only man would ever think of doing an awful thing like that. It looked like "the abomination of desolation" must look like. And all through the long night those big guns flashed and growled just like the lightning and the thunder when it storms in the mountains at home. And, oh my, we had to pass the wounded. And some of them were on stretchers going back to the dressing stations, and some of them were lying around, moaning and twitching. And the dead were all along the road. And it was wet and cold. And it all made me think of the Bible and the story of the Anti-Christ and Armageddon. And I'm telling you the little log cabin in Wolf Valley in old Tennessee seemed a long long way off."