Jews From The United Kingdom

"I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him [Thomas Cromwell] to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there. I still think that Cromwell was the most remarkable English statesman of the sixteenth century and one of the most remarkable in the country's history. I still think that he instigated and in part accomplished a major and enduring transformation in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. And I still think that he was largely responsible for the fact that the medieval heritage of common law and representative institutions remained at the heart of England's modern government, until very recent times."

"One of the things that you have to grasp about the English of the sixteenth century is that they were a confident nation. It would be an error to suppose that they were uncertain of themselves. Of course, they had no reason to be overconfident in the face of God... Though quite sure that life was short and miserable and dangerous, by and large they faced those dangers and those miseries often with pessimism, but rarely with despair... [The] more universal reaction was to accept man's fate and to confront it firmly. This made for confidence. In fact, the reign of Elizabeth was notable for chauvinistic arrogance."

"In history there are no authorities: history is a free study in which no man can claim rule, or credence for his mere ipse dixit, and in which the only true sin is to deny a hearing to views with which one happens to disagree."

"The absolute differentiation of England from the continent was achieved in the aftermath of the great transformation which we call the Henrician Reformation, and it was in the end achieved with conscious recognition and even deliberation."

"The history of England between 1603 and 1640 is not the history of a growing disease in the body politic, but of conflict – some of it healthy, some morbid – within a setting of agreed essentials: or rather it was this until the impatient attempt at a drastic solution on the king's behalf persuaded his opponents that the essentials were no longer agreed. Thus the prehistory of the civil war should certainly be read as the breakdown of a system of government. But it did not break down because it had been unworkable from the first... It broke down because the early Stuart governments could not manage or persuade, because they were incompetent, sometimes corrupt, and frequently just ignorant of what was going on or needed doing."

"We need to see the sixteenth-century in terms of its own experience, not as the prehistory of a later revolution. We need to regard even the reigns of the early Stuarts without the conviction that the only thing of moment in their history is the ultimate breakdown of government which we know was to come. If thereafter we want to investigate the causes of the civil war, we need to remember that no revolution of the size claimed for this one ever so readily stopped short and reversed itself."

"[O]nce...the early seventeenth century is treated as a sequence of events rather than the working out of a destiny – the parliamentary history of 1603–28 ceases to be the record of the "inevitable" accentuation of inherent strain and becomes comprehensible as a series of political crises, complicated by personality, in which the outcome may be identified but cannot be presumed from the start. In the context it is worth notice that James I's last Parliament was the only one in which Crown and Commons worked in a measure of harmony, and that even in 1628 the opposition leadership carefully avoided any proposals which could be read as an invasion of prerogative rights. The ineffectiveness of the Petition of Right, as futile a document as even constitutional struggles have ever thrown up, neatly demonstrates the absence of revolutionary strains in the difficulties encountered up to that point. Before Charles I's experiment in the 1630s, war was not so much inevitable as totally improbable; and the failure of Charles's government was not rendered "inevitable" by deep divisions in society or inherited stresses in the constitution, but was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system."

"The Reformation, then, was not the inevitable development of the text-books. Whether it would have come anyway it is idle to speculate; but it came in the 1530's simply because Henry's desire for his divorce was baulked by an international situation which made co-operation with the papacy impossible, and it came as it did because Thomas Cromwell produced a plan which achieved Henry's ends by destroying the papal power and jurisdiction in England and by creating in England an independent sovereign state. This policy was not present from the start; it had to overcome much caution and conservatism as well as fear of the consequences before its bold simplicity was permitted to develop. The Henrician Reformation reflects the ideas—one may say, the political philosophy—of Thomas Cromwell."

"[Replying to the criticism of J. P. Cooper] I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents. A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest."

"If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays on the causes of the civil war, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown, but it will be less well tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real."

"Prolonged involvement with Parliament has in the end convinced me that the customary concentration on it as the centre of public affairs, however traditional it may be, is entirely misleading. This is a message, it seems to me, that needs to be absorbed into the general history of England."

"Sir John Neale has shown how mistaken this view is: queen and Commons clashed frequently throughout the reign, but this did not prevent equally frequent co-operation. Secondly the conventional view supposes that serious conflict on the parliamentary stage is somehow normal: that "the Commons" misbehaved unless they opposed the Crown. This is nonsense. Parliament was part of the king's government, called to assist him by making grants and laws, but also designed to keep the Crown in touch with opinion and an accepted occasion for complaint and protest. It was, and is, a talking institution, a place for debate. The historian who supposed that debate must mean "inevitable conflict" had better investigate his subconscious."

"The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome was a government measure, affected slightly by opposition from the church and not at all by parliament. A proposal to authorize the archbishops by act of parliament to dissolve the king's marriage was soon replaced by a comprehensive attack on papal jurisdiction in England. In Cromwell's hands, the preamble turned into an unhesitating statement of the theory which underlay the whole practice of Henry VIII and his government: the theory of the imperial crown of England sovereign within its own realm over both laity and church."

"We historians are, in a way, fighting for our lives. Certainly, we are fighting for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights – the intellectual equivalent of crack, in fact. Any acceptance of these theories – even the most gentle or modest bow in their direction – can prove fatal."

"Your arguments are overwhelming. You’re obviously right — and the answer is No."

"As chief secretary, I was having a terrible time doing what I didn’t go into politics to do — cutting public expenditure. And I was having meetings with every departmental minister about their budget. They all wanted more money — Tony Benn and Barbara Castle more than most. I decided that I could get rid of three Cabinet ministers — the secretaries of state for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — if I could settle on a formula for their budgets. So I set up this method for allocating public expenditure that the Cabinet then agreed to."

"The real problem is that now no politician wants to tackle it. The Barnett Formula saves people trouble. It saves prime ministers worrying. That’s the way with politics… Here we are, about to make the wrong decision again."

"We know that you have a very arduous duty ahead of you. We hope you enjoy the best of health; if you go on looking as attractive as you do tonight, it will be very beneficial."

"I thought that health was a manifestation of the way we organize society, and that by asking about health in society, we're asking about society itself."

"When people would come in with non-specific problems and we never quite got to the root of a medical diagnosis, it always seemed to me they were expressing problems in living, and that one needed to look at their problems in living, and how they manifested themselves in physical problems."

"I used to think that medicine and particularly surgery is just failed prevention. That if we could treat these people properly and, particularly, if we could do something about prevention, we could empty the hospital wards. It was probably false, but that's what I used to think."

"The family image, the family tradition, was that my parents were poor immigrants into East London, and that they thought that education was vitally important. But they both left school at fourteen, and so I grew up with the idea that, but for the opportunity, my parents would have been educated. That they were giving me this opportunity, and by golly, I better take advantage of it."

"It makes a lot of sense to me. She seems to me like a Jewish woman, the way she thinks and behaves."

"My beloved wife Peaches was adored by myself and her two sons. I shall bring them up with their mother in their hearts every day. We shall love her forever."

"I'm very proud to be Jewish and a big part of me being a creative person comes from being Jewish. The eccentricity in Jewish musicians really connects with me."

"She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us."

"History repeats itself: historians repeat each other."

"Autobiography—that unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people."

"If your opponent imagines that because you are a woman you’re easy to bluff, that you’d never bluff yourself and that you can be pushed around, you can exploit those assumptions."

"Stuart Wheeler says women are no good at poker?! If he fancies playing a bit of Heads Up, he knows where to find me."

"He falsely asserted that Jews hated Christians so much that they never met them without ejaculating curses on their heads, thus pretending that the bigotry and intolerance of the Jews was equal to those qualities inherent in the breasts of Dominican friars."

"No science is more worthy of cultivation and encouragement than that which, calculating time by the aid of Astronomy, adjusts the results of observations thus obtained to the ordinary use and instruction of man."

"Two of my favourite current management writers are Americans – Clayton Christensen and Peter Senge. My all-time favourite gurus are Peter Drucker, who became a greatly admired friend, and W. Edwards Deming. The thing that set these people apart from many other business commentators is that they didn’t propose any all - encompassing theories, they simply told it like it is. The fact is that life cannot be summarised as a simple set of rules; it’s far too complicated for that and it’s always changing. Unfortunately, all-encompassing panaceas do seem to be popular and certainly sell books, which is why I so value the objectivity of thought that each of these people brought to the debate."

"Robert Heller can rightly be credited with promoting "management" as a skill that could be learned and perfected – and written about."

"Common sense suggests that some factors in a [risk management] process are more important than others — and analysis supports this. In reality, only 20 percent of activities. In reality, only 20 percent of activities may account for up to 80 percent of results. This is known as Pareto's law, the “80/20 rule”...Pareto's law concentrates on the significant 20 percent and gives the less important 80 percent lower priority."

"When I left university I had two objectives; I wanted to write and I wanted to get married. The only way I could afford both was to get a job as a journalist. At that time, the National Union of Journalists was very powerful and would not allow the direct recruitment of journalists from college except under special circumstances. The Financial Times was deemed special and duly recruited a cadre of very bright young people. I joined the FT as part of that now celebrated intake and, as a result, found myself working on a business newspaper."

"No decision in business provides greater potential for the creation of wealth (or its destruction, come to think of it) than the choice of which innovation to back."

"My first book “The Naked Manager”, a big success in 1971, had been followed by many others, and I wanted to write still more. Writing books is very interesting as each new project takes you in a different direction. You learn a lot – especially about what you yourself really think."

"Management — The definition that includes all the other definitions in this book and which, because of that, is the most general and least precise. Its concrete, people meaning — the board of directors and all executives with the power to make decisions — is no problem, except for the not-so-little matter of where to draw the line between managers who are part of "the management" and managers who are not."

"Letting I dare not wait upon I would is a mug's game, and those who play it usually get mugged."

"What goes wrong [in long-range planning] is that sensible anticipation gets converted into foolish numbers: and their validity always hinges on large loose assumptions."

"Never ignore a gut feeling: but never believe that it's enough on its own"

"Effective management always means asking the right question."

"All businesses operate below their true potential. That is unavoidable, given the fallibility of human beings."

"Management is a far more homely business than its would be scientists suggest, more closely allied to cookery than any other human activity. Like cooking, it rests on a degree of organisation and on adequate resources. But just as no two chefs run their kitchens the same way, so no two managements are the same."

"CEO of General Electric for 30 years, Jack Welch was declared the greatest manager of the 20th century. Focusing firmly on results, he revolutionized management to achieve phenomenal growth for his company."

"Although he reputedly hated the label of ‘guru’, Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the ‘the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow’ and Robert Heller described him as ‘the greatest man in the history of management’, praise indeed for a man who described himself as ‘just an old journalist’."

"Decisions should be pushed down as far as possible, to the level of competence. This allows senior managers more time for making decisions of a more complex nature"

"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that's enough."

"Managers are to information as alcoholics are to booze. They consume enormous amounts, constantly crave more, but have great difficulty in digesting their existing intake."