Jews From The United Kingdom

"A new scientific theory is seldom stated with such clarity by its original author, and usually takes many years to creep into public conciousness."

"...the 'size' of science has doubled steadily every 15 years. In a century this means a factor of 100. For every single scientific paper or for every single scientist in 1670, there were 100 in 1770, 10,000 in 1870 and 1,000,000 in 1970."

"Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'."

"Ethics is not just an abstract intellectual discipline. It is about the conflicts that arise in trying to meet real human needs and values."

"The communication of modern science to the ordinary citizen, necessary, important, desirable as it is, cannot be considered an easy task. The prime obstacle is lack of education. … There is also the difficulty of making scientific discoveries interesting and exciting without completely degrading them intellectually. … It is a weakness of modern science that the scientist shrinks from this sort of publicity, and thus gives an impression of arrogant mystagoguery."

"I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our souffles."

"Forty years on, Amnesty International has secured many victories. Its files are full of letters from former prisoners of conscience or torture victims thanking the organisation for making a difference. Torture is now banned by international agreement. Every year more countries reject the death penalty. The world will soon have an International Criminal Court that will be able to ensure that those accused of the worst crimes in the world will face justice. The Court's very existence will deter some crimes. But the challenges are still great. Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or "disappearance" to be carried out by their officials with impunity. Those who today still feel a sense of impotence can do something: they can support Amnesty International. They can help it to stand up for freedom and justice."

"Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government … The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done."

"Pressure of opinion a hundred years ago brought about the emancipation of the slaves'."

"Just after we came up from dinner, two young men came—one very shy, the other to all appearances very much at his ease. The former was Siegfried Sassoon. He was in khaki: at first I only noticed his sticking-out ears and obvious embarrassment, but a closer scrutiny revealed great charm and a certain sweetness and grave strength in his countenance. I felt much drawn towards him, but had no conversation with him. Nichols, on the other hand, was twice introduced to me by the zealous hostess and we spent the remainder of the evening side by side. He was a thin alert face and is quick and agreeable to talk to—he expressed great admiration for Siegfried, both as poet and soldier. They have both had shell-shock. For Siegfried, he claimed astonishing valour. They each read some of their own poems... Siegfried in a terse, laconic style... Siegfried's have a brilliant, grim irony."

"What voice revisits me this night? What face To my heart’s room returns? From the perpetual silence where the grace Of human sainthood burns Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal? I know not. Only I feel His influence undiminished And his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished."

"[A]s he relates the story there emerges a most delightful picture of English country life, by no means of its sporting side only. It is written in the pleasantest of good prose, simple, cool, and telling. It is marked by very vivid perception and by quiet and good-humoured irony."

"If A Fox-Hunting Man presents the Edwardian Age as an idyll of hunting and cricket, The Old Century is a complementary idyll of a serenely cultivated existence carried on, like the former, in the atmosphere of perpetual summer."

"Cecil Day-Lewis, A Time to Dance, 1936. Also quoted in C. Day-Lewis: The Golden Bridle - Selected Prose. Oxford University Press, 2017."

"During the War, Siegfried Sassoon published a volume of poems called Counter-Attack: these poems expressed in satire his violent revulsion from all that the war meant. They were a personal expression, as all good poetry is, but they had a considerable influence amongst those numerous intellectuals who had been swept into the War on a tide of Rupert Brooke feeling: I know of several, indeed, whose disillusionment was crystallised by these poems and who became conscious revolutionaries from the moment of reading them."

"It may be that it will be by his war poems that his name will last. He has gone far beyond them. His poems are diverse both in styles and subjects. As one critic has said: "There is no telling where a reader may fetch up when he goes out with this poet." But a poet is more than a man with metrical skill and an ability to make verbal music. (Sassoon is not high in this department.) He is a man apart from others. He has a way of looking at things that is not the ordinary man's. Sassoon has had his vigils and his visions. He has written Allow me now much musing-space To shape my secrecies alone. Happily his Collected Poems allow us to share some of them."

"Although his satirical poems hit some legitimate targets in shirkers, profiteers, hysterical women and home-front militarists, they are too sweeping, savage and self-centred to carry conviction. Indeed some now seem unnecessarily brutal, telling us more about the poet's troubled mind than about the war on the home or military fronts. Most seriously, at that time Sassoon shows no understanding of the meaning of the conflict in strategic or political terms. Although his protest had been well-intentioned and required great moral courage, it took another world war for him to admit that in 1917 there was no possibility for Britain or her allies to gain acceptable peace terms."

"As Sassoon's wartime diaries reveal, he was an extremely complex character, troubled by his homosexuality and anxious to prove his manliness in combat and so to earn the respect, perhaps even love, of his men. Also, as a poet first and foremost, he was never at ease with the majority of his fellow officers whom he found boorish, dull and snobbish, hence his delight in meeting other poets and literary men such as Graves, Owen and de Sola Pinto. Both on his own account, and for the reputation of poets, he wanted to prove himself a hero and did so in several gallant actions. But in seeking to protest against what he thought of as the excessive suffering of his men in an unduly prolonged war he allowed himself to be influenced by pacifists who had little respect for men in uniform and were disappointed that he did not provide publicity for their cause by going to prison."

"Freyberg inveighed against the Georgian Poets and reproached me for holding a brief for Siegfried Sassoon. I maintained that, having fully demonstrated his personal physical courage, he had earned the right to exhibit moral courage as a pacifist without laying himself open to the charge of cloaking physical cowardice under the claim of moral courage. Freyberg is very uncompromising in his condemnation and, with some justice, says it is offensive to come back and say, "I can't lead men to their death any more"—it implies a monopoly of virtue, as if other officers liked doing it because they acquiesced in their duty. He thought the poem called "The Hero" caddish, as it might destroy every mother's faith in the report of her son's death. Certainly Siegfried Sassoon breaks the conspiracy of silence, but sometimes I strongly feel that those at home should be made to realise the full horror, even to the incidental ugliness, as much as possible."

"O fathering friend and scientist of good, Who in solitude, one bygone summer’s day, And in the throes of bodily anguish, passed away From dream and conflict and research-lit lands Of ethnological learning, — even as you stood Selfless and ardent, resolute and gay, So in this hour, in strange survival stands Your ghost, whom I am powerless to repay."

"Deep in my morning time he made his mark And still he comes uncalled to be my guide In devastated regions When the brain has lost its bearings in the dark And broken in it’s body’s pride In the long campaign to which it had sworn allegiance."

"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows. In the great hour of destiny they stand, Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows."

"Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead."

"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest."

"I must add that in the light of subsequent events it is difficult to believe that a Peace negotiated in 1917 would have been permanent. I share the general opinion that nothing on earth would have prevented a recurrence of Teutonic aggressiveness."

"The visionless officialized fatuity That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity."

"Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom."

"Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages."

"Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride 'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims. Was ever an immolation so belied As these intolerably nameless names? Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime."

"Who will remember, passing through this Gate, The unheroic Dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, — Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own. Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp; Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone, The armies who endured that sullen swamp."

"October's bellowing anger breakes and cleaves The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves For battle's fruitless harvest, and the feud Of outrage men. Their lives are like the leaves Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown Along the westering furnace flaring red. O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, The burden of your wrongs is on my head."

"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go."

"I'd say — "I used to know his father well; Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap." And when the war is done and youth stone dead, I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed."

"If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line of death."

"Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives."

"Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans... Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed."

"[A]ction restarting action: all we need to reverse inertia is some sense of consequence - some sense that beyond this occurrence there is another, and that they are linked, some sense that life has chapters."

"It's revealing [...] Because the obvious thing to say is not that the documentary demonizes Hamas - it simply shows Hamas, through their own audio and footage - but that the documentary makes uncomfortable viewing for those who wish to believe that Hamas represents the Palestinians, both their suffering and their political purpose, rather than being inspired by Jew-hatred and violcence [sic]."

"That's the thing about your destiny: how are you supposed to know it when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from the random life?"

"[H]e felt frustrated, his sense of fate and direction subverted by banalities - the frustration of the man who, having thought himself following his destiny, finds he is actually on the A318 to New Malden."

"Earlier last year, following the spate of statues being toppled as part of the Black Lives Matter protests, a protester a long way from Minneapolis – in Broadstairs, Kent – sprayed the words "Dickens Was A Racist" on the Dickens House Museum. The protester was called Ian Driver and he was prompted by a letter that Dickens had written decrying the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Unquestionably, the letter is racist. However, it is strange that Driver had to go all the way to a relatively obscure piece of correspondence by Dickens to become inflamed by his racism, when, in Oliver Twist, in plain sight, and widely known to us for many, many years, has been Fagin. But maybe he doesn't count."

"Contrary to popular belief, English women do not wear tweed nightgowns."

"My family were of good English peasant class from St. John's Wood. My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands."

"It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing."

"Tom Stoppard is in my pantheon. I just saw Leopoldstadt on Broadway, and was equally moved and impressed. (Moved to the point of sobbing, impressed to the point of continued hero worship.) His Arcadia is my favorite play, and had a seismic impact on my writing."

"When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?""

"Stoppard just assumed his audience was as well read and inquisitive as he was. … Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno."

"My wife and I are deeply saddened to learn of the death of one of our greatest writers, Sir Tom Stoppard. A dear friend who wore his genius lightly, he could, and did, turn his pen to any subject, challenging, moving and inspiring his audiences, borne from his own personal history. We send our most heartfelt sympathy to his beloved family. Let us all take comfort in his immortal line: "Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.""

"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."