Jews From The United Kingdom

"War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted."

"To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus."

"Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war. Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it? Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia... Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration."

"Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism."

"An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."

"Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket.""

"Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality. George: … The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!"

"How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."

"It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting."

"It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright."

"There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it."

"Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

"The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe — responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages."

"I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it."

"When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say."

"My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers."

"Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos."

"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands."

"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."

"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence."

"I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."

"Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition which would occur to any intelligent person in his bath. They're not "academic" questions — they're simply questions which have been given academic status … Philosophy can be reduced to a small number of questions which can be battered about most bars most nights."

"It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest."

"I'm the same as a key piece of machinery in a steel mill, which is needed to make steel and to make money for the mill owners. If I break down, it's their problem. My problem is to build some kind of decent life for myself in this crazy unreal world in which I make my living."

"I've been married too many times. How terrible to change children's affiliations, their affections — to give them the insecurity of placing their trust in someone when maybe that someone won't be there next year."

"I was less pleased than [my friend] to read Elizabeth Taylor's announcement that she had joined the ranks of the sober. Liz Taylor, whom I'd always cherished as one of the few famous women to barrel down the road of excess with a vengeance-eating, drinking, swearing, fucking, marrying, acquiring diamonds as big as the Ritz…"

"There are three things I never saw Elizabeth do: be on time, tell a lie, be unkind to anyone at all."

"Elizabeth Taylor should get a divorce and settle down."

"See what happens? One date with me and Liz ends up engaged to a millionaire."

"Really nice girl. I dated her only once."

"I was with her one Easter in France or Africa and all the animals on the set tried to get into her lap."

"There is no deodorant like success."

"You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal."

"I've always admitted that I'm ruled by my passions."

"Oh God! I'm going to miss him. I can’t yet imagine life without him. But I guess with God’s help... I'll learn. I keep looking at the photo he gave me of himself, which says, 'To my true love Elizabeth, I love you forever.' And, I will love HIM forever."

"I still can't believe it. I don't want to believe it. It can't be so. He will live in my heart forever but it’s not enough. My life feels so empty. I don't think anyone knew how much we loved each other. The purest most giving love I've ever known."

"My heart…my mind… are broken. I loved Michael with all my soul and I can't imagine life without him. We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together."

"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

"The music reached us. Clumsily, stumbling over our own roots, rustling our leaves in answer, we moved, we followed."

"Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer. As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me. I was seed again. I was fern in the swamp. I was coal."

"He told of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots ... He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs, and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it."

"Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made the music: he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language came into my roots out of the earth, into my bark out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning."

"I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest. He was a man, it seemed. . ."

"I love them for finding what I can't find,and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, forassuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all."

"Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.I who don't know the secret wrote the line."

"The world is not with us enough. O taste and see."

"I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glowin the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning."

"I like to find what's not found at once, but lieswithin something of another nature, in repose, distinct."

"Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God."

"Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow."