journalists-from-scotland

"James was twenty- seven and never had a boss again. Until that moment, he and Roland had lived as employees, as if in the warm, dark, cosy- fetid hold of a ship. What happened up at the helm was not their concern."

"The twentieth century had conclusively settled the question of how a society should be organised: liberal democracy, free markets and personal self- realisation. Even the Russians and Chinese had hauled down the red flag and realised they'd rather have a nice time than a world revolution. Even the Irish had settled their eight-hundred-year vendetta, simply because no one wanted it any more."

"It was as if they were together in their campaign tent, studying the map and deciding where to deploy their regiments."

"For James, there was no sense that expanding Tesco’s sales onto the web was what the human race urgently needed. It didn’t have to be. This was a ladder. And yet: he’d come first in the most prestigious course at the most famous university in the world, and he was sitting here in his boxers copying and pasting the item code for ironing boards. It didn’t feel as if he were ascending to greatness."

"James had assumed this would be a task of meticulous detection, of inefficiencies brilliantly uncovered, but there was blatant wastage everywhere. Half the employees barely lifted a finger. They spent days listlessly scheduling meetings or organising the holiday calendar. A company grown fat on oil. For James it was like finding ripe fields of wheat yearning for the scythe. Roland felt like a snitch."

"James said that in years to come, when the company had swelled to thousands, people would brag about having been on this boat. It would be like saying you were with Mao on the Long March."

"This was what it must be like when the winners of some shitty trophy in Slovenia qualified for the Champions League and came up against Real Madrid. It was the sheer embarrassment of having taken yourself seriously."

"It was insane that you had to pretend to be interested in your job and use these lame phrases like “pinging things over” “by close of play”."

"... The Corbie (or Raven) is sacred to the All-Father. The Katyogle (or Owl) is consecrated to the goddess of wisdom. ... I have too much respect for the Corbie and Katyogle to dwell in detail upon their . I care not for their "," according to the scientist. The and species to which they belong influence me not one whit. Why—when I know on the authority of a Shetland witch, that the Corbie can assume any form he pleases, and that the Katyogle is the inhabitant of another world in disguise–why should I trouble my spirit with assigning to either a place in the Darwinian circle?"

"We had been dressing the wee lassie one day is a graceful fairy-like of Aunt Ellen's devising, and maternal pride gave utterance to some (foolish) remarks about the child's appearance. Very sweetly came the rebuke from childhood's wisdom. "Yes, but it was very good of God to make me pretty.""

"Winds are raging fierce and high, Lurid lightnings wreathe the sky, Thunders roll and night is nigh, Ships 'mid storm-toss'd breakers lie At the ocean's will. Little ones there are who weep, Wives who weary vigils keep, When all else have gone to sleep. Father! to yon angry deep "Say Thou, Peace, be still.""

"I hear you're such a lazy bird, You cannot build a ; Perhaps you could, if you would try— We ought to do our best. The little bird that told me this Suspected something worse,— That you neglect your little ones, And put them out to nurse. Oh, Cuckoo! if this story's true, I think you're much to blame. Then talk no more about yourself; Go, hide yourself, for shame!"

"An incantation against nightmare was once used over me by old Mam-Kirsty famed for her witchcraft."

"Pompous the boast, and yet a truth it speaks: A Modern Athens—fit for modern Greeks."

"Through regions by wild men and cannibals haunted, Old Dame Ida Pfeiffer goes lone and undaunted; But, bless you, the risk's not so great as it's reckon'd, She's too plain for the first, and too tough for the second."

"Blogg sneers at ancient birth;—yes, Blogg, we see, Your ears are longer than your pedigree."

"Tomkins will clear the land, they say, From every foul abuse: So chimneys in the olden day, Were cleansed by a goose."

"We have followed the bright rainbow of humanistic promise, too zealously and too long. It still hangs in the sky, but its colours have faded; and the floods are still rising about us."

"There is only one word for aid that is genuinely without strings, and that word is blackmail."

"... Obviously my chief authority is Xenophon's ; if I can induce anyone to read this (the Loeb translation is very vivid on the whole) and get as much pleasure out of it as I did, then I shall be — as the good books say — amply rewarded. For actual history I have gone to Cavaignac or . ... 's The Greek Commonwealth is a good book to begin on."

"The first thing about science is asking questions; the next—and this includes the bulk of what is called scientific work—is measuring the knowledge and finding new standards of measurement; and the final thing is putting all this knowledge together."

"My father was writing one paper after another in conjunction with various people, , , Butterfield, , and others, but especially ..."

"... readers, remember that my account of what was happening in Sparta or Athens or even Egypt, is all based on real history, but the view was moulded by what I—and many another person—was thinking in the Europe of those days, with Mussolini and his fascists in Italy and already the shadow of Hitler in Germany. If I was writing this book now I might treat my characters and my story differently. But I cannot be certain, even of that."

"Mrs. Mitichison brings on her stage, and gives one the feeling of that bleak and terrible greatness. The impression which Cæsar has left on history is just the impression he made on his contemporaries. The shadow of a vastness had fallen coldly across them. Mrs. Mitchison knows how to make it fall across us. She has, as it were by miracle, got back into the air and mood of the time she writes about: she creates, and recreates. The splendor and the mystery come easy to her."

"It occurred to the writer, a year ago, in thinking about modern Ireland, to wonder what light the record of Cæsar’s Gallic wars might throw on the causes of the present discontents. , , —were these leaders of the Gauls like the leaders of the Gael to-day? Did they feel the same blinding passion of nationalism? Were they, too, distracted by feuds and harassed by jealousies? Is the Celtic temper an undeviating possession of the centuries ; and is the character of a stock inherited as surely and as inevitably as the colour of eyes and hair ? To find an answer to these questions it would have been necessary to read those later books of the , to which (however skilled we may become in the structure of the bridge which Cæsar threw over the Rhine) few, if any, of us ever attain in our schoolboy days. For such reading no opportunity occurred; but the fortunate chance of an old friendship brought another solution. I was privileged to read the manuscript of Mrs. Mitchison’s work, and the answer came, irradiated by an historical imagination, and animated by a living sympathy, as I read."

"How you see the world depends upon where you look."

"The hand that wields the knife shall never wear the crown."

"Winning was never the most important thing to her. It was the only thing."

"All that can rationally be claimed is that a teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs, may have Messianically uttered some of these teachings at various periods, presumably after the writing of the Pauline epistles."

"Alexander Duff was convinced that “of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen men, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous” and that India was “the chief seat of Satan’s earthly dominion.”"

"While you engage in directly separating as many precious atoms from the mass as the stubborn resistance to ordinary appliances can admit, we shall, with the blessing of God, devote our time and strength for the preparing of a mine, and the setting of a train which shall one day explode and tear up the whole from its lowest depths."

"In 1840, the Reverend Alexander Duff briefly referred to the Aryan commonality by stating that the Hindus "can point to little that indicates their high original." But for the most part he also simply ranted that they "have no will, no liberty, no conscience of their own. They are passive instruments, moulded into shape by external influences—mere machines, blindly stimulated, at the bidding of another, to pursuits the most unworthy of immortal crea tures. In them, reason is in fact laid prostrate. They launch into all the depravities of idol worship. They look like the sports and derision of the Prince of darkness" (107)."

"If in that land you do give the people knowledge without religion, rest assured that it is the greatest blunder, politically speaking, that ever was committed."

"A choice must be made. Either you stand with the censors or you ally yourself with those who appreciate the importance of liberty. It is beyond depressing that so many of our parliamentarians are either explicitly or implicitly on the side of those hostile to liberalism and the foundational principles of a democratic society. That is the real test here and, dispiritingly, many of our MSPs utterly fail it."

"There are not many trans prisoners in Scotland so statistics regarding them should be treated with a measure of caution. Nevertheless, it is well-established that trans women criminals fit a male pattern of offending, not a female one. Since they are biologically male this can only surprise those already stupefied by gender woo-woo. Moreover, some 50 per cent of Scottish inmates only discovered their new gender identity after they were charged by police."

"But as this case – and its portents for the future – demonstrates, those concerns could scarcely be more pertinent or more valid. Ultimately, this is a disagreement between fantasists and realists and it is deplorable to realise that the majority of Scottish parliamentarians are signed-up members of the fantasy club. Well, they cannot pretend they have not been warned of the likely consequences which flow from their delusions. This is meagre comfort but in mad times such scraps of consolation are all that is available."

"Like other ministers, [[w:Shirley-Anne Somerville|[Shirley-Anne] Somerville]] is keen that voters forget what the Scottish parliament's gender recognition reforms actually meant. They would rather you ignore the reality that the bill created a situation in which, as a legal matter, someone might be one sex in Dumfries but a different one in Carlisle. If Scotland were an independent state, a rump UK government's disinclination to recognise gender recognition certificates in Scotland might not matter much but — at the risk of saying something dangerous here — it does seem sensible for the definition of a "man" and a "woman" to be consistent within and throughout a single nation state."

"Cherry is accused of "transphobia", a term now so broad it has become functionally meaningless. If Cherry is transphobic then so is reality. The expansive definition of transphobia favoured by trans activists now decrees that lesbians who do not wish to sleep with natal males are bigots. Suggesting that homosexuality means same-sex attraction is — apparently — a transphobic "dogwhistle". This is a very modern kind of madness but there we have it."

"After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older", "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans—literally morons by comparison with ourselves. Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm."

"We have severed our connection to spirit. That's what our society has done. It has sought to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm. And the only way we're going to recover is to reconnect with spirit. And I truly believe we need the help of the plants in order to do that."

"If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization—a society that ticks all the boxes—is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is—that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology—all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us."

"Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight—and with no apparent antecedents whatever. For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty."

"We can no longer think of the so-called Fertile Crescent of Sumeria as the cradle of civilization. What seems more likely from the large body of evidence I have compiled is that there were a number of cities built before this time which were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age... It proved that the methods I was using, the combination of deciphering ancient myths and new technology, actually worked. Of course I still keeping an open mind, but it does suggest I am on the right track after all. Its mainstream archaeology and science that are blinkered."

"Our society values alert, problem-solving consciousness, and it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today. Of course, we accept drunkenness. We allow people some brief respite from the material grind. A society that subscribes to that model is a society that is going to condemn the states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert, problem-solving mentality.And if you go back to the 1960s, when there was a tremendous upsurge of exploration of psychedelics, I would say the huge backlash that followed that had to do with a fear on the part of the powers that be: that if enough people went into those realms and those experiences, the very fabric of the society we have today would be picked apart—and, most importantly, those in power at the top would not be in power at the top any more."

"Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow—we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely—through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site.Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of "world ages" of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins."

"Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus—perhaps to a large extent subconsciously—on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm."

"We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality that the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoretically there could be other realms, other dimensions, as all religious traditions and quantum physics alike maintain. Theoretically, the brain could be as much a receiver as a generator of consciousness and thus might be fine-tuned in altered states to pick up wavelengths that are normally not accessible to us."

"Science in the twenty-first century does not encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of "the facts"—particularly when those facts call into question long-established notions."

"All the same, conservatism still eludes satisfactory definition even as an aim. If it were just a style, as some writers seem to assume, the Soviet regime would qualify without difficulty, but all states which endeavour to avoid political change will not be allowed by the nouveaux philosophes of the right, wherever in the world, to be conservative. ‘Rightism’ will not do either: the Nazi programme of destroying an entire social order and its institutions, though supported initially by many German conservatives, drove some of them in the end to conspiratorial resistance."

"Some questions were raised by journalists in the early Seventies, all over Western Europe, which have never been answered in Britain. If the press is to be owned by private tycoons like Murdoch, or by international conglomerates with many other interests, how is editorial independence to be protected? How is the public, democratic function of the media to be guaranteed while they remain in private hands? In those days, the suggestion that journalists should have entrenched and specified rights over the integrity of what they wrote and over who was appointed or elected to be their editor was greeted by the newspaper proprietors as a threat to press liberty worse than that presented by the printing unions. A few experiments in that direction were made, none very encouraging. Yet the whole recent history of Times Newspapers raises that question again in its most acute form: only the journalists – not the readers, not ineffective ‘independent’ directors – can really guarantee the editor’s independence against a proprietor, and then only if their rights are solidly documented. Britain may think it does not need a written constitution, but British newspapers do, and that constitution should be written into law. After reading Good Times, Bad Times, nobody could believe that the present system, with the Government attaching a string of ad hoc conditions designed by itself to a given newspaper sale, is in any way effective."