People From Birmingham

"How much better it is to see men live exactly than to hear them argue with subtlety!"

"The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God and after conversion to keep it with Him."

"I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing."

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter."

"The sun has burst the sky Because I love you And the river its banks."

"The only great actor I have worked with who was not in any sense a star — there was no great publicity about him, no scandal about him, none of the attitude to stardom."

"Privacy is not negotiable."

"I feel incredibly lucky to have discovered early in my life, practically when I was a child, that I could do something that in the end I finally wanted to do all my life. It has something to do with being completely removed from oneself, which doesn't necessarily mean one is uncomfortable inside oneself. It just means it's a great relief to be inhabiting somebody else. It can be a tremendously liberating sensation."

"I've found that an actor's work has life and interest only in its execution. It seems to wither away in discussion and becomes emptily theoretical and insubstantial. It has no rules except perhaps audibility. With every play and every playwright the actor starts from scratch as if he or she knows nothing and proceeds to learn afresh every time, growing with the relationships of the characters and insights of the writer. When the play has finished its run the actor is empty until the next time...and it is the emptiness which is, I find, apparent in any discussion of theatre work."

"It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been."

"Oh, I suppose my wife and I will open a bottle of champagne with another couple."

"I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled."

"Beneath the gentle modesty of his behavior lay the absolute assurance of a born artist."

"As you get older, the more you know, so the more nervous you become. The risks are much bigger."

"If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr? If you have always been that, then why lose your title? I have a title, which is the same one that I have always had. But it's not political. I have a CBE, which I accepted very gratefully."

"I found at this point that effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do, that I didn't want to make effects, that I wanted, as it were, to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being."

"King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear."

"He brought you face to face with the unfathomable. No actor summoned with such authority the mysterious depths of human experience."

"As an actor I don't admit to any limitations. In rehearsal one comes up against apparently insuperable barriers, but if one can imaginatively get past them, overreach one's natural reach, it is astonishing how elastic one can become. I've got to go not so far as I can, but as far as is needed. It's up to somebody else to say if I've made a fool of myself."

"Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life."

"The enthusiastic and pleasing illusions of youth."

"All creeds and opinions are nothing but the mere result of chance and temperament."

"It is ridiculous that British troops are here in Crossmaglen. The claim is that they're in Ireland keeping the peace between the two communities. But there is only one community in South Armagh, so what the heck are they doing here?"

"I should make it clear [...] that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers."

"They say 10,000, double, treble and then think of another number. It will be golden elephants next. They have got to stop this game. It is bad governance. It's hysterica scaremongering, which is whipping people up."

"I also believe that US backing for Israeli policies of expansion of the Israeli state and oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world."

"She sounds like a mouthpiece for an old nineteenth-century colonial and Conservative government."

"Many there are, I doubt not, who will regard the Eastern girl with horror. I ask their forgiveness in that I regarded her quite differently. No man having seen her could have condemned her unheard. Many, having looked into her lovely eyes, had they found there what I found, must have forgiven her almost any crime."

"There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system as the anticipation of calamity."

"There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life."

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."

"I always look for people whose ideas coincide with mine, and then I'm ready to give them a chance to make a name for themselves."

"We made films at Ealing that were good, bad and indifferent, but that were indisputably British. They were rooted in the soil of the country."

"The Labour Party are going to bring in a law that means you can go everywhere you want in the country. I have checked this with two people and they both said it was true. People will be able to walk into your garden and pick your flowers. It is absurd. My garden is a blaze of flowers. I don't want anyone In there."

"Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cartland's Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. In many ways her most romantic book, it was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was "all of a piece", something which I always admired."

"I will be voting for John Major. He is getting better and better every year. He is very, very good. He now speaks far better than he did. He's a brilliant speaker. He is learning to be a real leader. He really does speak out. Look around and who else is like the old leaders like Winston? I knew Winston when he was a little boy. He gradually got stronger and stronger. John Major came to lunch with me when he got in. He asked me what he should be doing. I said take England back to what it was. We really want lo be led, and John Major is leading as he has never before."

"The right diet directs sexual energy into the parts that matter."

"France is the only place where you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on your door."

"I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth."

"The great majority of people in England and America are modest, decent and pure-minded and the amount of virgins in the world today is stupendous."

"A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines."

"Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."

"Over the years, John Oliver has a history of creating energy for an overlooked issue over the course of his program, and then turning that energy into activism through a stunt at the end. He's pointed out how ridiculously corrupt the predatory lending industry is by buying 15 million dollars worth of medical debt for just 60 thousand dollars and forgiving it. He's raised awareness for net neutrality by making the petititon site "goffcyourself.com". He's written a children's book called Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Presents: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo to combat Mike Pence's support for conversion therapy, which raised millions of dollars for The Trevor Project and AIDS United. That is a much more concrete difference to make than getting a bunch of liberals to show up to the "Rally to Restore Sanity.""

"There is no "fact-checking" of John Oliver, Beyonce or Kim Kardashian. They're entertainers, not politicians or journalists."

"When John Oliver told viewers that if they opposed abortion they had to change the channel until the last minute of the program, when they would be shown “an adorable bucket of sloths,” he perfectly encapsulated the tone of these shows: one imbued with the conviction that they and their fans are intellectually and morally superior to those who espouse any of the beliefs of the political right. Two days before the election, every talking head on television was assuring us that Trump didn’t have a chance, because he lacked a “ground game.” After his victory, one had to wonder whether some part of his ground game had been conducted night after night after night on television, under flattering studio lights and with excellent production values and comedy writing."

"For years, Oliver has criticized the estate tax, which opponents, in a smart linguistic move dreamed up by Frank Luntz, long ago labeled the “death tax”; and the tax code’s raft of loopholes that benefit special interests he identified as oil companies and hedge fund managers. Oliver even briefly established the bogus Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption to draw attention to tax-exempt status granted to churches and charities. Back in July 2014, in an episode in which he lamented the "Wealth Gap in America” (which has resulted in the richest one percent of Americans controlling 20 percent of annual income), Oliver said, “At this point the rich are just running up the score…What sets America apart is that we are actively introducing policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy,” such as tax cuts and loopholes like trusts. So it’s a little surprising to discover that just months before, Oliver had a tax attorney set up two revocable trusts, one for him and one for his wife, to hide the couple’s purchase of a $9.5 million Manhattan penthouse. Then he used a tax loophole created by Donald Trump himself back in the 1970s, when the current president was merely a prominent New York real estate developer and aspiring celebrity author."

"No one takes more glee in dumping their shit on middle America than John Oliver. [...] If he delivered the exact same words sounding as if he went to school with Miley Cyrus, no one would take him seriously."

"If what you want is a centrist candidate that's quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed, and she just lost!"

"On the 6th May 2011 episode of The Bugle John created the phrase "fuckyoulogy", an obituary for someone recently deceased who most certainly will not be missed."

"Here's a guy who likes to take boring topics and make them interesting. If you can do that for an administrative process like the FCC on net neutrality, imagine the level of interest in issues people are even more familiar with at the state level."