People From London

"Though I was satisfied that I was on the verge of perhaps a magnificent find, probably one of the missing tombs that I had been seeking for many years, I was much puzzled by the smallness of the opening in comparison with those of other royal tombs in the valley."

"Here before us was sufficient evidence to show that it really was an entrance to a tomb, and by the seals, to all outward appearances that it was intact."

"With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner... widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in... at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker. Presently, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously "Can you see anything?", it was all I could do to get out the words "Yes, wonderful things"."

"The news of the discovery spread fast all over the country, and inquisitive enquiries mingled with congratulations from this moment became the daily programme."

"In the lives of nations some occasions possess a unique character. Surely this, the opening of the Independent Fiji's first Parliament, is one of them."

"On the 10th day of October, Fiji achieved nationhood in the fullest sense of that term. There was no declaration of independence on her part, since independence was freely given. There was simply a grateful acceptance of the independence that was offered, and a dedication to the tasks that lay ahead and she became the master of her own destiny and assumed her place in the world family of Nations."

"I was on the way to my hotel, and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction."

"Thanks to our brave allies: you gallant Russian bear, you British everywhere."

"I’m not actually against, for example, people going into rehabilitation, provided it is understood that this is not really a medical procedure. Often what happens is that people who are addicted to a substance — alcohol or opiates — have comprehensively messed up their lives, and since life is biography and not just a series of unconnected moments, it may be that they require some assistance in getting their lives together. But I don’t regard that as really a medical procedure."

"Addicts, to this day, claim that they are they are the only people qualified to speak of the seriousness of withdrawal effects; as if only people with cerebral malaria or bowel cancer could speak of their seriousness."

"Incidentally, many thousands of American servicemen addicted themselves to heroin in Vietnam, but two years after their repatriation their rate of addiction was no greater than that of draftees who were to go to Vietnam, but never did go because the war had ended."

"And the fact is that millions of opiates addicts having given up their habit without medical assistance."

"People who are given opiates after operations — sometimes for days — do not become addicts in the sense that I’m talking about. Moreover, it’s been shown that heroin addicts have to make considerable efforts — in other words to be determined — to become addicts, and addicted; and on average it takes them about a year or so. In other words, heroin does not hook them, they hook heroin. And this, I think should suggest, is a typical example of the way that when we think about social problems, or the way many of us think about social problems, we ascribe agency not to agents but to inanimate objects and substances, and forces."

"The withdrawal symptoms from opiates are not severe and never dangerous, though of course they do exist. Insofar as they are genuinely feared, there has been a campaign of exaggeration about them for nearly 200 years."

"Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles."

"There is nothing an official hates more than a person who makes up his own mind."

"If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion."

"His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil--well, so be it."

"There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue."

"Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?"

"<14:06> ...Of course I made it quite clear to the women that I thought that the way that they had been abused was terrible and completely unjustifiable. However, I thought that it was very important that they should understand their own complicity in it; so that, for example, they understood that the way they chose men, and their refusal to see signs (which they were capable of seeing) resulted in their misery… <14:40> To give you a concrete example, I would say to them, ‘This man of yours, who’s very nasty to you, and drags you across the floor, and puts your head through the window, and sometimes even hangs you out of the window by your ankles: How long do you think it would take me to realise he was no good, as he came through the door? Would it take me a second, or half a second, or an eighth of a second, or would I not notice that there was anything wrong with him at all?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, an eighth of a second, you’d know immediately.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well, if you know that I would know immediately, then you knew immediately as well.’ It’s a logical consequence, really. And they would accept that. ‘And yet, you chose to associate with him, knowing full well that he was no good; and I tell you this, because it’s very necessary you should understand your own part in the predicament you now find yourself in, because if you don’t understand it, or don’t think about it, you’re just going to repeat it.’ which is of course, a very, very common pattern."

"The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer."

"Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it’s useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless, it’s harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives."

"Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking."

"It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind."

"The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free."

"The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty."

"It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow."

"Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment."

"Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion."

"Equality can only be measured by outcome: and this means the imposition of racial quotas. The job of the Senior Executive is therefore to be a senior racist."

"In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it."

"In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend."

"Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children."

"If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not."

"Loose language suggests loose thought."

"Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism."

"It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised."

"Modernity is the most transient of qualities."

"If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space."

"Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned)."

"In his prime, the young comic walked onto a stage with the confidence of a man who owned it, and by the time he walked off, he did."

"No doubt the funniest exploit I was involved in was dropping leaflets on the Bob Hope Christmas show at Cu Chi in 1969. Our company was assigned to provide perimeter security and air cover for the show, so none of our guys would get to see it. The night before, some enlisted men came to me with boxes of small white leaflets upon which they had written messages welcoming Bob Hope to Cu Chi. Three platoons had stayed up all night making these things, and they begged me to drop them on the show, since they knew I'd be up there. I told them it was closed airspace and you can't do that without getting into big trouble, but in a weak moment I let them talk me into it. Sure enough, in the middle of the show, I took a sharp turn, ignored the controller in my earphones, who wanted to know what I thought I was doing, and we dropped the leaflets. If you watch the videotape of that show, you can see Hope looking up as the leaflets came down. The next day, I was called in front of the CO, but he let me off when I explained why I had done it. In 1975, I was finishing my college degree at Saint Martin's in Olympia, Washington. Nobody could figure out who to get for a graduation speaker, so I suggested Bob Hope. Everyone said, "Great, you go get him." It took some time, working through his assistants, but I finally got him on the phone and explained that I was the guy who dropped the snow on his show at Cu Chi. "Why'd you do that?" he immediately asked. When I explained how I couldn't turn the troops down, he said, "Okay, I'll speak at your graduation." And he did. I was his escort the whole day, and he continued to pepper me with questions."

"For years, as I've said, Bob has worked hard for our family's sake to cut our traveling to a minimum. But there are some 300,000 miles he and I shared that we wouldn't take back for anything. I mean the world-famous Bob Hope Holiday Tours to the armed forces stationed in remote outposts overseas, made on behalf of the U.S.O. "Go with us one time, Anita, and it will get into your blood," Bob Hope suggested in 1960, the first year Bob and I were married. "You'll never play to a greater audience.""

"Bob Hope will go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, providing they have a camera there and three people. He'll go to the opening of a market to receive an award. He'd get an award from Thom McCan for wearing their shoes. It's pathetic. It's a bottomless pit. A barrel that has no floor. He must be a man who has an ever-crumbling estimation of himself. He's constantly filling himself up. He's like a junkie – an applause junkie. What happens to those people when they can't get up and do their shtick, God only knows. Bob Hope, Christ, instead of growing old gracefully or doing something with his money, be helpful, all he does is he has an anniversary with the President looking on. It's sad. He gets on an airplane every two minutes always going someplace. It didn't bother him at all to work the Vietnam War. Oh, he took that in his stride. He did his World War II and Korean War act. "Our boys" and all that. He’s a pathetic guy."

"You mean like Democrats?"

"I know I'm in England because this morning, my stomach got up two hours before I did and had a cup of tea! I've had so much tea, I slosh when I walk! You have to drink tea - I've tasted the coffee!"

"To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute."

"There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic."

"What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess."