People From London

"With carefully nourished resentment, a man can go through his life blaming someone or something else for his failures. This enables him to be a failure and to feel morally superior to the world at the same time."

"Education is not a shield against stupidity, much less against brutality. Indeed, one might almost define an intellectual as someone who can witness a massacre and see a principle."

"Just imagine what the pattern of taking meals I have described actually means. The child who is subjected to it learns that, in the matter of when and how and what to eat, his appetite and opportunity are the only things he has to consult. Meals for him are not social occasions but nasty, solitary, British and short (and, I might add, frequent). He does not learn that, for the sake of the convenience or wishes of others, he sometimes has to refrain from eating or even to eat when he is not fully hungry. He does not learn to wait till others are served, or to share what food is on the table. He does not learn how to converse. These are very elementary social requirements that he does not acquire."

"When the Berlin Wall was dismantled I, like many other naive observers, supposed that the age of ideology was at an end. On the contrary, ideology proliferated, blossomed and balkanised; we underestimated people’s need, quasi-religious in nature, for an all-encompassing cause."

"Humor, fearlessness, seriousness, and honesty: the qualities that are hated with an equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universities."

"Nothing is easier - or more gratifying - than to apologise for what your ancestors, enemies or political opponents have done or omitted to do. We get the kudos for having apologised, they get the blame for what we apologise for."

"Compassionate fellow-feeling ... can soon become self-indulgent and lead to spiritual pride. It imparts an inner glow, like a shot of whiskey on a cold day, but like whisky it can prevent the clear-headedness which we need at least as much as we need warmth of heart."

"Multiculturalism as an official doctrine, complete with enforcing bureaucracies, undermines the rule of law because it seeks to divide people, formalise their cultural differences and enclose them in moral and intellectual ghettoes. As a result, as Bhiku Parekh puts it, ‘The idea of national culture makes little sense.’ But the rule of law requires a common cultural understanding, not merely the means of repression to enforce a legal code. Once that basic cultural understanding is lost, all that remains is repression, effective or ineffective as the case may be, and experienced by many as alien and unjust."

"Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy."

"Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know."

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

"Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration."

"He that is not aware of his ignorance, will be only misled by his knowledge."

"There is, I conceive, no point in which the idea of dishonest artifice is in most people's minds so intimately associated with that of Rhetoric, as the address to the Feelings or Active Principles of our nature. This is usually stigmatized as "an appeal to the Passions instead of the Reason;" as if Reason alone could ever influence the Will, and operate as a motive, which it no more can, than the eyes, which show a man his road, can enable him to move from place to place; or than a ship provided with a compass, can sail without a wind."

"On the whole, the arguments which it requires the greatest nicety of art to refute effectually … are those which are so very weak and silly that it is difficult to make their absurdity more palpable than it is already.… The task reminds one of the well-known difficult feat of cutting through a cushion with a sword."

"Though the easiest popular way of practically refuting … any Fallacy is, by bringing forward a parallel case, where it leads to a manifest absurdity, a metaphysical objection may still be urged against many cases in which we thus reason from calculation of chances; an objection not likely indeed practically to influence any one, but which may afford the Sophist a triumph over those who are unable to find a solution."

"No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.."

"Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole, a public benefit, or evil; and secondly, whether any artificial system of Rules is conducive to the attainment of that skill."

"Cicero is hardly to be reckoned … for he delighted so much more in the practice, than in the theory, of his art, that he is perpetually drawn off from the rigid philosophical analysis of its principles, into discursive declamations, always eloquent indeed, and often highly interesting, but adverse to regularity of system, and frequently as unsatisfactory to the practical student as to the Philosopher."

"In the present day, however, the province of Rhetoric, in the widest acceptation that would reckoned admissible, comprehends all "Composition in Prose;" in the narrowest sense, it would be limited to "Persuasive Speaking.""

"Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term."

"We still have prostitutes standing on our corner, and people crapping round the back of buildings. The charms are still there."

"I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way."

"I don't want to make plop art — sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture."

"I think the difference between me and some of the other YBAs [Young British Artists] was that I was ambitious for the work, and not ambitious for myself."

"I make all this stuff in the studio, but I also work on these white elephants — like House or Untitled Monument — things that are incredibly ambitious, take an awful long time to do, involve a lot of controversy, an awful lot of people, and don't make any money particularly, but it's just because I need to make them."

"I verily believe the poorest creature in al this city feared not God more than she did. She had the love, commendation, and admiration of al the world. In this church she maried herself unto this realm, and in token of faith and fidelity did put a ring with a diamond upon her finger; which I understand she never put off after, during her life, whatsoever succes things had: for that is in the hand of God only. She was never unmindful or uncareful of her promise to her realm. She used singular mercy toward offenders. She used much pity and compassion towards the poor and oppressed. She used clemency among her nobles. She restored more noble houses decayed, than ever did prince of this realm, or I pray God ever shal have the like occasion to do hereafter. She restored to the church such ornaments as in the time of schism were taken away and spoiled. She found the realm poisoned with heresy, and purged it; and remembring herself to be a member of Christ's Church, refused to write herself head thereof."

"I will say with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced."

"The Queen, being born of a Spanish mother, was always inclined towards that nation, scorning to be English and boasting of her descent from Spain."

"The nobility have gone off to the country, entirely disposed to take up arms as they know the people are harbouring evil intentions. When I ask the reasons of all this, I am told that the people say the King [Philip II] will not be served by Englishmen although this point was settled by the articles... They assert that the King is sending for 10,000 Germans and 10,000 Spaniards to land in this country; that it is intended to set up the monastaries again...and the Bishop of Rome is going to command in religious matters. The foreigners, they complain, are making Englishmen feel strangers in their own homes, and have taken to managing everything since they landed... They proclaim loudly that they see they are going to be enslaved, for the Queen is a Spanish woman at heart and thinks nothing of Englishmen, but only of Spaniards and bishops. Her idea, they say, is to have the King crowned by force and deprive the Lady Elizabeth of her right, making the operation of the law subject to her own will."

"Commonwealth schoolchildren are often taught one of the key events in British history with the help of a mnemonic: "King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded: One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded." Beheaded! In 1536 Henry had his wife Anne Boleyn decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason because she gave him a son that did not survive, and he had become attracted to one of her ladies-in-waiting. Two wives later he suspected Catherine Howard of adultery and sent her to the ax as well. (Tourists visiting the Tower of London can see the chopping block for themselves.) Henry was clearly the jealous type: he also had an old boyfriend of Catherine’s drawn and quartered, which is to say hanged by the neck, taken down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, and cut into four. The throne passed to Henry’s son Edward, then to Henry’s daughter Mary, and then to another daughter, Elizabeth. “Bloody Mary” did not get her nickname by putting tomato juice in her vodka but by having three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake. And both sisters kept up the family tradition for how to resolve domestic squabbles: Mary imprisoned Elizabeth and presided over the execution of their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, and Elizabeth executed another cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth also had 123 priests drawn and quartered, and had other enemies tortured with bone-crushing manacles, another attraction on display in the Tower. Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You’d think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered."

"Mary Tudor, queen of England and Ireland from 1553 until 1558, the first woman to rule England in her own right, was the notorious ‘Bloody Mary’ who placed her realm at the feet of the Spanish king and presided over a pitiless religious terror, burning dissidents at the stake, to enforce and restore Catholicism. Bitterly preoccupied with the past, she tried to reverse the Protestant Reformation started by her father, Henry VIII. Yet her own life was tragic, her marriage childless, her health ultimately fragile, her mind increasingly deranged; while her reign, both in her repression and foreign policy, failed utterly."

"The essence of Mary's faith lay in the sacraments, and particularly in the mass."

"Whatever the issue, her response was shaped and motivated by the dictates of her conscience. ... She was incapable of political manipulation, and of self-interest in the normal sense. Hysterically indecisive when her conscience was not engaged, she could be both obstinate and ruthless when she saw a clear path of duty before her."

"Everyone who commented upon Mary's conduct of public affairs remarked upon her diligence and her piety. She rose before dawn, heard mass every day, ate frugally and transacted business incessantly, often until after midnight. ... She was generous to petitioners, and had the reputation for never turning away anyone with a story of grievance or oppression."

"[W]e shall never find any reign of any prince in this land or any other, which did ever show in it (for the proportion of time), so many arguments of God's great wrath and displeasure, as were to be seen in the reign of this queen Mary; whether we behold the shortness of her time, or the unfortunate event of all her purposes, who seemed never to purpose any thing that came luckily to pass, neither did any thing frame to her purpose, whatsoever she took in hand, touching her own private affairs."

"Religious devotion led Queen Mary - the first woman to rule England in her own name - to commit the atrocities which have blackened her reputation and obliterated the memory of her many acts of clemency and generosity. Mary started life as a princess and heir to the throne, but fell into disgrace and saw her beloved Catholic church dismantled by her father and brother. As Queen, she was determined to restore Catholic worship, but her heavy-handed methods, combined with a bitterly unpopular marriage and her inability to produce an heir, doomed her to failure."

"Mary burned few as compared with continental practice, but for English conditions and traditions her activities were unprecedented and left an ineradicable memory. More than all the denunciations of Henry VIII, the fires of Smithfield and the like places all over southern England created an undying hatred of the pope and of Roman Catholicism which became one of the marked characteristics of the English for some 350 years. This in itself is an adequate comment on the activities of these earnest and good and rather stupid fanatics, and an answer to those who would always judge people's place in history by their personal morals rather than by the work they did."

"The reign of Mary Tudor lasted only five years, but it left an indelible impression. Positive achievements there were none: Pollard declared that sterility was its conclusive note, and this is a verdict with which the dispassionate observer must agree. ... She was personally gentle and inclined to mercy. ... She was also sensible and generous. ... But all her good qualities went for nought because she lacked the essentials. Two things dominated her mind—her religion and her Spanish descent. In the place of the Tudor secular temper, cool political sense, and firm identification with England and the English, she put a passionate devotion to the catholic religion and to Rome, absence of political guile, and pride in being Spanish. The result cannot surprise. Welcomed by the nation as a Tudor and a relief from the ambitions of selfish politicians and the extravagances of reforming divines, she died only five years later execrated by nearly all. Her life was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, but the pity which this naturally excites must not obscure the obstinate wrong-headedness of her rule."

"And yet, like her father and grandfather, Mary possessed many traits which should have fit her for a successful reign. Like all Tudors, she was intelligent, courageous, dignified, ad resilient. These qualities had ensured her survival during her father's and brother's reigns. She was well educated: in addition to her native tongue, she spoke Spanish, French, and Latin and could read Greek and Latin. Nor was she entirely serious: she danced and played the lute. Finally, Mary was not without mercy. Apart from Northumberland, few died for the plot to usurp the throne. Even Lady Jane Gray and Guildford Dudley were allowed to live, for the time being, albeit as close prisoners in the Tower. Unfortunately, she was at her accession naive in politics and inexperienced in government, having been repudiated by her father and, thus, never groomed to succeed. Without training or experience, she was forced to rely on her conscience and her faith. In the end, she had too much of the one and was too inflexible in the other for her own or the country's good. More specifically, she was half-Spanish and all Catholic and so saw it as her God-given duty to ally her country with the Spanish Empire and undo the "heresies" of the previous 20 years by restoring the Roman Catholic Church in England at any cost. Both policies would bring misery to her people."

"The English people had rallied to Mary because she was the offspring of Henry VIII and next in line for the throne, not because she was Catholic, or the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and certainly not because she was a woman. Mary's great tragedy was that she failed to draw the obvious lessons from this. Her Tudor blood was an advantage to be exploited to the full while her Spanish lineage and gender were, at best, neutral factors in the eyes of most of her subjects. As for her Catholicism, it divided her people: some loved it, some hated it. But Mary subordinated her strong Tudor personality to the demands of her religion, her Spanish sympathies, and contemporary expectations of her gender. The result was the only Tudor reign that could truly be called tragic, even pathetic."

"It was an ancient and commonly received practice, (derived from the civil law, and which also to this day obtains in the Kingdom of France) that, as counsel was not allowed to any prisoner accused of a capital crime, so neither should he be suffered to exculpate himself by the testimony of any witnesses. And therefore it deserves to be remembered, to the honour of Mary I, (whose early sentiments, till her marriage with Philip of Spain, seem to have been humane and generous) that when she appointed sir Richard Morgan chief justice of the common-pleas, she injoined him, “that notwithstanding the old error, which did not admit any witness to speak, or any other matter to be heard, in favour of the adversary, her majesty being party; her highness' pleasure was, that whatsoever could be brought in favour of the subject should be admitted to be heard: and moreover, that the justices should not persuade themselves to sit in judgment otherwise for her highness than for her subject.""

"In greatest stormes she feared not, for God she made her shielde, And all her care she cast on him, who forst her foes to yelde. Her perfecte life in all extremes, her pacient hert dyd shoe, For in this worlde she never founde, but dolfull dayes and woe."

"She never closde her eare to heare, the rightous man distrest, Nor never sparde her hande to helpe, wher wrong or power opprest. when all was wracke, she was the porte, from peryll unto joye, when all was spoyle, she spared all, she pitied to distroye."

"And so am not I."

"When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my head."

"Her majesty, being now in possession of her imperial crown and estate pertaining to it, cannot forsake that faith that the whole world knows her to have followed and practiced since her birth; she desires, rather, by God's grace, to preserve it till her death; and she desires greatly that her subjects may come to embrace the same faith quietly and with charity, whereby she shall receive great happiness."

"This natural life of ours is but a pilgrimage from this wandering world, and exile from our own country: that is to say, a way from all misery to thee (Lord) which art our whole felicity. And lest the pleasantness and commodity of this life should withdraw us from the going to the right and speedy way to thee, thou dost stir and provoke us forward, and as yet ward prick us with thorns, to the intent we should covet a quiet rest, and end of our journey. Therefore sickness, weepings, sorrow, mourning, and in conclusion all adversities be unto us as spurs; with the which we being dull horses, or rather very asses, are forced not to remain long in this transitory way. Wherefore Lord, give us grace to forget this wayfaring journey, and to remember our proper and true country. And if thou do add a weight of adversity, add thereunto strength, that we shall not be overcome with that burden: but having our minds continually erected and lift up to thee, we may be able to strongly bear it. Lord! all things be thine; therefore do with all things, without any exception, as shall seem convenient to thine unsearchable wisdom. And give us grace never to will but as thou wilt. So be it."

"While my father lives I shall be only the Lady Mary, the most unhappy lady in Christendom."

"I recognize no Queen but my mother. But if the King's Mistress would intercede with the King on my behalf, then I would be grateful."