Satirists From England

"A lot of people never use their initiative because nobody told them to."

"Nobody ever listened to me until they didn't know who I was."

"T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress."

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that's only if it's done properly."

"People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine."

"I sucked a lot of breasts to get where I am today."

"Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access."

"Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else."

"I got home at last and crawled into bed next to my girlfriend. I told her I'd had an epiphany that night [about using stencils] and she told me to stop taking that drug 'cos it's bad for your heart."

"Conversations don't get any better as you get older."

"We don’t need any more heroes; we just need someone to take out the recycling."

"Think from outside the box, collapse the box and take a fucking knife to it."

"If you want someone to be ignored, then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town..."

"People who should be shot: Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, people who write lists telling you who should be shot."

"We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves."

"I used to tell everyone I meant to be an artist..... I don't do that any more."

"Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas everyday, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art."

"Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie."

"Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place, some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place."

"Last year there was a story on the news that went 'A man arrested in Central London today was found to be carrying over a hundred British passports, twenty birth certificates and more than three hundred driving licenses. Police say they have not yet been able to identify the man...'"

"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..."

"Graffiti is like boxing. The people who do it 'professionally' tend to go round in circles pulling the same old moves all the time. The real entertainment takes place on Amateur's night. That's when you get to watch the bitter and twisted unleash all their pent-up frustrations on an unsuspecting public in a desperate attempt to make some kind of point before collapsing under a cloud of their own blooded spit."

"I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me."

"There are four basic human needs: food, sleep, sex and revenge."

"A legal thief, a bloodless murderer, A fiend incarnate, a false usurer."

"He is wealthy enough, that wanteth not: he is great enough, that is his own master: he is happy enough, that lives to die well."

"How easy it is for men to be swollen with admiration of their own strength and glory, and to be lifted up so high as to lose sight both of the ground whence they rose, and the hand that advanced them."

"Perfection is the child of time…"

"So little in his purse, so much upon his back."

"'Mongst all these stirs of discontented strife, O, let me lead an academic life; To know much, and to think for nothing, know Nothing to have, yet think we have enow."

"Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave."

"There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a fair pearl laid up in the bosom of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be."

"Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues."

"When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him."

"The mountain sheep are sweeter But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it...As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off."

"The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity."

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

"MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis. MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason. MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable. SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made. MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible. MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding. MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock. MR. PANSCOPE. 'Sdeath, Sir, do you question my understanding? MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate. MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd. MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd. MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir! MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient. MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir? MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument. MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!"

"Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond."

"My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything."

"There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and canonical."

"I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away."

"I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race."

"Used on a more limited scale, these schemes of balance can seem impressively artless, especially when they bring to an aphoristic point a loosely strung series of thoughts or events: one celebrated example is Moll's summary of the joint career of two fellow criminals: "In short, they robb'd together, lay together, were taken together, and at last were hang'd together." My object, however, is not to vindicate Defoe's endeavors toward stylistic balance and formality, let alone to maintain that they are the most common or distinctive feature of his prose, but simply to suggest, by calling attention to their existence, that immethodical homespun garrulity is not Defoe's only style."

"Defoe's writings are of the highest value as an historical indication of the state of the middle and lower classes of his time."

"Daniel Defoe is one of the great professionals in all these centuries of secret service, a discreet giant among the legions of straining, posturing and boastfully "confiding" amateurs. Defoe, be it known, was in himself almost a complete secret service during the reign of the last Stuart sovereign of Britain; and he is our strongly endorsed candidate for everybody's "favorite secret agent" of these annals."

"Robinson Crusoe did not deal with love. Defoe's other stories, which are happily forgotten, are bad in their very essence. Roxana is an accurate example of what a bad book may be. It relates the adventures of a woman thoroughly depraved, and yet for the most part successful, -- is intended to attract by licentiousness, and puts off till the end the stale scrap of morality which is brought in as a salve to the conscience of the writer. Putting aside Robinson Crusoe, which has been truly described as an accident, Defoe's teaching as a novelist has been altogether bad."

"Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain has long been recognized as a key book of its age. It has been lauded by the most eminent historians as a prime source of understanding for Britain in the eighteenth century (indeed, for understanding the birth of the modern, on a global scale), and remains one of the most-quoted works in general surveys of the period."

"The accidents of history, then, treated Defoe fortunately, although he courted them as no other writer has done, and deserves his reward. They impelled him to a step which was decisive in the history of the novel. His blind and almost purposeless concentration on the actions of his heroes and heroines, and his unconscious and unreflective mingling of their thoughts and his about the inglorious world in which they both exist, made possible the expression of many motives and themes which could not, perhaps, have come into the tradition of the novel without Defoe's shock tactics: motives such as economic egoism and social alienation; and themes such as the conflicts between old and new sets of values as they are manifested in daily life. Very few writers have created for themselves both a new subject and a new literary form to embody it. Defoe did both. In his somewhat monocular concentration on making his matter seem absolutely convincing, there was much he did not see. But what is left out is probably the price for what is so memorably and unprecedentedly put in."

"Roxana adds feminist ideology to Moll's praxis. But instead of violently appropriating the masculine like Mrs. Manley's grotesque Zarah, she aspires to a new category and actually declares that her ultimate ambition lies in a powerful androgyny. When an eminent merchant proposes marriage, she refuses in the name of liberty: "and seeing Liberty seem'd to be the Men's Property, I wou'd be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou'd die so". Roxana has a fully articulated ideology of freedom which grasps very clearly the central problem that she solves in her book, the loss of self attendant upon being merely a woman."