Satirists From The United Kingdom

"When you have some kid, who works for Twitter in the Philippines, censoring a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, speaking about his area of expertise, I think we've lost the plot."

"Rather than us exporting liberal democracy to these countries instead we're importing Chinese-style authoritarianism."

"I actually get invited on TV a lot nowadays, and I don't do as much of it as I used to. And part of the reason is that once you've [got] the heroin of a long term conversation, why would you drop down to methadone? This is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. We're sitting here for a good chunk of time, you're giving me the space to speak, you're not talking over me, you're not trying to make me look bad [...], and [in corporate media] you get three minutes to make one point. And look, there's a market out there for that [but] I enjoy this. I enjoy having a conversation [and] connecting with somebody, getting to know how they think and them getting to know how I think, disagreeing where there's disagreement but doing it in a constructive way as opposed to going for the click bait and all of that. That is a really fulfilling part of doing Triggernometry for me. We get to interview fascinating people [...] and we just sit and learn. [...] How many people get the opportunity to sit down with a great mind for an hour and just engage, and speak, and listen, and think about the world? To me, that is incredibly gratifying. And I don't think that if i was hosting something on TV [that] I'd get a chance to do that."

"This country is responsible for 2 percent of global carbon emissions, which means that if Britain was to sink into the sea right now it would make absolutely no difference to the issue of climate change. You know why? Because the future of the climate is going to be decided in Asia and in Latin America. By poor people who couldn't give a shit about saving the climate. [...] Do you know why? Because they're poor. [...] 120 million people in China do not have enough food. I don't mean that they don't get dessert, I mean they suffer from malnutrition. That means that their immune system is breaking down because they don't have enough food. You're not going to get them to stay poor."

"The only way to deal with the problem of racism is to treat people on the content of their character and nothing else, and the fact that woke culture seeks to overturn that is a new form of racism that we must all oppose."

"Free speech is not some right-wing reframing of whatever; it is the foundation of Western civilization."

"I'm a non-believer, but I can't help but think that what we've created as a society when we killed God is a vacuum that inevitably has to be filled. And when it gets filled, it gets filled by a new religion which is what social justice and intersectionality and all of that now is. They have priests. They have inquisitions. The only thing they don't have in that religion is redemption and forgiveness. [...] If we don't have forgiveness, I don't understand how this world is gonna work. I honestly don't."

"Your Prime Minister, your MP, Theresa May, called this election about Brexit. Have we heard from her what she plans to do about Brexit? No. This is mad. On Thursday, you are going to be faced with Prime Minister May, or Prime Minister Corbyn, against twenty-seven prime ministers from the European Union. It will be a shitshow."

"Lord Buckethead is an intergalactic space lord who ran on a platform of, among other things, "the abolition of the House of Lords (except me)" and "stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, start buying lasers from Lord Buckethead." And he did this all while looking like Darth Vader fucked an Amazon Echo."

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

"If only Saki – the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro – were still alive. The age of Trump needs his brutal dismantling of human stupidities. Despite a coterie of literary fans, Saki’s icy, perfectly constructed short stories have been relatively little read over the past 50 years – years of smug belief in endless progress — but his tales, by turns malevolent and macabre, may be due a revival in our new age of exigency. … He was a glorious pyromaniac let loose in the genteel upper-middle-class Edwardian world he knew so well. In many of his stories, stuffy authority figures are set against forces of nature – polecats, hyenas, tigers. Even if they are not eaten, the humans rarely have the best of it."

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation."

"The animal which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathematised as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics — courage and self-respect. No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore. Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under the adverse conditions of civilisation — that civilisation which can impel a man to the degradation of clothing himself in tawdry ribald garments and capering mountebank dances in the streets for the earning of the few coins that keep him on the respectable, or non-criminal, side of society. The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside."

"To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments."

"The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them."

"Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent."

"Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."

"Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage."

"A beautifully constructed borsch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought."

"Romance at short notice was her speciality."

"I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient, but it seems I asked too much of fate."

"His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect."

"Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte."

"Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then."

"By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine."

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

"Sredni Vashtar went forth, His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white. His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful."

"The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally."

"Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own."

"You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood."

"All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do both."

"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," [Clovis] resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster."

"You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

"Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up."

"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school."

"The death of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts."

"The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistress."

"Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason than that he didn't get one in December."

"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II."

"I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got."

"People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes."

"It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score."

"Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact."

"Women and elephants never forget an injury."

"The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went."

"Madame was not best pleased at being contradicted on a professional matter, and when Madame lost her temper you usually found it afterwards in the bill."

"Children are given us to discourage our better emotions."

"The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time."

"Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people."

"And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn – I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night."