University Of Oxford Alumni

"He is forced to go whom the devil drives."

"Cedant arma togæ, concedat laurea linguæ."

"He that readeth good writers, and pickes out their flowers for his owne nose, is lyke a foole."

"The Woolf jettes in Weathers felles."

"A bad excuse is better, they say, than none at all."

"The Harpies have Virgins faces, and vultures Talentes."

"Pleasure is a sweet tickling of sense, with a present joy."

"Hyena speakes like a friend, and devoures like a Foe."

"He that goes to sea, must smel of the ship; and he that sayles into Poets wil savour of Pitch."

"The Dominion of the Sea, as it is an ancient and undoubted right of the Crown of England, so it is the best security of the Land; for it is Impregnable, so long as the Sea is well-guarded: therefore out of all question, it is a thing of absolute necessity, that the guard of the Sea be exactly looked unto; and those Subjects, whose minds are most fixed upon the Honour of the King and Country, will with no patience endure to think of it; that this Dominion of the Sea, which is so great an Honour, should be either lost or diminished: besides, for safeties fake, the Dominion of the Sea is to be kept, and the Sea guarded. The Wooden-Walls are the best Walls of this Kingdom; and if the Riches and Wealth of the Kingdom be respected, for that cause the Dominion of the Sea ought to be respected; for else what would become of our Wool, Lead and the like, the prices whereof would fall to nothing if others should be Masters of the Sea."

"The most important single quality of any government, without which it would not exist, must be the obedience and submission of its subjects. Obedience is at the heart of political power."

"All dominating elites and rulers depend for their sources of power upon the cooperation of the population and of the institutions of the society they would rule."

"The same water that drives the mill, decayeth it."

"Poets are the whetstones of wit."

"After-wittes are ever best."

"The Syrens song is the Saylers wrack."

"Civilization in its higher form today, though highly complex, forms essentially a unitary mass. It has no longer to be sought out in separate luminous centers, shining like planets through the surrounding night. Still less is it the property of one privileged country or people. Many as are the tongues of mortal man, its votaries, like the Immortals, speak a single language. Throughout the whole vast area illumined by its quickening rays its workers are interdependent and pledged to a common cause."

"In the book Biophilia, designer and best-selling author, Sally Coulthard, demonstrates how to transform your living and working spaces into places that put you in touch with nature. The illustrated guide covers key elements for the ‘biophilic home’, including sounds, s, views, colour and natural light. Each section explores the links between home, health and happiness, drawing on environmental research and while making practical suggestions for bringing the natural world into your home."

"Recent of ancient human remains revealed that, across Europe at least, farming was spread by the physical movement of people, not the dissemination of ideas. Scientists can trace the DNA of , over multiple generations, as they slowly made their way around the coast and into mainland Europe, mixing with local groups as they went. And, by around 4000 BCE Neolithic farmers had finally reached Britain."

"Yorkshire-based Sally has put together a compendium of s, including the new, the old and the forgotten. The book is a thing of beauty itself and includes illustrations by printmaker Louise Lockart. It’s also a fascinating read and serves as inspiration for those who love making things. Sally covers everything from why craft matters and endangered crafts to maker spaces and how to make a living from your hobby. Alongside this, she delves into the details of over 70 crafts, from trug making to globe making and crochetdermy, and hopes this will encourage readers to try something new."

"In Europe, nearly one in ten species of wild s faces extinction, and in the US about a quarter of all wild bees have disappeared in the past ten years alone. s of all kinds — bees, butterflies, moths and other bugs — are showing declines worldwide and although not all species are threatened (some are even improving their numbers), the overall picture is alarming."

"Of all the deep burrowers, the best known is the Common earthworm ('). This is the 's friend — also known as the lob worm, the night crawler, the granddaddy worm and the dew worm — and is the largest naturally occurring earthworm across most of Europe (around 9–30 centimetres). The body of the Common earthworm can be as thick as a pencil and its tail can be flattened into a paddle shape, to help the earthworm grip the sides of its burrow."

"If you visited your and told him you were suffering from a broken heart, what do you think he would prescribe? s? ? Or would he just tell you to go home and stop wasting his time?"

"We have sheep to thank for the invention of . Very early sheep farmers tried many different methods for removing wool, some more painful for the sheep than others. Plucking (also called rooing), tearing and combing out would are mentioned in n texts from the late third millennium ... ( is still harvested by combing in China), while modern comparison from traditional shepherding communities suggest that some farmers may have cut the wool off using knives — shepherds in Nepal still use a curved, sickle-like knife ..."

"s are one of the few birds to have benefited, at least initially, from human activities. When , the barn owl managed to exploit the new that was created when forests were cleared to grow food. Not only did the absence of trees make it easier for barn owls to access open ground but the presence of s actually boosted the number of s scuttling around on the ground. And although barn owls originally evolved to nest in cliff cavities and tree hollows, human settlements, with their churches, farms and other buildings, offered an enticing array of places to roost and raise a family."

"For us, as kids, snow was synonymous with fun. Snow meant speed, exhilaration, and toppling laughter. Snow gave us the freedom to fight, slide, crash, and make a mess, without the fear of a scolding. Snow put a wrench in the works, stopped the numbing timetable of school lessons and stealing an extra day of free time."

"Nature never ceases to amaze me. I often describe my writing as the intersection between nature, people and history — I'm fascinated by the relationship between us, our , and how that has changed over the centuries. In many ways, that relationship is more sophisticated than it has ever been — we now know so many things about how the natural world works. And yet, something has also been lost. Unlike our ancestors, few of us could, with any confidence, recognize the plants in a typical or name more than a handful of birds that visit our gardens. Key moments that once defined the year, such as s, solstices or natural signs of seasonal change, have also lost their meaning."

"Physical certainty is not to be attained when we have to traverse the vast distances of celestial space, and human infirmity must be content to recognise the boundary beyond which it may not pass, the limit imposed on finite minds by the Infinite."

"You wouldn’t let your schooling interfere with your education."

"The controversial importance of this subject in more recent times is, of course, obvious. The Catholics answered the accusation of Protestant writers, that their special doctrines could not be found in the writings of the early Fathers, by showing the existence of this practice of reserve. If it was forbidden to speak or write publicly of these doctrines, silence was completely accounted for."

"He had to learn to sing, readily and accurately, all the tunes that were used in the many distinct Soma-sacrifices, and he had also to know which strophes were required for each sacrifice and in what order they were sung. Therefore, that the young priest might master all the tunes thoroughly and have any one at command at any moment, each was connected with a single stanza of the right metre, and the teacher made his pupils sing it over and over again, until tune and stanza were firmly imprinted, in indissoluble association, in the memory."

"The wisdom found in Sanskrit works was greeted with something like reverential awe. Thus, the French philosopher Victor Cousin, speaking of the poetical and philosophical movements of the East, and above all, those of India, which were, he said, beginning to spread in Europe, declared that they contained so many truths, and such profound truths, that he was constrained to bend the knee before the genius of the East and to see in that cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy."

"On 19 March 1791 five of the great luminaries of French science, Laplace, Lagrange, Condorcet, and , met at the in Paris and drew up a document that laid down the definition of the new basic unit of length, the , for the proposed new system of measurement that would become the ."

", the science of measurement, is part of the essential but largely hidden infrastructure of the modern world. We need it for high-technology manufacturing, human health and safety, the protection of the environment, global climate studies and the basic science that underpins all these. Highly accurate measurements are not exclusively the preserve of the and engineering; many areas of chemistry, and medicine are now dependent on accurate quantitative measurements. in all manufactured and agricultural products is strictly controlled by regulations that need accurate metrology for their implementation."

"It has long been recognized that the basic units in science – such as the and the – should be defined in terms of fundamental physical phenomena. Indeed in 1870 James Clerk Maxwell recognized that the units of , and would only remain unchanged and reproducible if they were defined by the , period of vibration and absolute mass of molecules rather than by the physical properties of the Earth. However, it took over a century for the metre and the second to be defined in terms of the quantum properties of atoms. And it was only in 1990 that reproducible standards of and were linked to quantum phenomena."

"In my house I have four , I sometimes adjust them so that at least two, but rarely more than three, strike the hour within a few seconds of each other. Fortunately, the pleasure I get from my clocks does not depend on them all telling the same time. When I switch on the in my car, however, things are different. It very quickly latches on to at least four atomic clocks high in the sky, all of which tell the same time to about a hundred millionth of a second. If they did not, my GPS would guide me to somewhere other than my desired destination."

"Russia is a great bicephalic creature, having one head European and the other Asiatic; but with the persistent habit of turning its European face to the East and its Asiatic face to the West."

"... of may allow us to say that "this object is hotter or colder than that one." But even this apparently simple statement is fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. For example, take hold in turn of a block of , a piece of expanded and a rod of , all near room temperature but differing slightly slightly in temperature from one another. It is not easy to make any useful statements about which is hotter or colder. This means, of course, that the is a poor thermometer, but the reasons for this being so are by no means straight-forward: they are related to the way in which sensations of hotness and coldness are generated in the human body ..."

""Covenants without swords are but words." Thus did Hobbes sum up, typically, one of the more elementary and depressing truths of political science. At the root of save all the most primitive or the most celestial of social organizations there must lie the sanction of force: force not to create right but to uphold it; force to assure order, to cow rebellion at home and to subdue enemies abroad. That it is not in itself the foundation of society, that it is only the one factor out of many which go to constitute a political community, has been emphasized by political thinkers at least since the days of St Augustine. But as yet no community of any degree of complexity has succeeded in existing without force, and the manner in which that force is organized and controlled will largely determine the political structure of the State."

"Provisional age data now show that between 2000 and 3000 BCE, flow along a presently dried-up course known as the Ghaggur-Hakkra River ceased, probably driven by the weakening monsoon and possibly also because of headwater capture into the adjacent Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers."

"The system-builders, from Hegel to Toynbee, selected facts from history to prove an a priori thesis, and presented subjective works of art as objective statements of fact. But the old positivist belief in the possibility of a truly scientific and objective history is no longer held even by the most fanatical members of the Institute of Historical Research."

"The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, selecting evidence to conform to his views and ignoring all that does not. The abuse of history in fact lies less often in the motives of the historian than in his methods. It was after all the most honourable loyalties and affections which led Cardinal Gasquet to attempt the vindication of the monastic orders against the charges of Protestant historians; the formidable Coulton may have been inspired merely by acrimonious anti-Popish spite; but Coulton was an honest scholar, and Gasquet, one is forced to conclude, was not."

"The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment. The social and economic developments of the past fifty years had brought about a military as well an industrial revolution. The Prussians had kept abreast of it and France had not. Therein lay the basic cause of her defeat."

"Hobbes's ideas seemed at least as relevant to the middle decades of the twentieth century as they had been to those of the seventeenth. (Happy the generation now growing up in our universities whose natural affinity appears to be rather with Rousseau!) A situation in which recourse to force is such an imminent probability that one's whole life and policy has to be adjusted to it is not, save in the most formal sense, a state of peace. It is for that reason that I equate peace with that unfashionable term 'Order'; an emphasis which probably brands me as a temperamental Tory rather than a temperamental Whig."

"An elegance of style which, since his much esteemed early work The Franco-Prussian War, has always distinguished his writing has not been achieved by a sacrifice of accuracy or relentless extension of his "wide learning", and his critical judgments – sometimes feline, sometimes ruthless – are usually cogent. More than that. I suppose that during recent decades nobody on either side of the Atlantic has so effectively brought military studies securely within the domain of the humane disciplines. If he has not civilized Bellona single-handed, he is primus inter pares."

"So long as the conventional balance remains so uneven, the Western strategy of relying on the first use of nuclear weapons to defend ourselves is not only morally dubious but politically incredible. But the responsibility for this strategy does not lie with the United States. It lies with the governments and peoples of Western Europe who have, for the last thirty years, refused to take the necessary measures to provide for their own conventional defence. That is where the CND is so dangerous. Their present campaign is sending a signal both to Moscow and to the United States, not simply that the peoples of Western Europe are not prepared to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, but that they are not prepared to defend themselves at all: a signal that could create a quite terrifying degree of instability by presenting the leaders of the Soviet Union with options that hitherto have been firmly closed to them."

"Many Christians, of whom I am one, see no moral dilemma inherent in the possession, and if necessary the use, of nuclear weapons to deter their use against our own peoples by a Soviet state whose leaders are explicitly unconstrained by those considerations of "bourgeois morality" which so properly worry us. It is the initiation of the use of these weapons that causes so many of us such profound concern; and we have come to depend on that initiation because we have acquiesced in a decision to maintain a standard of living far higher than that of our adversaries, rather than provide the resources needed for a convincing defence by non-nuclear means of the territories of Western Europe."

"The Foreign Secretary's Malcolm Rifkind] apologia for Nato enlargement is strong on dogmatic assertion but weak on reasoned argument... "Neither the new Nato nor its expansion poses a threat to Russia". That surely is for the Russians to say. After all, we were taught during the Cold War to base our policies on the capabilities of our adversaries rather than their intentions. To take account of Russian susceptibilities is not to accept their veto over our policies. It is simply to recognise that there can never be stability in Europe unless the Russians feel secure, and to ride roughshod over their susceptibilities is not a very sensible way to guarantee the security of their neighbours to the west."

"Michael Howard is an excellent and succinct writer and his book is very easy to read."

"If the tumults of the eleventh century had taught the English anything, however, it was that a hereditary claim to power could easily be trumped by other factors. Violence was one, as the Vikings had shown. Virtue was another."