people-from-leeds

"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away."

"In business sometimes, that’s how people are and that’s what works for them, but that’s not how I would want to manage my own. So I tried to keep out of confrontation, focus on the prize and keep people on board. But by the end, I wanted to show myself a bit more. I think everything I did worked really well and, obviously I’ve won so... I can't even believe I’m saying that."

"Business owners shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help from the people who have the answers."

"You’ve got to have that entrepreneurial flair where you will find the answer to the problem."

"One of the key things for me going in was to just be myself. I tried to stay calm. I did not want the aggressive label. In business sometimes, that’s how people are and that’s what works for them, but that’s not how I would want to manage my own."

"“Am I going to feel passionate about my business every day for the rest of my life?”"

"Usually, you’d have to remind yourself what happened but this part was just selling myself and my business, and that’s my passion. That’s what I know everything about. So by that point, it was great to be able to just talk abut the business and to sell it."

"As long as you’ve got a solid idea and a strategy to get to where you want to be - just give it a go."

"The rise of social media made it easier to make and sell my own clothes and get into the fashion world."

"You don’t need massive amounts of money behind you when you start, but finding the right products for your business can really help."

"I think you need a little bit of everything. I think you have to kind of play it safe to begin with a little bit, you have to listen to people and work as a team, but towards the end you kind of use your own initiative and be a bit more outspoken."

"I’m very confident in myself as a person, and I know I work well in business, but you just never know with the tasks. The first couple of weeks were really hard."

"I ended up working pretty much every hour I possibly could and reined in my spending as well so that I could invest in my business."

"“Actually, if I put my head down and do the right things, I could bloody win this.” I felt I grew a lot more in confidence during the process and eventually won it. So yeah, I did something right."

"You have to work hard for money and save for a rainy day."

"You cannot always bang the drum for financial returns."

"All art is political and most artists want to change something in the world; they want to spur action."

"Over the next few decades one billion lives and trillions of pounds will be at risk due to a single issue: climate change."

"All is fair in love and art but nothings ever fine in war."

"It’s not just about giving a voice to those otherwise unheard but trying to demonstrate by example, a new way of living and thinking about money."

"It is about recognising dual materiality, understanding where we can invest to make the world a better place and where risks may impact our bottom line."

"The Leeds Mercury has always taken a pride in stating fairly all points of view in public life."

"It is the woman herself that matters rather than her covering."

"I have arranged the poems by women in a separate section, irrespective of whether British or American; not in any sense of sexual rivalry, but merely from a natural desire to give them prominence and to show that despite their lack of opportunity, women feel all the poetry of flight and are fully alive to all that progress in aviation means to the world."

"I do not advocate neglecting your parents: honour and succour them, especially in their old age, but don’t stay at home and do housework when you long, body and soul, to fly to the uttermost ends of the earth, there to find your mission in life and your gift to the world."

"In the fourth century there were not a few eminent physicians in Byzantium, Alexandria, and Asia Minor; still on the whole the Byzantine system stifled mental activity, and medical literature was represented only by such encyclopedias as those of Oribasius, Aetius, and Paul of Aegina, compilations which notwithstanding, by salvage of writings which might otherwise have been utterly lost, did priceless service to the historian. And, beside these, the endless succession of herbaries, recipe books, and antidotariums, like lower organisms, propagated their futile kind."

"... Palissy—like his contemporary Gilbert, and like Galileo who came very soon after him—was one of the chief engineers of the new paths of knowledge, and was in France the chief engineer. Indeed, astronomy and mathematics apart, he with Dodoens and Gesner were the first in Europe since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, to pursue modern scientific methods in the worlds of geology, botany, and zoology, and to work and teach from and with the natural objects themselves."

"Nothing is so conducive to a right appreciaton of the truth as a right appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded. The successful investigator must bring to test statements and conceptions which have been too long accepted on faith, habit, or good-nature. He must look boldly behind certain large words which are now too often the shelter of ignorance, and he must satisfy himself whether they have any definite value or not. When it is seen how much our current language really signifies, and when all technicalities, which took their rise in old and false methods, have been swept out of sight, we shall feel, perhaps, a little bare, but at any rate we shall have open field for our new researches."

"Education, as contrasted with instruction, is a drawing forth of faculties, a quickening, enlarging, and refining of them when brought out, and an establishment of them in habits; so that virtue and reason become easy and pleasant to us."

"So you keep trying to cancel away in your state of permanent offence, I've been cancelled already and may well be again, but I don't care one bit, and I will keep defending my right to have an opinion on issues which concern me. Without free speech and the presumption of innocence we are not free. We aren't quite communist Eastern Europe yet. We may very close, but not quite there. It's still worth fighting for. So if you are expecting a grovelling apology, I suggest you don't hold your breath. I won't ever apologise to the mob."

"Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman ever, ever, who wasn't an incel. That cucked little woman has been fed, spoon-fed, oppression, day after day after day after day. We need powerful, strong amazing women who make great points for themselves. We don’t need this sort of feminist 4.0. They're pathetic and embarrassing. Who'd want to shag that?"

"If I was going to be sensible and I could replay it, I would say: "Any self-respecting man in 2023 would probably be well advised to avoid a woman who possessed that worldview because she would probably cause him nothing but harm." But what I did say was, you know: "I wouldn't shag that," and all that sort of stuff, which is not right. It's demeaning to her, to Ava, so I'm sorry for demeaning you in that way, however angry I am with you still for doing that, and it demeans me because it's not representative of who I am."

"I personally think it's a dreadful idea that Holocaust denial is, you know, a crime in various places because how are you going to give someone an opportunity to air their ridiculous views, without evidence, without giving someone else the opportunity to correct them?"

"Success is standing. Success is getting to the end and not losing my mind."

"First of all, don’t take a pop at Dan Wootton for something I said. That’s not fair. Secondly. I stand by every word of what I said."

"Just completed my GB News show trial. I mean disciplinary hearing. I think the rules are that I can't speak freely about it. Which is totally on brand. For the home of free speech."

"I say, "Can we just get on and not be mean to each other?" But I feel compelled to be mean to the wokies."

"[On his vote in the 2017 general election.] I voted for "Magic Grandpa" Jeremy Corbyn last time, but then I realised he was an anti-semitic old Marxist."

"You know, even in 1917 they've done it with a Sikh soldier, which is great. I mean, it's brilliant, but you're suddenly aware. It's like, "there were Sikhs fighting in the this war," and you're like, "OK, you're now diverting me away from a story of what the story is..." It is kind of racist, if there is racism. If you're talking about institutional racism, which is what everyone loves to go on about - which I'm not a believer in, you know - there is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way."

"I should probably say only correct things, but I have a sneaking suspicion if everybody does that, the world’s going to die of boredom. The world needs a fool — not that I think I’m a fool. Though some may disagree."

"It's so easy to throw the charge of racism at everybody and it's really starting to get boring now."

"I've encountered racism from black people towards me, when I was working in Kenya for seven months. It’s the way you’re spoken to — racism can be deferential."

"My agent was like, "I’ll stand by you, darling ... Get out!""

"[After his Question Time appearance] Suddenly, I was denounced by the whole of showbiz. I thought, Oh, it’ll be alright. But it wasn't. It just got worse and worse."

"[On being expelled from Harrow for having sex at the sixth-form dance with twins] My choice of venue for said escapade could have been better ["Middle of the dance floor on a bar stool"]. My ancient housemaster turned to me and said, "Your penis was visible." Those were our final words."

"It's grim [...] but with it comes an incredible feeling of liberation. You think I can say anything because I'm not going to lose my job, because I've already lost my job. So now I can resist this disgusting religion of wokery. I'm going to resist it with all of my heart."

"It's called free speech. I realise that the new woke world is low on laughter and high on offence, but it's still worth trying to find the lighter moments in this joyless new cancel culture which has been created for us."

"[Undecided on his vote for then forthcoming 2019 general election because of their "hate-speech laws".] You’re the Conservative Party, the clue's in the word! I would vote for a conservative party, but not this one."

"Remember. It's OK to encourage acid attacks on Nigel Farage. It's OK to wish Boris Johnson died of Covid. It's OK to want white people dead. As long as it's on the @BBC or the propaganda media. It’s not OK to not want to shag someone. We must protect the "broadcast ecology" for Adam Boulton at all costs."

"Doth Nature know our dream, or is the mind A passing breath her beauty leaves behind?"