People From London

"Sharpe is one of England's funniest writers. He's in the tradition of the 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote novels of ideas laced with physical, slapstick farce."

"Charles Tannock, Vice-President of the Human Rights subcommittee of the European Parliament, had written in a 2005 editorial that, “The world cannot afford a second Afghanistan in Bangladesh, where Huji (Harakat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh or HuJI-B -- Movement of Islamic Holy war/Bangladesh) members are believed to have given sanctuary to many Taliban fighters after the fall of their regime… All of Asia’s powers, including China and Japan, will have to play a part in stopping Bangladesh’s drift into fanaticism and chaos. The rest of the world should support them before it is too late.” Tannock pointed out that a massive rise in the number of madrasas (Islamic seminaries) “financed by Saudi and Gulf money — totaling roughly 64,000 and operating under the same fundamentalist Deobandi Islam that inspired the Taliban — is part of a clear effort to change Bangladesh’s culture of religious tolerance.” Tannock’s fear and assessment were both on target as 2006 saw an increase in violence and worsening condition in Bangladesh."

"I am in favour of foxhunting because foxes kill chickens"

"President Bush doesn’t need toilet paper. He has Blair"

"Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked."

"Fifty miles away, Lord Lynchknowle’s dinner had been interrupted by the arrival of a police car and the news of his daughter’s death. The fact that it had come between the mackerel pâté and the game pie, and on the wine side, an excellent Montrachet and a Château Lafite 1962, several bottles of which he’d opened to impress the Home Secretary and two old friends from the Foreign Office, particularly annoyed him. Not that he intended to let the news spoil his meal by announcing it before he’d finished, but he could foresee an ugly episode with his wife afterwards for no better reason than that he had come back to the table with the rather unfortunate remark that it was nothing important. Of course, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that hospitality came first, and old Freddie was the Home Secretary after all, and he wasn’t going to let that Lafite ’62 go to waste, but somehow he knew Hilary was going to kick up the devil of a fuss about it afterwards."

"All is fair in love, war and tax evasion."

"The authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State."

"While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact."

""Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools."

"Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money."

"The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and churchwardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country."

"There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk."

"By shooting your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house."

"If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal."

"I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials. ... There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with cream."

"The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "" to Motor Mechanics."

"'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'"

"If I seek anyone’s approval, it would be my parents. That would be the highest level of achievement."

"If you were to break up with that person, people will have their own opinions as to why you broke up or whose fault it was. And me being a famous person and having people that love me around the world, if I were to break up with a poor girl, they might think it was her fault. And I wouldn’t want that pressure to be on someone because of me."

"I'm no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing. But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality."

"I hope that people will feel educated about the powers of mental health, the struggles, [and] our incredible abilities to survive."

"I’m no stranger to hard work. I’ve lived by the idea that hard work is good work."

"I went through a rough stage in my career where I must have gone to 50 or 60 auditions and did not get a single job. And then my mum packed my bags, sent me to Cardiff in Wales, and I did this carpentry course. So I’m a qualified carpenter in England. I did that for a while and really enjoyed it."

"I didn't one day wake up and say, 'I'm giving up drinking,'. Like many Brits, I had a very, very boozy December. [It was] Christmas time, I was on vacation, I was drinking a lot, and I've always been able to drink a lot. I think I get my genes from my mom's side in that thing — I can drink. And I decided to just give [it] up for January."

"I was really, really struggling and I started to really worry that maybe I had an alcohol problem. So I decided that I would wait until my birthday, which is June 1. I said to myself, 'If I can do six months without alcohol, then I can prove to myself that I don't have a problem.' And by the time I got to June 1, I was the happiest I've ever been in my life."

"I was becoming a problem. I was just obsessed with it, and I was obsessed to find out what people were saying and how people, what they thought about me. So I decided to make an announcement, which we unfortunately have to do, and say I’m taking a break from social media. And I tried to position myself and say I’m taking a break from social media because I feel like my mental health will benefit from it."

"I really am a massive fan of making movies, but I really do not like Hollywood. It is not for me. The business really scares me. I understand that I’m a part of that business and I enjoy my kind of interactions with it, but that said, I am always looking for ways to kind of remove myself from it to kind of just live as normal a life as possible."

"My biggest flaw is probably my attention span or lack thereof. And while it might seem contradictory, my biggest strength is my work ethic."

"I definitely think it has been an ongoing thought, which is ‘don’t lose yourself.’ I’ve seen so many people come before me and lose themselves, and I’ve had friends that I’ve grown up with that aren’t friends of mine anymore because they’ve lost themselves to this business, and I just am really, really keen to focus on what make me happy which is my family, my friends, my carpentry, my golf, the charity my mom runs, that is the stuff that makes me really happy and that is the stuff I should protect."

"As an actor, your face is your superpower. If you take that away, and put someone in a mask, it’s really difficult to emote. Having done that for maybe eight years has given me a great sense of confidence in my physicality."

"The 20-year goal is to be a film director. The 15-year goal is to win an Oscar. The five-year goal is to just keep enjoying myself. I really am having the time of my life. But as far as my future goes, I want to stretch myself as an actor in a way that Jake Gyllenhaal, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Meryl Streep do. I don’t want to be stuck to one character. I think that’s what can happen when you take on a superhero movie."

"Like, you’ll never see me at an award show that I don’t have to be at. I’m never going to a red-carpet event that I’m not in the film of. I don’t want the attention when I don’t need it."

"Things that would go wrong on set that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had such better mental clarity. I felt healthier. I felt fitter and I just sort of said to myself, ‘Why am I enslaved to this drink? Why am I so obsessed by the idea of having this drink?’ It’s honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done."

"Mental health is a slightly more complicated subject because you can’t see it, and the pain is internal. So, to try and build a platform that has more compassion, that has more sympathy and more understanding to the internal struggles that many people are going through on a daily basis, is a really wonderful thing that I think we’ve achieved with the show, and I’m hoping that the general public will pick up on that message."

"Whenever I break down a character, the first thing I do is I’ll pick out the moments that I relate to with the character. I build on that. That’s how I make a character that is true to myself while representing different things."

"I haven’t quite found someone yet that I think I could call ‘my therapist.’ But I think it’s an incredibly honorable profession. I should find someone. I’m going to look further."

"For me, when it comes to looking for the next job, it’s about the message, and that is the same thing for Spider-Man."

"It’s tough when every time you leave your front door, you are working. You’re on camera. I can’t walk around New York without clicking everywhere I go. And social media was bringing that outside world into my house. I just had to get rid of it. I needed to get back to reality, remind myself of who I am and where I’m from, and just live my life as normally as possible, in my abnormal way. Which is my career, I guess."

"I wouldn’t say I particularly have a history of issues with mental health. I just feel like I am a young person living in a world where we are expected to share every moment online. We are under the pressures of public opinion and other people’s opinions, and you’ve got these pressures of delivering to a certain standard. And it’s stressful. It’s hard."

"Politicians often repeat the mistakes of the past – the level of turnover in parliament makes it even more likely that no one will notice."

"The message from [[Rosie Duffield|[Rosie] Duffield]]'s experience is that if you are a woman in politics, you'd better think really long and hard before you dare stick your neck out on issues you really care about – and not because people will argue with you, but because they'll threaten you."

"As I stood in a group near the bar, a Tory MP came over to introduce himself. "What are you doing here?" he asked abruptly, in what I can only assume was an attempt at small talk. "I work with the party’s host," I explained. “What are you doing here?" ... And then he said: "If you work at the Telegraph, do you know that slut who writes that Single Girl About Town column at the back of the magazine? What's her name? Bryony Gordon?" The room seemed to fall silent. "Yes," I managed to respond. "I know her very well, because that slut is me." The new minister for can-you-guess-what blushed crimson and spent the rest of the evening apologising profusely."

"These incidents are only trivial if you compare them to, say, the fact that women MPs are frequently mistaken for researchers, or that there are currently more British male MPs than there have been female ones in the entire history of parliament. And if the men who govern us aren't capable of seeing women as anything other than totty, sluts or dears then what hope do we have of them taking the issues that affect us seriously?"

"Last night, an MP who I've only met a couple of times actually said to me as his opening gambit "I want to talk to the totty.""

"There is a lesson to be learned from [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]]'s comments, though, which is that rape is not well understood at all. When he says something is "not rape as most people understand it", this is because society still largely imagines rape as an unexpected attack on a woman walking down a dark alley late at night. By describing what [[Julian Assange|[Julian] Assange]] is alleged to have done as "bad sexual etiquette", Galloway demonstrates that he does not understand the legal definition of rape, or of sexual assault for that matter. Neither, he suggests, do many other people."

"Have been thinking about whether or not to tweet about it, but actually that is NOT on and lobby women shouldn't have to put up with it."

"We learn one lesson from the seed that diamonds have never taught us. For seeds, unlike diamonds, are for spending--for throwing away, almost. For unless the seed falls into the ground, dying buried in the darkness of the earth for due season, there can be no spring nor harvest. The image of the seed is the living message of truth for all of us: that death of some kind is the cause of all renewal. 'Death', albeit in inverted commas, is a cause; and life its consequence. Thus sleep is a little death: but so are looking and listening, which require a condition of self-emptying, or 'dying to know', before communication from the other can be received. So, 'expiring' with every breath, we may grow continuously, until the time arrives when we must all experience the irreversible state of change, called death."

"Human earnestness, so fearfully direct, so anxious to improve, builds monuments to house the living God and kills him dead within an ornamental prison."

"Images "stand in" to represent what is in fact unknowable, non-ceptual and non-evidential to us, who are negatively situated on this side of consciousness. Such images can only be real in themselves, however, in so far as they represent, or re-present, the eternal reality of THAT. When they become real in themselves, then we are only over-stating them and have become idolaters guilty of the error of the Sanskrit word upadhi, which is treating THAT as if it is only this, and so confusing the lesser with the greater."