People From Lima

"Even I, as Bishop of Ayacucho, work as a missionary. In my diocese, in my territory, I have to go and evangelize, because there are areas that are difficult to reach, for geographical difficulties and distances. The people of these places have heard little of Jesus and the Gospel, and yet many need this message, because in their hearts wounds of violence are still alive."

"Lent is a time to confirm our faith in the Lord Jesus and our determination to announce his mystery of salvation with new zeal. Heed God's Word, to learn the truth of man, where we come from, where we are going and what we must do to be happy and obtain salvation. May the liturgical and ascetic season of Lent help us to open our hearts to the loving mercy of the Lord Jesus who forgives, reconciles, enhances and makes us more worthy."

"We must therefore fulfill the obligation of being aware of a world which continues to ignore with a guilty conscience the Law of God, and which is based on human laws imposed by those who hold the power of economic strength. It is up to the latter to give up these interests."

"The Amazon is a territory that is devastated and threatened by the concessions made by States to transnational corporations. Large-scale mining projects, monoculture and climate change place its lands and natural environment at great risk, leading to the destruction of cultures, undermining the self-determination of peoples and above all affronting Christ incarnate in the people who live there."

"For years the Church has been the country's only moral point of reference. Faced with a people who look to her with hope, the Church has a grave responsibility to not disappoint them and to ensure that her activity and life are always exemplary giving testimony of coherence between what is preached and what is practised. If good example is necessary everywhere, this is certainly true in Peru where there is a serious institutional crisis of government, ethic and moral values and a marked presence of religious sects."

"I believe that Peru's great illness is individualism, partly caused by a liberalist culture that followed the Fujimori dictatorship, preventing the emergence of a network of grassroots organizations, often called "intermediate bodies". But individualism has also penetrated our faith. Basically, "saving my soul" has emerged as the main objective. Yet this is also what the evangelicals say. In public life attention was given to nascent life, to the fight against abortion, but not to an idea of community, of building a future together. For this reason I firmly believe that this pandemic is a challenge to individualism, and, at the same time, to both our pastoral work and to politics."

"We have a commitment — our city of Lima and our entire coast — to our Amazon region."

"Above all, I believe sports have given me the God´s gift of ease to relate to people. It is very easy for me to be with people of any age, social condition or circumstance. Sports helps you not to have barriers. This has helped me a lot in the priesthood. In the second place, I would say that in sports, one works as a team. One person doesn't win, the whole team does. Moreover, I have played basketball especially. This also leads one to see the need to be organized. Each one has to give his best. The leader is not the one who carries a plan forward. He is the one who creates conditions in such a way that each one can give the best of himself. He is not the one in front carrying the flag. This is also very important in the priesthood and the episcopate. In the third place, as in sports, it is very important to know how to struggle. Life, for a man who wants to be loyal in the Church today, is a real struggle. Today we cannot say that the Church is synonymous with success — on the contrary."

"The country is very diverse, geographically, ethnically, so the reality that the bishops have on the coast, in the mountains, or in the jungle is very different."

"Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven."

"I always say we’re like doctors, we fashion photographers — we get given problems and we solve them…"

"I think if you are curious you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities. People close doors all the time, but I look at some pictures I take today and think they are so much better than pictures I took 10 years ago because I haven't stopped growing, and I don't ever want to stop growing."

"Social media makes photography available to the world so quickly that immediacy has become more important than quality. Not many people appreciate the quality that comes with experience and most are happy with seeing something now. Consumption makes it all come and go very fast, so there’s no need to elevate things."

"I've never wanted to call myself any sexuality, because I hate the idea of taking freedom away from you, and I think we all can be everything. I understand that at moments you have to define it, but my sexuality has been so wide and open, and that's what's influenced my way of working. I think it's given me freedom, my sexuality."

"Soy el cantor de América autóctono y salvaje: mi lira tiene un alma, mi canto un ideal. Mi verso no se mece colgado de un ramaje con un vaivén pausado de hamaca tropical."

"Inmóvil como un ídolo sagrado, ceñido en mallas de compacto acero, está ante el agua estático y sombrío,'a manera de un príncipe encantado que vive eternamente prisionero en el palacio de cristal de un río."

"The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators and MPs, including many Tories."

"If people are determined to be outraged, they will be outraged."

"Surely the liberal ideal one is where, instead of obsessing about the ethnic backgrounds of actors, we treat their skin-colour as just one more attribute, like hair-colour or the ability to speak the appropriate accent for the production."

"If you don't know who Daniel Hannan is, he is of course a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, fetid excuse for a prick. Sorry, um, sorry, no, no, no, I think I misread that, could you just scroll the autocue back up a bit, I meant he to say Daniel Hannan is of course a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, fetid excuse for a prick. Oh no, it turns out I got it right the first time."

"Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted."

"The two totalitarian systems [USSR Communism and German National-Socialism] traded in all the necessary commodities of war: not just oil and vital chemicals, but arms and ships. They exhibited each other’s cultural achievements, performed each other’s music and films, stressed their joint hostility to Western capitalism."

"Georgia, like Ukraine and Moldova, is a sovereign state. If we accept, in practice, that Russia can alter borders by force, we signal to Moscow that it can violate international norms with impunity. We can hardly then complain if the Kremlin meddles in American elections, or orders murders on British soil."

"Race is said to be non-existent, yet our cultural elites rarely seem to think of anything else."

"Detaining people for shouting republican slogans, even if they do so in a deliberately coarse and provocative way, is utterly un-British [...] I worry that our police are becoming more authoritarian and — worse — that a section of the public is cheering them on."

"The bureaucracy has ballooned since Brexit – in other words, at precisely the moment when we could be opting out of the needlessly intrusive bits of the EU’s Money Laundering Directive."

"While Nazism is well understood as the monstrosity it was, there is often a lingering sense that Communism was well-intentioned, even though it went wrong. The merest connection with fascism bars a politician from office; yet those who actively supported the USSRare allowed to become ministers and European Commissioners. Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is not regarded in the same light as wearing an Adolf Hitler tee-shirt; but it should be."

"Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism."

"Marx's error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity - to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order."

"Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed."

"Don’t get me wrong. Every atrocity is unique in its own terrible way. The Nazi Holocaust haunts us for good reasons. Years after I saw it, I still find this image rising, unbidden, in my mind. Happily, though, no one, beyond a deranged fringe, denies the nature of Nazism. The same is not true of the Soviet tyranny."

"History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty."

"Britain, as a relatively large economy which exports more to non-EU than to EU markets, would be better off trading freely with the single market than belonging to it."

"The EU's single market is a single regulatory regime. Membership of it doesn’t mean that you can sell your products into it: pretty much the whole world can do that. Membership means, rather, that you accept a common set of technical standards, and that you submit yourself to the ultimate jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice."

"Back in 2014, when no one else was planning how to win the referendum, @DouglasCarswell talked tactics at the @Tate. He said: "We can win in one of two circumstances: a visible failure of the renegotiation, or one of the two main party leaders being neutral." In the event, we got both. Thanks @jeremycorbyn."

"Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism."

"I love Turkey. I first traveled there in my early twenties, when I was obsessed by the 1915 Dardanelles campaign. I immediately liked the people — brave, stoical, generous, hospitable and patriotic, if a little inclined to conspiracy theories. I saw Turkey as a model for the region, a successful, Western-oriented Muslim democracy."

"What is happening to this country, for the love of God?"

"Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk."

"Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers' Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said."

"What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists."

"The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture."

"The two armies [Red Army and Nazi Army] met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”."

"It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated."

"The idea that there was an unbridgeable gap between Soviet Communism and National Socialism, which is nowadays so widespread, would have seemed curious at the time. To be sure, there were some in Moscow, and a few more in Berlin, who believed that there must eventually come a reckoning with their “real” enemy. But theirs were minority voices. Many more gladly went along with the idea that the two socialist systems were joined in battle against “decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism”."

"The coincidence in doctrine between the Nazis and the Soviets was obvious to the “decadent” Anglo-Saxons, too. The day after the Soviet invasion of Poland, a Times editorial observed that “Only those can be disappointed who clung to the ingenuous belief that Russia was to be distinguished from her Nazi neighbour, despite the identity of their institutions and political idiom, by her foreign policy”."

"We have lived through this mistake for 60 years now."

"We threaten to rain fire upon North Korea and Iran, yet we quail before an elderly, impoverished and decrepit Russia. How diminished we are as a civilization."

"In an atmosphere when anyone can close down the conversation by saying “I feel uncomfortable”, rational discussion becomes impossible. The empirical method, the basis of Enlightenment civilization, no longer applies."

"You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon, the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government"