Satirists From England

"The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."

"...whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one's friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one's relatives."

"By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?"

"The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style."

"Lord of myself, accountable to none, But to my conscience, and my God alone."

"I wear my Pen as others do their Sword. To each affronting sot I meet, the word Is Satisfaction: straight to thrusts I go, And pointed satire runs him through and through."

"Curse on the man who business first designed, And by't enthralled a freeborn lover's mind!"

"And should you visit now the seats of bliss, You need not wear another form but this."

"While some no other cause for life can give But a dull habitude to live."

"Ah, dearer than my soul… Dearer than light, or life, or fame."

"Altho' your frailer part must yield to Fate, By every breach in that fair lodging made, Its blest inhabitant is more displayed."

"I don't like David Blaine, he is the ultimate git wizard."

"[On David Cameron] When I heard this inherited multi-million ex-Etonian talking about a culture of entitlement, well, I'm sorry, but my irony meter went through the red and then exploded in a gale of bitter laughter. It actually went "HAA!" I was furious, because I've only just had a new irony meter installed after Rebekah Brooks complained about how she had been unfairly reported by the British press."

"We humans who art on Earth, humanity is special, our kingdom has come. Do what we innately know to be right, on Earth because that's all there is. Share the bread we have, try not to screw up. When others screw up, understand. We can't have everything that tempts us (Unless we work in international finance). Deliver ourselves from evil because this is it. The Earth, the power to do right, and the glory that will come if we do is ours, now and forever. Hu-man."

"All big cities are the same now. It used to be easier at weekends. Not anymore, you get the white stretch limos everywhere. You see them at first, you think, "Is it a celebrity or a foreign dignitary?" No, its some slags. No one's sure how many slags, cause the windows are tinted. All you can say with any real degree of accuracy is that there is an indescriminate number of slags in said vehicle. There's at least two poking out the sunroof."

"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

"Would you like the oldest, most historically significant athletic competition the world has ever known, attracting athletes from every known nation on the face of the planet to come here and perform at the peak of their abilities, in the very city where you live? Most British people go, "Where will we park?!""

"[on global warming] There's a group of people who, a little while ago, were saying, "It's not happening." That same group of people are now saying, "Alright, it is happening, but it's not our fault." That's a very dodgy position to be in. That's like saying, "I'm not having an affair, and, anyway, she seduced me"."

"I was brought up to believe that cricket is the most important activity in men's lives, the most important thread in the fabric of the cosmos."

"Before we were old enough to practise at the nets with the Burslem men, we played most of our cricket on waste land that had been trampled flat by the clogs and boots of generations of miners."

"There is one aspect of our own mentality for which it's difficult as yet to foresee what type of explanation would even be relevant. I'm referring, of course, to consciousness. The point is that although I have no reason to believe that my consciousness is implemented by anything other than my brain, I remain convinced that there's something impenetrably mysterious about the relationship between brains and thoughts. And you can understand, therefore, why it's so hard to imagine, let alone tolerate, the idea that the death of the brain necessarily leads to the end of the personal self—and this, of course, is the "trump card" with which religion has consistently played."

"Ever since the Reformation, there's a sense in which the road to atheism was paved not with science, but with religious intentions."

"With thoughtfulness—and, above all, with literacy—thoughts themselves become subjects of discussion in a way that they wouldn't have been before they were written down. It's not until they're written down that they become stable enough to bear examination in the same way that physical objects themselves can bear examination."

"Although he never admitted himself to be an atheist as such, he was clearly and unarguably the most vividly elegant and eloquent skeptic of them all. I'm referring, of course, to the great Scottish philosopher David Hume."

"Perhaps I was too dumb, or just too interested in cricket or in girls, to ask myself any questions about religion. If I had not been, I might have, inevitably, asked myself questions that have troubled skeptics and unbelievers for as long as men and women have been skeptical or have lacked belief: "Is there really no God? And if there really is no supernatural dimension to the universe, why have so many people throughout history and in so many different cultures thought there was?""

"While the early deists were busy reconstructing Christianity, at the same time being very careful to avoid the accusation of atheism, the world of science had been steadily progressing."

"[In casual conversation] The reason why I feel relatively indifferent to [the Anglican Church of England] is it's lost its power, and it's so desperately keen to solicit support that they're willing to throw God out of the window in order to retain it. God for the many of the Anglicans is nothing more than a sort of awkward geriatric relative, kept upstairs, who might be embarrassingly coming downstairs, incontinently, and cause trouble."

"Paradoxically, some of the sources of disbelief are to be found amongst the arguments of believers. … Theologians often formulated the most dangerously skeptical arguments in their efforts to test the impregnability of their own faith, and in doing so, they unknowingly furnished atheists with ready-made weapons."

"During the time when I was doing Monitor for the BBC I found that if I wanted to show the detail of a painting it suffered pretty badly. You can get away with it provided the lighting is not too heavily contrasted and the details are not too minute. But by and large the electrical mechanics of television are still at such a primitive stage that almost any fine visual detail suffers and is rubbed away. If it weren't for the fact that it is the only medium available for transmitting things into a large number of homes simultaneously, no one would ever dream of using television as a didactic instrument for showing visual detail. It is fair to say that if you're showing diagrams on flat surfaces it is not too hard to read the detail. It is terrible, though, for showing any sort of depth—for example, if you're trying to demonstrate not an art object, but a relatively complicated thing like a skull."

"There were academics and theologians who spent hours calculating what they thought was the precise age of the Earth, on the basis of the Biblical account of it. And as early as 1650, James Ussher had come to the startlingly precise conclusion that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C. on October the 22nd—in the evening, apparently. What God had been doing that morning is still open to conjecture."

"Ay, now the Plot thickens very much upon us."

"What a Devil is the Plot good for, but to bring in fine things?"

"The blackest Ink of Fate, sure, was my Lot, And, when she writ my Name, she made a blot."

"A Lady that was drown'd at Sea, and had a wave for her Winding sheet."

"I drink, I huff, I strut, look big and stare; And all this I can do, because I dare."

"Kisses are but like sands of gold and silver, found upon the ground which are not worth much themselves but as they promise a mine near too be dig'd."

"There are few have Dana's fortune, to have God and gold togather."

"Buckingham was a sated man of pleasure, who had turned to ambition as a pastime. As he had tried to amuse himself with architecture and music, with writing farces and with seeking for the philosopher's stone, so he now tried to amuse himself with a secret negotiation and a Dutch war."

"He had no principles of religion, virtue, or friendship. Pleasure, frolic, or extravagant diversion, was all that he laid to heart. He was true to nothing, for he was not true to himself."

"All these threatening storms, which, like impregnate Clouds, hover o'er our heads, will (when they once are grasp'd but by the eye of reason) melt into fruitful showers of blessings on the people."

"A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. … Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late, He had his jest, but they had his estate."

"The world's a wood, in which all lose their way, Though by a different path each goes astray."

"She that would raise a noble love must find Ways to beget a passion for her mind; She must be that which she to the world would seem, For all true love is grounded on esteem: Plainness and truth gain more a generous heart Than all the crooked subtleties of art."

"Methinks, I see the wanton houres flee, And as they passe, turne back and laugh at me."

"O! what a prodigal have I been of that most valuable of all possessions — Time!"

"The first gentleman of person and wit I think I ever saw."

"The world is made up, for the most part, of fools and knaves, both irreconcileable foes to truth."

"We might well call this short Mock-play of ours A Posie made of Weeds instead of Flowers; Yet such have been presented to your noses, And there are such, I fear, who thought 'em Roses."

"Why, Sir, when I have anything to invent, I never trouble my head about it, as other men do; but presently turn over this Book, and there I have, at one view, all that Perseus, Montaigne, Seneca's Tragedies, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, Plutarch's lives, and the rest, have ever thought upon this subject: and so, in a trice, by leaving out a few words, or putting in others of my own, the business is done."

"A mans fame and hayre grow most after death, and are both equally uselesse."