Academics From The United Kingdom

"Enough of dreams! No longer mock The burdened hearts of men! Not on the cloud, but on the rock Build thou thy faith again;O range no more the realms of air, Stoop to the glen-bound streams; Thy hope was all too like despair: Enough, enough of dreams."

"Thou whose deep ways are in the sea, Whose footsteps are not known, To-night a world that turned from Thee Is waiting — at Thy Throne.The towering Babels that we raised Where scoffing sophists brawl, The little Antichrists we praised — The night is on them all."

"Descend, descend, Urania, speak To men in their own tongue! Leave not the breaking heart to break Because thine own is strong. This is the law, in dream and deed, That heaven must walk on earth! O, shine upon the humble creed That holds the heavenly birth."

"The fool hath said … The fool hath said And we, who deemed him wise, We, who believed that Thou wast dead, How should we seek Thine eyes?How should we seek to Thee for power, Who scorned Thee yesterday? How should we kneel in this dread hour? Lord, teach us how to pray."

"Grant us the single heart once more That mocks no sacred thing, The Sword of Truth our fathers wore When Thou wast Lord and King. Let darkness unto darkness tell Our deep unspoken prayer; For, while our souls in darkness dwell, We know that Thou art there."

"I suppose that if your name is Freud, it is better to be related to Sigmund than not. It must be frustrating to have to keep denying family connection."

"I was called up in 1942. Having been born in Berlin, schooled in Devon, London and Berkshire, and lived in Suffolk, I ended up in the Highland Light Infantry."

"If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer."

"In 1978 I was on a parliamentary delegation to Japan and returned via China during the Cultural Revolution, a choice also made by young Winston Churchill, then the Conservative MP for Stretford. I was debriefed by the Minister for Information who asked if there was anything at all I would like to ask. I said: "Yes. Everything you do, you do with extreme care and precision. When I ask questions that your government does not like, my driver calls for me five minutes later than arranged. When I ask if there are any blind or handicapped children in China, I get cabbage soup for dinner."Now I am in your country with a colleague, than whom I am older, have been in parliament longer, have held higher positions in our respective political parties: we are both staying at the Peking Palace Hotel and his suite is bigger than mine. Why?"The Minister, very embarrassed, finally said: "It is because Mr Churchill had a famous grandfather."It is the only time that I have been out-grandfathered."

"He did not suffer fools gladly (or at all) and his threshold for foolishness was set rather low. He was the master of the terrifying put-down: with his fine palate he loathed cigarette smoke and once on the train, an acquaintance told me with awe, a woman lit up in the non-smoking carriage near him. When he remonstrated she said: "Oh, it's only ten feet from the smoking section." Freud sprang to his feet and said: "Madam, we're only five feet from the lavatory, is it all right if I piss on the floor?""

"Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world."

"That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else's expense. Write a paper and see the world! I'm Jane Austen – fly me!"

"I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art."

"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round."

"Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut – at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus – and happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the last. This is called Finals, the very name of which implies that nothing of importance can happen after it."

"Looking around at the faces of his colleagues in the Senior Common Room he felt reassured: not a Lineament of Gratified Desire to be seen."

"I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting – the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on."

"[T]oday there is hardly a country in the world, certainly not a single country in Europe, where Jews feel safe. A society, or for that matter, a political party, that tolerates antisemitism, that tolerates any hate, has forfeited all moral credibility."

"In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel..."

"My Lords, I and the vast majority of the Jewish community, care deeply about the future of the Palestinians. We want Palestinian children, no less than Israeli children, to have a future of peace, prosperity, freedom and hope. Which is why we oppose those who teach Palestinian children to hate those with whom they will one day have to live; who take money given for humanitarian aid and use it to buy weapons and dig tunnels to take the region back to a dark age of barbarism.More generally we say in the name of the God of Abraham, the Almighty, merciful and compassionate God, that the religion in whose name atrocities are being carried out, innocent people butchered and beheaded, children treated as slaves, civilians turned into human shields, and young people into weapons of self-destruction, is not the Islam that once earned the admiration of the world, nor is its God the God of Abraham. It was Nietzsche not the prophets who worshipped the will to power. It was Machiavelli not sacred scripture who taught that it is better to be feared than to be loved.Every religion must wrestle with its dark angels, and so today must we: Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. For we are all children of Abraham and it will only be when we make space for one another as brothers and sisters that we will redeem the world from darkness and walk together in the light of God."

"The twenty-first century is, and will remain, the Age of Insecurity."

"The first of the "request" prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole."

"Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art."

"The meaning of the word "true" here is similar to the word Amen said after a blessing. It is an act of affirmation and ratification, reminding us that the Shema is less a prayer than a declaration of faith."

"One of the most important distinctions I have learned in the course of reflection on Jewish history is the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Knowing what we do of our past, no Jew can be an optimist. But Jews have never – despite a history of sometimes awesome suffering – given up hope. Not by accident did they call the national anthem of their new state Hatikvah, meaning, the hope."

"We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast."

"Faith is not a certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty."

"If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery."

"Judaism is the refusal to give way to despair."

"Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other."

"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

"He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation."

"The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left."

"the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)"

"His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. (II)"

"Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds (I)"

"Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. (II)"

"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."

"A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants."

"here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure. (IV)"

"No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat."

"I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex."

"Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination."

"I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!"

"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."

"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes… I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…."

"Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie."

"In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)"

"I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering."