Academics From The United Kingdom

"Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well."

"Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first."

"I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world."

"To all those who by accident or design, have not been included in this book."

"I am just a man, not fit to do the work of God... or the Devil."

"Billy Budd: You didn't even hate him. I think that sometimes you hate yourself. I was thinking, sir, the nights are lonely. Perhaps I could talk with you between watches when you've nothing else to do. Claggert: Lonely. What do you know of loneliness? Billy Budd: Them's alone that want to be. Claggert: Nights are long. Conversation helps pass the time. Billy Budd: Can I talk to you again, then? It would mean a lot to me. Claggert: Perhaps to me, too. [His expression suddenly sours] Oh, no. You would charm me too, huh? Get away."

"Claggert: We must serve the law, sir, or give up the right and privilege of service. It is only within that law that we may use our discretions according to our rank. Captain Vere: You're so intelligent and so lucid for the rank you hold, Master At Arms. Claggert: I thank you, sir. Captain Vere: Yes, that's no flattery, Mr. Claggart. It's a melancholy fact. It's sad to see such qualities of mind bent to such a sorry purpose. What's the reason for it? Claggert: I am what I am, sir. And what the world has made me. Captain Vere: The world? The world demands that behind every peacemaker there be the gun, the gallows, the jail. Do you think it will always be so? Claggert: I have no reason not to, sir. Captain Vere: You live without hope? Claggert: I live. Captain Vere: But remember, Mr. Claggart, that even the man who wields the whip cannot defy the code we must obey and not be broken by it. That will be all."

"I'd rather be buried at sea than on the shore when I come to die. Will you stand by the plank, mates, so I can shake a friendly hand before I sink?"

"Lieutenant Seymour: Wyatt, we do not deal with justice here, but with the law. Lieutenant Wyatt: Was not the one conceived to serve the other?"

"You know Seymour, there are some men who cannot stand too much perfection. They see it as a disease, which must be stamped out at its first rash showing."

"The sea is calm you said. Peaceful. Calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who's to tell me it's any different here on board, or yonder on dry land."

"It's wrong to flog a man. It's against his being a man."

"Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn't know! It was just — his turn!"

"It's hot. And there's a lot of it. I like everything about it except the flavor."

"Good-bye to you too ol' Rights of Man!"

"2nd Soldier: Do you mean that, as a General, you're not the tiniest bit ambitious for our military future? General: I prefer our military past. The harm's done and there it is. As for being a General, well, at the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords, we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it."

"I'm Rally of Unionist Separist Extremes, sometimes known as the R.U.S.E. … It's the party at present in power."

"The only one who's always punctual is Death … whatever the time he always strikes his knell at the first streak of dawn … and believe me, he knows what he's doing. How I hate the dawn! It's the hour of the firing squad. The last glass of brandy. The ultimate cigarette. The final wish. All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses … fix your bayonets boys …gentlemen, synchronize your watches … in ten seconds time the barrage starts … a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years... And finally dawn is the herald of the day, our twelve hours of unimportance, when we have to cede to the pressures of the powers, smile at people we have every reason but expediency to detest … A diplomat these days is nothing but a head-waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally."

"Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of."

"Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy."

"The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill."

"I have Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Ethiopian blood in my veins."

"Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

"Sex is a conversation carried out by other means."

"Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them."

"Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique."

"It is unfortunate for all that no moral issue has ever been clearer. Any attempt to plea-bargain with outlaws and renegades will only be at the expense of honor, decency and self-respect. The Serbs, are two-dimensional people with a craving for simplicity and an ideology so basic it can be understood without effort. They need enemies, not friends, to focus their two-dimensional ideas. Life for them is a simple tune, never an orchestration, or even a pleasant harmony. Animals make use of their resources with far greater felicity than these retorted creatures, whose subscription to the human race is well in arrears."

"There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners."

"The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us."

"Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a superabundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares."

"Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus."

"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."

"Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth."

"By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door."

"To be gentle, tolerant, wise and reasonable requires a goodly portion of toughness."

"If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue."

"Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I'll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks."

"I hate being moved. I hate that man who came in. So self-righteous, so cruel. He made fun of me, that's why I cried. You never did that. You led me into temptation by your — politeness."

"Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom."

"Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died."

"I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek."

"The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual oneupmanship, and Guru competitions."

"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion."

"We say in popular speech that we come into this world, but we do nothing of the kind. We come out of it. In the same way as the fruit comes out of the tree, the egg from the chicken, and the baby from the womb, we are symptomatic of the universe. Just as in the retina there are myriads of little nerve endings, we are the nerve endings of the universe."

"Unbelievably, there is still here [in Los Angeles] one of my most favorite places—the home of Henry and Ruth Denison at the very top of the hill, at the end of a road going nowhere, hanging above a reservoir-lake surrounded with pines. They have a sundeck under a eucalyptus tree where I have slept some memorably deep sleeps, and awakened very early in the morning, before sunrise, with stars still showing through the branches. In this house I have made some of my greatest friendships, so much so that I cannot think of it without that curious pleasure-pain which the Japanese call aware—the sense of echoes in the courtyards of the mind after the sun has left and the people have gone their ways forever."

"Everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life."

"Over the years it has become my firm opinion that sexual activity (even if only through masturbation) is "requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul"; for men and women alike. It stimulates your glands, exercises your pelvis, thrills your nerves, brings mind and body together as one, and culminates in an ecstasy in which there is neither past nor future nor separation between self and other. We need that as we need vitamins, proteins, water, and air."

"At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs."

"Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory."