Editors From England

"Better build school-rooms for "the boy," Than cells and gibbets for "the man.""

"In Britain we have a free press. It's not a pretty press, but it's free. The people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they say: 'you should ban it'. No no, no no, you don't ban it... you don't buy it.""

"So no, I'm not in that camp, but I do think that statutory regulation is not required, and most of the heinous crimes that came up and have made such a splash in front of this Inquiry have already been illegal. Contempt of court is illegal. Phone tapping is illegal. Taking money from - policemen taking money is illegal. All of these things don't need a code. We already have laws for them. The fact that these laws were not rigorously enforced is, again, due to the behaviour of the police, the interaction of the police and News International, and - I mean, let's be honest about this - the fact that our politicians have been very, very involved, in ways that I think are not sensible, with senior News International people, and I hope you'll be calling the Prime Minister and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to explain how that comes down from the top.""

"I do have a residual belief that, if at all possible, you should try not to mock the weak."

"Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'"

"The trouble about working on a tabloid is that they tend to be run by bullies."

"For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted -- almost always men, there was a couple of women -- have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back."

"If this is justice, I am a banana."

"A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred."

"Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it."

"I think the best thing the Manchester Guardian has done in my time was to oppose the Boer War... We were together there."

"Free Trade in the sense in which we have always understood it is either a sound economic policy or it is not. Judging by results in national prosperity I should have thought it would take a lot of disproving, but the Tories are ready to play fast and lose with it and some of our own people who ought to know far better seem ready to back them up. If there is any future for the Liberal party it surely rests on the rock of Free Trade."

"Truth like everything else should be economised."

"[He is] one of the heroes of the struggle, one of the ablest men they had and the most courageous Member who had ever been returned. ... He had made sacrifices and had run risks which few realised in the part which he had taken in this struggle—the greatest that England had passed through, he thought, for a century."

"[I am delighted] that my native city is honouring itself today by conferring its highest distinction upon the greatest Liberal publicist of the day."

"When C. P. Scott died, the innumerable tributes to him all emphasised his courage and integrity, his humanitarianism and his championship of unpopular causes. They omitted comment on his remarkable astuteness, his diplomatic gift, his caution, his capacity for compromise, his knowledge of when to strike and when to forebear. C. P. Scott had something of the fox in him, as well as much of the lion. He was no champion of lost causes; he was, on the contrary, the benignly Machiavellian advocate of causes which less far-sighted men thought lost or Utopian. He could claim, above all, that he had been right—right about the Boer War, right about Home Rule, right about Women's Suffrage, right about the Versailles Peace Treaty, right about a host of other smaller causes which we have forgotten because they have been won. The influence of the Manchester Guardian was due to the fact that the causes it took up were never run as stunts, taken up in the hot mood and dropped in the cold; they were clearly imagined lines of policy, consistently and moderately pursued year after year, boldly urged in season, persuasively advocated out of season, but never abandoned until victory was achieved."

"He terrified us also, and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the promise of it, and lack his praise."

"It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is both conciliatory and receptive."

"He founded a school, and has survived all his disciples. He has always thought too much about himself, which is wise; and written too much about others, which is foolish. His prose is the beautiful prose of a poet, and his poetry the beautiful poetry of a prose-writer. His personality is insistent. To converse with him is a physical no less than an intellectual recreation. He is never forgotten by his enemies, and often forgiven by his friends. He has added several new words to the language, and his style is an open secret. He has fought a good fight, and has had to face every difficulty except popularity."

"He was most human—human, I used to say, like one of Shakespeare's characters—and yet pressed and pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a speech, as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond words."

"All over the world, the nation, in a dream Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps Of well-being, and so Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down Into a rich deliquium of decay."

"A people, haggard with defeat, Asks if there be a God; yet sets its teeth, Faces calamity, and goes into the fire Another than it was. And in wild hours A people, roaring ripe With victory, rises, menaces, stands renewed, Sheds its old piddling aims, Approves its virtue, puts behind itself The comfortable dream, and goes, Armoured and militant, New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps To those great altitudes, whereat the weak Live not. But only the strong Have leave to strive, and suffer, and achieve."

"Into a land Storm-wrought, a place of quakes, all thunder-scarred, Helpless, degraded, desolate, Peace, the White Angel, comes. Her eyes are as a mother's. Her good hands Are comforting, and helping; and her voice Falls on the heart, as, after Winter, Spring Falls on the World, and there is no more pain."

"Of Henley the talker, at least, one portrait remains. He was the original of Stevenson's Burly the talker who would roar you down, bury his face in his hands, undergo passions of revolt and agony, letting loose a spring torrent of words. There was always a wild flood and storm of talk wherever Henley might be."

"Life — life — life! 'Tis the sole great thing This side of death, Heart on heart in the wonder of Spring!"

"Henley's talk was animated above all by the intense and virile love of life that I was so conscious of in him personally, that reveals itself in every line he wrote, and that is what I liked best about him. He was so alive, so exhilarated with the sense of being alive. The tremendous vitality of the man, that should have found its legitimate outlet in physical activity, seemed to have gone instead into his thought and his expression of it as if the very fact that fate forced him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at. He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital."

"Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb. Love, which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom.Love, which is lust, is the Main of Desire. Love, which is lust, is the Centric Fire.So man and woman will keep their trust, Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.Yea, each with the other will lose and win, Till the very Sides of the Grave fall in.For the strife of Love's the abysmal strife, And the word of Love is the Word of Life.And they that go with the Word unsaid, Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead."

"Dear, was it really you and I? In truth the riddle's ill to read, So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed."

"Life — life — let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!"

"You played and sang a snatch of song, A song that all-too well we knew; But whither had flown the ancient wrong; And was it really I and you? O, since the end of life's to live And pay in pence the common debt, What should it cost us to forgive Whose daily task is to forget?"

"Life — give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream."

"Some starlit garden grey with dew, Some chamber flushed with wine and fire, What matters where, so I and you Are worthy our desire?"

"Think on the shame of dreams for deeds, The scandal of unnatural strife, The slur upon immortal needs, The treason done to life:Arise! no more a living lie, And with me quicken and control Some memory that shall magnify The universal Soul."

"What have I done for you, England, my England? What is there I would not do, England, my own?"

"Time's right-hand man, the sea Laughs as in joy From his millions of wrinkles: Laughs that his destiny, Great with the greatness Of triumphing order, Shows as a dwarf By the strength of his heart And the might of his hands.Master of masters, O maker of heroes, Thunder the brave, Irresistible message: — 'Life is worth Living Through every grain of it, From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.'"

"Those incantations of the Spring That made the heart a centre of miracles Grow formal, and the wonder-working bours Arise no more — no more.Something is dead... 'Tis time to creep in close about the fire And tell grey tales of what we were, and dream Old dreams and faded, and as we may rejoice In the young life that round us leaps and laughs, A fountain in the sunshine, in the pride Of God's best gift that to us twain returns, Dear Heart, no more — no more."

"We are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw, And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law."

"Madam Life's a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: She's the tenant of the room, He's the ruffian on the stair."

"East and west and north, wherever the battle grew, As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will to do.Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease — (Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!) —Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire, Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire."

"Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade and die, While the living stars fulfil their round in the living sky?"

"My songs were once of the sunrise: They shouted it over the bar; First-footing the dawns, they flourished, And flamed with the morning star.My songs are now of the sunset: Their brows are touched with light, But their feet are lost in the shadows And wet with the dews of night."

"There let it rest. It has fought and won, And is still the best That either has done. Each as he stands The work of its hands, Which shall be more As he was before? What is it ends With friends?"

"So be my passing! My task accomplish'd and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gather'd to the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death."

"Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave, I was a king in Babylon, And you were a Christian slave."

"Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep."

"I captain an army Of shining and generous dreams."

"Bland as a Jesuit, sober as a hymn."

"Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist: A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist."

"As dust that drives, as straws that blow, Into the night go one and all."

"Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."