Journalists From England

"It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand."

"I wish I were Commander in Chief of India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not in the least regarding them as if they lived in the Strand, London, or at Camden Town), should be to proclaim to them in their language, that I considered my Holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I begged them to do me the favor to observe that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding, which all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth."

"If the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be. ...Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born, and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor's Assistant, and well versed in figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, book-keepers and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called "tallies." In the reign of George III an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected. All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting, memoranduming, and despatch-boxing on this mighty subject. The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof, the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia, hasn't got home to-night. ...The great, broad, and true cause that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the sun, moon, and stars."

"La difficulté d'écrire l'anglais m'est extrêmement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu! si l'on pouvait toujours écrire cette belle langue de France!"

"I was present, myself, at the execution of Courvoisier. I was, purposely, on the spot, from midnight of the night before; and was a near witness of the whole process of the building of the scaffold, the gathering of the crowd, the gradual swelling of the concourse with the coming-on of day, the hanging of the man, the cutting of the body down, and the removal of it into the prison. From the moment of my arrival, when there were but a few score boys in the street, and those all young thieves, and all clustered together behind the barrier nearest to the drop – down to the time when I saw the body with its dangling head, being carried on a wooden bier into the gaol – I did not see one token in all the immense crowd; at the windows, in the streets, on the house-tops, anywhere; of any one emotion suitable to the occasion. No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious."

"O let us love our occupations, Bless the squire and his relations, Live upon our daily rations, And always know our proper stations."

"Since World War Two, Britain's elite has suffered from a collective collapse of cultural nerve. Many things contributed: postwar exhaustion, the collapse of the British Empire (and therefore of national purpose), and post-colonial flagellatory guilt of the kind that white western liberals have made their specialty. This left the British establishment vulnerable to the revolutionary ideology of the New Left, at the core of which lay a hatred of western society. As a consequence, the British elite decided not only that the British nation was an embarrassment but also that the very idea of the nation was an anachronism."

"Israel has been at war many times. It has experienced many terrorist atrocities and many thousands of rocket attacks. This was something different. Barbarism and depravity against Jews on this scale hasn't been experienced since the Holocaust. In a country that arose from the ashes of that genocide, the spectacle of Jews being dragged from their homes to be slaughtered, raped or captured, with desperate parents throwing themselves on their children to protect them, was unspeakable. This wasn't simply terrorism. This was a pogrom."

"Yet having been inculcated with the unchallengeable belief that they are victims of white society, too many black people believe that any disadvantage they may suffer is not the result of bad luck, circumstances beyond anyone's control or their own behaviour but must be the product of white racism."

"The UN was created out of the experience of World War II to defend life, liberty and human rights. Yet now it is providing a global platform for a further demonization and dehumanization of the Jewish people, and the willed extinction of their right to their own homeland. The platform it gives to the NGOs’ global Jew-bashing army is all of a piece with the UN’s own obsessional and deranged hatred of Israel."

"A continuum links peaceful law-abiding ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other."

"At the heart of multiculturalism lies a radical egalitarianism by which everyone's culture and lifestyle has equal validity and moral stature. The consequence is that people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behaviour. Instead, minorities of all kinds -- ethnic, religious, sexual -- are not held responsible for their misdeeds because they are perceived as a victim class. So the majority are held responsible instead."

"The Mail writer Melanie Phillips continued stridently plugging the anti-MMR bogus science even when Wakefield's paper was comprehensively dismissed by an authoritative Cochrane review. Shortly after the review found there was "no credible evidence" for a link between MMR and autism in 2005, the Mail published a feature by Phillips claiming "MMR safe? Baloney. This is one scandal that’s getting worse". No surprise that she has also called the science on global heating a "scam"."

""A leftie who saw the light" was the Daily Mail headline over the serialisation of her memoirs earlier this week. But "light" is not the most apt word for what Melanie Phillips sees. There is a lot of dark in her world, a lot of people with moral shortcomings, a lot of hate. It does not seem to be much fun being Melanie Phillips, but she marches on, undaunted."

"In our libertarian society, where individual choice is all, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ have come to mean something very different. Liberals took for granted that freedom depended upon self-discipline. Libertarians decided that all such restraint was repressive. The individual had to be free from all attachments to family, culture, nation, institutions and traditions that might fetter freedom of choice. Since every individual was equally entitled to such free choices, the distinctions that were the basis of morality became eroded."

"The question the multiculturalists in Britain and other European countries have to answer is this: are we a Western culture, or are we to become something else? It applies to Australia, Canada and the United States too. If we are to become something else, who is arrogating the decision to wipe out our cultural identity? Because if we take in enough people who either refuse or are unable quickly enough to assimilate to Western values, belief in those values will not survive."

"Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC—which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries—has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy ‘research’."

"Valuable vocational courses have vanished along with the further education colleges that once delivered them. Now all such colleges are universities, every other tutor is a professor and all get degrees which are supposed to be of equal value. But of course this is nonsense on stilts. A degree in golf-course management does not have the same value as a degree in physics."

"Thousands of alienated young Muslims, most of them born and bred here but who regard themselves as an army within, are waiting for an opportunity to help to destroy the society that sustains them."

"The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror."

"For the further western society retreats from its core morality, the more it opens the way for Islam to fill the gaps left by Christianity in full flight from its own beliefs. Multiculturalism is predicated on the idea that all faiths are equal; but the fact is that if enfeebled Christianity no longer identifies itself as the spiritual pastor of the culture it founded, then Islam will move into the vacuum."

"I find that Muslims are often allies. Their critique offers a salutary contrast to western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity. They are right to be horrified at the wholesale destruction of the sacred, and the worship instead of consumer choice. They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society, its arrogance and the paralysis of its institutions. This is, after all, why so many are turning to fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam."

"Since most of the mass immigration now convulsing Europe is composed of Muslims, it is therefore hardly surprising that anti-immigrant feeling is largely anti-Muslim feeling. The sheer weight of numbers plus the refusal to assimilate to western values makes this an unprecedented crisis for western liberalism. The crisis is forcing it to confront the fundamental questions of what constitutes a country, national identity and the very nature of a liberal society."

"After eight years in government, Mr Blair has precious little to show for his ambitious plans to heal the divisions in society."

"For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons’ crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight."

"For this is certainly not a racial issue. Indeed, one of the many red herrings in this debate is that - if cultural characteristics are discussed at all - the gangs tend to be described as ‘Asian’. But this is to besmirch Sikhs, Hindus, ­Chinese and other Asians. For these ­particular gang members are overwhelmingly Muslim men. And the common ­characteristic is not ethnicity, but religion. For these gang members select their victims from communities which they believe to be ‘unbelievers’ — non-Muslims whom they view with disdain and hostility. You can see that this is not a racial but a religious animosity from the fact that, while the vast majority of the girls who are targeted are white, the victims include Sikhs and Hindus, too. Back in 2007, The Hindu Forum Of Britain claimed that hundreds of Hindu and Sikh girls had been intimidated by Muslim men who took them on dates before terrorising them until they converted. And the Sikh Media Monitoring group described ‘the deliberate and targeted sexual degradation of Sikh women purely because of their religion’ and how a minority of young Muslim men boasted about ‘seducing the Kaffir (unbeliever) women’."

"An unlopp’d trunk it was, and huge, Still rough; like those which men in treeless plains ... fish from the flooded rivers."

"So full of power, yet blithe and debonair, Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger."

"Mat. Arnold is a great loss to me. He was one of my firmest and dearest and best friends. Every year I had a higher opinion of him. No one ever united so much kindness and lightheartedness with so much strength. He was the most sensible man of genius whom I have ever known and the most free from personality, and his mind was very far from being exhausted."

"There is always a tincture of pride in his confessed inability to believe—a self-congratulation that he is too clear-eyed to yield to the temptations of the heart. He asks with compassionate imperiousness for demonstration rather than conviction; conviction he will not take without demonstration. The true humility of the yearning for faith is far from Mr. Arnold's conception."

"His is perhaps the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, in its ability to cut to the heart of debate and to identify what the issues of society really were."

"If a single word could resume him, it would be "academic;" but, although this perfectly describes his habitual attitude even as a poet, it leaves aside his chaste diction, his pictorial vividness, and his overwhelming pathos. The better, which is also the larger, part of his poetry is without doubt immortal. His position is distinctly independent, while this is perhaps less owing to innate originality than to the balance of competing influences. Wordsworth saves him from being a mere disciple of Goethe, and Goethe from being a mere follower of Wordsworth. As a critic he repeatedly evinced a happy instinct for doing the right thing at the right time. Apart from their high intellectual merits, the seasonableness of the preface to the poems of 1853, of the lectures on Homer, and those on the Celtic spirit, renders these monumental in English literature. His great defect as a critic is the absence of a lively aesthetic sense; the more exquisite beauties of literature do not greatly impress him unless as vehicle for the communication of ideas. He inherited his father's ethical cast of mind; conduct interests him more than genius."

"With every drawback, together with some serious failures in good taste which cannot be overlooked, Arnold's crusade against British Philistinism and imperviousness to ideas was as serviceable as it was gallant, and much rather a proof of his affection for his countrymen than of the contempt for them unjustly laid to his charge. In literature and allied subjects his chief protest against their characteristic failings was made in Culture and Anarchy (1869), a collection of essays (that had first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine) all leading up to the apotheosis of culture as the minister of the "sweetness and light" essential to the perfect character."

"[O]n discovering himself to be at issue with the bulk of his countrymen in every region of opinion, Arnold subsequently undertook the unpopular office of detector-general of the intellectual failings of his own nation. The cast of his mind was rather critical than constructive, and the gradual drying up of his native spring of poetry, at no time copious, left him no choice between criticism and silence."

"But whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist."

"A democrat by conviction rather than by temperament, urging democracy as 'the only method consistent with human instinct toward expansion,' he was yet an educator, and believed in equality upon a high, not upon a low plane. Like Ruskin, he demanded of men their best, and with less than their best refused to be satisfied."

"As a critic he was chiefly concerned to preserve criticism itself; to set a measure to praise and blame and support the classics against the fashions. It is here that it is specially true of him, if of no writer else, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was a new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman's strength was in a sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then: "Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I fear. Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis." If Newman seemed suddenly to fly into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting."

"His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian utility may be summed up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them "from a dismal and illiberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in Camberwell?""

"It is observable that Matthew Arnold, the eldest son, and the author of the volume of poems to which you allude, inherits his mother's defect. Striking and prepossessing in appearance, his manner displeased from its seeming foppery. I own it caused me at first to regard him with regretful surprise; the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative. I was told, however, that "Mr. Arnold improved upon acquaintance." So it was: ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit, and some genuine intellectual aspirations, as well as high educational acquirements, displaced superficial affectations. I was given to understand that his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, and indeed he betrayed as much in the course of conversation."

"But when he argues for an authoritative centre, like an Academy, in the field of literature; when he urges that representative government issues in pandering to the populace instead of the rule of right reason; when he praises the work done by an absolute monarchy in Prussia for the cause of education, his inclination seems clear. In the name of good taste or right reason he seeks an authority which will not pander to the bad taste of any class, and which must therefore presumably, be non-representative; and it is difficult to see where such an authority can be found except in a sort of absolute monarchy. Arnold would have instantly denied that he sought anything of this order; he would have treated the idea with elusive and delicate irony; and yet this is the one logical issue of his teaching."

"The influence of Carlyle was on the whole in favour of authoritarianism; and the teaching of Matthew Arnold ran the same way. But while Carlyle sought the aid of authority to realise divine justice, Arnold enlisted authority to defend the sweetness and light of culture against the tasteless riot of an individualistic age. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) it is the artist rather than the moralist who is in revolt against “Manchesterdom”; and Arnold is in this sense the fellow of Ruskin and Morris. But he lays his finger more definitely than his successors on a central fact of English politics—the English inability, partly due to long centuries of Dissent, partly due to the economics of laissez-faire, to form any idea of the State, “the nation in its collective and corporate capacity controlling as government the full swing of its members in the name of the higher reason of all.” In order to enthrone right reason, Arnold argues for the rule neither of the aristocracy of barbarians, nor of the middle class of philistines, nor of the populace, but of an authority which represents our best selves made perfect by culture. Where such an authority may be found he will not decide; he lays his main emphasis on the duty of attaining self-perfection through culture in order to make such an authority possible."

"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?"

"People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

"Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself."

"However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the word ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question, How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayam's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life."

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

"Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium."

"The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can."