Women From England

"I am Batley and Spen born and bred, and I could not be prouder of that. I am proud that I was made in Yorkshire and I am proud of the things we make in Yorkshire. Britain should be proud of that, too. I look forward to representing the great people of Batley and Spen here over the next five years."

"Many businesses in Yorkshire want the security and stability of Britain’s continued membership of the European Union, a cause I look forward to championing passionately in this place and elsewhere."

"Yorkshire folk are not fools."

"It is time to give city and county regions the powers and resources they need to promote growth, and I will happily work with all of those who are genuinely committed to building an economic powerhouse in the north."

"Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us."

"If you talk to quite a lot of people around the world, whether it’s in an camp or in an emergency disaster they often say the UK is a UN Security Council member, a leading member of the European Union, a leading member of , you can make a massive difference and they want us to act."

"I’ve been in some horrific situations where women have been raped repeatedly in , I’ve been with child soldiers who have been given Kalashnikov and kill members of their own family in . In Afghanistan I was talking to Afghan elders who were world weary of a lack of sustained attention from their own Government and from the international community to stop problems early. That’s the thing that all of that experience gave me - if you ignore a problem it gets worse."

"Having gone through that experience of being in a Cambridge college, surviving it and building myself up, meant that coming here (Westminster) was a walk in the park, and a lot of the same people are here!"

"I never really grew up being political or Labour. It kind of came at Cambridge where it was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered. I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year! To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years."

"The civil war in Syria is the worst humanitarian tragedy of our generation and one that our government, and the world, is failing to deal with adequately."

"This is about a deterrence effect to stop the Syrian regime targeting their own civilians. I think it would be enforceable from the Mediterranean using US French and UK military capability already out there. It would mean the aerial bombardment of Syrian civilians would stop, and it would create space for peace talks."

"The first place he went into was the Royal Exchange, .... where men of all ages and all nations were assembled, with no other view than to barter for interest. ... David ... resolved to stay no longer in a place where riches were esteemed goodness, and deceit, low cunning, and giving up all things to the love of gain were thought wisdom."

"Kester wrote about people and since human nature doesn't change his observations hadn't dated."

"A rational disposition must necessarily preclude a romantic outlook in life, and only the failures of this world can afford to dispense with a rational disposition."

"Recovering from an ill-starred romance is, after all, to anyone of sufficient will-power and self-respect, purely an attitude of mind."

"Boredom on social occasions is an inescapable hazard for the over-educated, and for the over-ambitious it must be endured."

"Man cannot live on charm alone, and an ambitious man cannot live on anything less than wealth, good social connections and substantial political influence."

"One must be rational about such matters and being rational need not mean being cold."

"Romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied, it anaesthesises them from the pain of their disordered second-rate lives [...] If romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied then surely nostalgia is the opiate of the disillusioned, for those who see all their dreams come true and find themselves living in a nightmare."

"'But never mind, all the best heroines are beautiful orphans, abandoned to their fate, and the one thing that's certain about my situation is that I'm going to be a heroine when I grow up.' 'Can I be a hero?' 'Well, I suppose you can try. But you'll have to try very hard.'"

"'Friendship's best,' I said, 'and friendship's forever because no baby can come along to spoil it.'"

"'To be distracted is pardonable. To be incoherent is simply unobliging.'"

"'Success on that scale don't make for happiness. Look at Asquith. Why does he drink? I wouldn't want you to end up a drunkard like that.'"

"Again, be patient. And have courage. Remember, everything passes, even the most unspeakable horrors."

"'Acquiring carnal knowledge is like swimming in the sea ... The sea's so beautiful to look at, so wonderful to swim in, but you must never bathe unless it's safe. People so often drown in the sea and some coasts are so very dangerous, ... like the Coast of Gower.'"

"'There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high.'"

"Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again ... To compete with Death, as I had discovered in the mountains, was to know one was alive."

"'The English don't have opinions about the Irish. They have prejudices.'"

"'Little girls don't stay playmates. Little girls become big girls and big girls become sweethearts.'"

"'Barbarity's everywhere, that's the truth of it. Absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything.' 'My dear Papa, I had no idea you were such a cynic!' 'That's not cynicism, that's honesty — as you well know, dealing with criminals as you do, seeing the human race continually at its worst.'"

"'I deserve to be thought a coward. I am a coward. I'm just so bloody afraid of dying — of losing —'"

"Every woman needs a special friend of her own sex with whom she can 'have a haircombing' about everything from menstruation to male monsters, and Julie had become that kind of special friend."

"'I could always walk out on a husband. But I could never turn my back on a friend.'"

"Distrust grows out of lies. Wrong-doing grows out of distrust. Tragedy grows out of wrong-doing. But out of honesty grows love and love's so powerful, it'll be like a suit of armour, protecting Robert, protecting you."

"'... we have to be kind, we have to be charitable and we can't condemn people just because they get in a mess...even the best people can get into ghastly messes,...we must never judge other people too harshly because although they can make awful mistakes they can still be very nice people.'"

"True doppelgängers should never meet face-to-face, you know."

"What a bloody jungle income tax is! It's a wonder we don't all go on strike and refuse to pay."

"More tears. Disgraceful. I was getting just like Kester, weeping at the drop of a hat, but of course I was Kester. I'd become him, and now there was just this other stranger who wrote me debonair notes and who sounded just like me."

"'He wasn't just being selfish, he was being realistic. Marriage would have been very difficult if not downright impossible.'"

"Christ, all you psychiatrists think about is sex — sex, sex, sex, sex, sex ..."

"Life's for living, not for mourning ... Live in the present, not the past."

"Sexual desire has to be dead as a doornail before a man and a woman can be genuinely at peace in a platonic relationship."

"Ghosts, unshriven souls, psychological hang-ups — they all exist in the mind to put people through hell — they're just different ways [...] of looking at a given situation."

"'Bloody men! sometimes I feel I hate them all.'"

"The one advantage of being childless is that one can choose one's children and so avoid the bizarre game of chance in which one passes one's best — or one's worst — genes to one's poor innocent offspring."

"But magic can't operate without a magician, and being a magician can beat a man to his knees."

"Redemption's just a word and as I'm not a Christian it means nothing to me."

"Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using such words as "higher" and "lower." What is downward about the trend that has produced elephants, chimpanzees, wolves, dolphins, and jackdaws by comparison with ants and bees?"

"If we ask how creatures [bees] that act so elaborately against their private advantage can have evolved, the answer lies in their mode of reproduction. Most workers are sterile. The unit of selection is normally the whole community. Its prosperity depends on the efficiency of the workers. An uncooperative strain would simply revert toward the solitary life these insects started from and in which many would still remain..So it is natural to understand their evolution, as we would that of a plant, without reference to the plans or wishes of the individual bees."

"The trouble with words like "fit" in these discussions is that, if taken in a wide sense they are liable to become vacuous, and if taken more narrowly they easily become tendentious. Thus the phrase "survival of the fittest" does not mean much if it means only "survival of those most likely to survive." If on the hand it means "survival of those whom we should admire most" or the like, it describes a different state of affairs; we shall need different arguments to persuade us that this is happening. In just the same way, Wilson equivocates with the notion that to be "fit" is an advantage to anybody. If it means "healthy" or "able to do what he wants to do" then it usually is so. But if it only means "likely to have many descendants," then there is no reason for treating it as an advantage at all."