Academics From The United Kingdom

"Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion."

"Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party."

"Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about."

"I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks."

"Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't."

"Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."

"And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said…"Chips with everything". Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything."

"If the electrician who comes to mend my fuse blows it instead, so I should stop having electricity? I should cut off my light? Socialism is my light, can you understand that?"

"Education ent only books and music – it's asking questions, all the time. There are millions of us, all over the country, and no one, not one of us, is asking questions, we're all taking the easiest way out."

"Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another."

"The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations."

"No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin."

"I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man."

"Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably one's forebears'."

"Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with a sword."

"His literary knowledge gave a fine flavour to his speeches, and he made by far the best adaptation of a quotation that I heard in the House of Commons."

"As militant pamphleteer Harcourt was of the first order—as good as Junius or Swift or Bolingbroke, in weight, scorn, directness, trenchant stroke. When any ecclesiastical pretensions irritated the Erastianism that was the deepest and most undying of his political tenets, his pen made prelates and their crosiers shake."

"Harcourt was the last of that long train of reasoners, debaters, orators, law-makers, great from Somers and Sir Robert Walpole onwards. New elements of feeling were edging their way into the public mind. The old plain, hard, secular, commonsense, after the Reform Bill of 1832 had revolutionised the foundations of parliamentary aristocracy, has become deepened and enriched, but changed. Harcourt was the last stout-hearted representative of the parliamentary polity of a long and not inglorious era."

"It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested."

"As regards the principle of the Bill, I, for one, am entirely in accord with it... Why, it is the great principle of the "three acres and a cow" which we fought out at the Election of 1885. ... The principle of the Bill, as I take it, is to be this—that the Local Authority is to have power by compulsion to acquire land for the advantage of the community in letting it out, or otherwise disposing of it to individuals. ... This was the great charge of Socialism which was brought against my right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham; but, happily, we are all Socialists now."

"We are supreme and irresistible in our force. We can do what we like. We can crush these Dutchmen in the Transvaal, and you will have to crush the Dutchmen all over South Africa. You may send out a corps d'armée and you can do that; of that there is no doubt. But that, I hope, is not the question. For us it is not what we can do, but what is right we should do and what we ought to do. That is the only supremacy which I claim for the English nation."

"If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world."

"Harcourt had many advantages as a speaker: a commanding presence, a classical style, a caustic humour, considerable erudition, and a wide knowledge of affairs. I heard him make many powerful speeches, but he was not naturally eloquent. I doubt if he ever moved an audience either to deep feeling or to tears—which might serve as a definition of oratory; and he failed to convince his hearers of sincerity or conviction—an impression which was encouraged by some of the circumstances of his political career. In satire, raillery, and scorn, not always highly refined, he was proficient. I remember calling upon him once in his rooms at Cambridge, where he was Professor of International Law, in 1879. He handed me a copy of a speech in this vein which he had just delivered at Southport in Lancashire—a place I was later to represent in Parliament—with the remark: "That speech will make me Home Secretary in the next Administration"—and so it did. Though he was very effective in improvised retort,—more so I think than when prepared—he became in later years so much a slave to his MS., that he lost all appearance of spontaneity."

"Socialism is the legitimate and inevitable corollary of Mr. Bright's doctrine. If want is the crime of the Government, then the duty of the Government must be to provide against want. This is Socialism pure and simple. It begins with national workshops, and ends with what Mr. Carlyle calls a "whiff of grapeshot." Mr. Bright may pretend to direct his attacks against the aristocracy alone, but it is the possessors of capital, the employers of labour, the great middle class of this country who have real cause to dread his revolutionary language."

"Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect."

"The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away."

"If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride."

"Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini."

"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."

"[Published shortly after Weldon died in January 2023] Twenty years ago, I was dispatched to interview Weldon at home in Hampstead, north London. Her then husband, Nick, answered the door and immediately began a brutal interrogation. My name sounded familiar. Hadn't I given Fay's novel The Bulgari Connection, a book controversially sponsored by the Italian jeweller, a stinking review? Uh oh. But I wasn’t about to confess: I had a job to do. Was it definitely me he was thinking of? And was the review really a stinker? Maybe marital loyalty had made it seem worse than it was. The interview began. Fay and I were getting along just fine when the door burst open. In strode her husband, in his hand a copy of the dreaded review, extracts from which he proceeded to read aloud as my entire body turned crimson (though I have to admit – icy chip and all that – I was also thinking what a good anecdote this would make later). As for Fay, a woman who understood revenge, she was enjoying herself mightily. "She's very hard, isn’t she?" she said to Nick, smiling like a goblin. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it." And then: "Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now." His work done, Nick left the room and we resumed, as if nothing had happened."

"One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods."

"Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully."

"Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on."

"I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?"

"Go to work on an egg."

"Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon."

"The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself…They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them."

"I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?"

"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is."

"I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas."

"It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly. This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either. The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision. In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers."

"Incomplete knowledge of the future, and also of the past of the transmitter from which the future might be constructed, is at the very basis of the concept of information. On the other hand, complete ignorance also precludes communication; a common language is required, that is to say an agreement between the transmitter and the receiver regarding the elements used in the communication process... [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.' These data comprise both the convention regarding the symbols and the language used, and the knowledge available at the moment when the message started."

"Religion, then, is Love's Celestial Force That penetrates thro' all to Its True Source; Loves all along, but with proportion'd Bent, As Creatures further the Divine Ascent, Not to the Skies or Stars, but to the part That will be always uppermost, — the Heart, There is the Seat, as Holy Writings tell, Where the Most High Himself delights to dwell; Whither attracting the desirous Will To its true Rest, He saves it from all Ill, Gives it to find in His Abyssal Love An Heav'n within, — in other Words, Above."

"All which she entreats, for His Sake, to be done, Who suffer'd to save them, Christ Jesus, His Son,— In respect to the World, the Redeemer of All; "To the Church of the Faithful, most chiefly," saith Paul; And to them who shall suffer, whoever they be, In the Spirit of Christ, in the highest Degree. How ought such a Goodness all Minds to prepare For an hearty "Amen" to this Catholic Pray'r!"

"The Church is indeed, in its real Intent, An Assembly where Nothing but Friendship is meant; And the utter Extinction of Foeship and Wrath By the Working of Love in the Strength of its Faith. This gives it its holy and catholic Name, And truly confirms its apostolic Claim; Showing what the One Saviour's One Mission had been: "Go and teach all the World," — ev'ry Creature therein. In the Praise ever due to the Gospel of Grace Its Universality holds the first Place. When an Angel proclaim'd Its glad Tidings the Morn That the Son of the Virgin, the Saviour, was born, "Which shall be to all People," was said to complete The angelical Message, so good and so great, Full of " Glory to God," in the Regions Above, And of "Goodness to Men," is so Boundless a Love."

"The One Unbounded, Undivided Good, By all His Creatures partly understood. If therefore Sense of its apparent Parts Raise not His Love or Worship in our Hearts, Our selfish Wills or Notions we may feast, And have no more Religion than a Beast."

"God bless the King! (I mean our faith's defender!) God bless! (No harm in blessing) the Pretender. But who Pretender is, and who is King, God bless us all! That's quite another thing!"

"Religion's Meaning when I would recall, Love is to me the plainest Word of all. Plainest, — because that what I love, or hate, Shews me directly my internal State; By its own Consciousness is best defin'd Which way the Heart within me stands inclin'd. On what it lets its Inclination rest, To that its real Worship is address'd; Whatever Forms or Ceremonies spring From Custom's Force, there lies the real Thing; Jew, Turk or Christian be the Lover's Name, If same the Love, Religion is the same."

"This short Supplication, or Litany, read When the longer with us is not wont to be said, Tho' brief in Expression, as fully imports The Will to all Blessings, for "Men of all Sorts," — Same brotherly Love, by which Christians are taught To "pray without ceasing," or limiting Thought; That Religion may flourish upon its true Plan Of Glory to God and Salvation to Man."

"Of all Religions if we take a View, There is but one that ever can be true, — One God, One Christ, One Spirit, none but He. All else is Idol, whatsoe'er it be,— A Good that our Imaginations make, Unless we love it purely for His Sake."