Autobiographers From England

"I was born under a lucky star, and I have nothing whatsoever to regret. I wouldn’t change a thing about my life."

"If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."

"Making money never was my incentive. I just want to fight big companies."

"My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around."

"I became an entrepreneur by mistake. Ever since then I've gone into business, not to make money, but because I think I can do it better than it's been done elsewhere. And, quite often, just out of personal frustration about the way it's been done by other people."

"My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, “Oh God, I've got to do this today.”"

"One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes."

"Have the lower animals "rights?" Undoubtedly—if men have."

"It was Mr. Salt's book, A Plea for Vegetarianism, which showed me why, apart from a hereditary habit, and apart from my adherence to a vow administered to me by my mother, it was right to be a vegetarian. He showed me why it was a moral duty incumbent on vegetarians not to live upon fellow-animals."

"I read Salt's book [A Plea for Vegetarianism] from cover to cover and was very much impressed by it. From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice."

"It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all. … In fact, if we once admit that it is an advantage to an animal to be brought into the world, there is hardly any treatment that cannot be justified by the supposed terms of such a contract. Also, the argument must apply to mankind. It has, in fact, been the plea of the slave-breeder; and it is logically just as good an excuse for slave-holding as for flesh-eating. It would justify parents in almost any treatment of their children, who owe them, for the great boon of life, a debt of gratitude which no subsequent services can repay. We could hardly deny the same merit to cannibals, if they were to breed their human victims for the table, as the early Peruvians are said to have done."

"I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a "panacea" for human ills; it is something much more rational—an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past."

"Has the artist ever considered the history of the "chop" which is brought so elegantly to his studio? … He has first employed a slaughterman … to convert a beautiful living creature into a hideous carcase, to be displayed with other carcases in that ugliest product of civilisation, a butcher's shop, and then he has employed a cook to conceal, as far as may be, the work of the slaughterman. This is what the Spectator calls being "humanised" by schools of cookery; I should call it being de-humanised."

"Before passing on, I will merely add this, that in some ways the evils attendant on slaughtering grow worse, and not better, as civilisation advances, because of the more complex conditions of town life, and the increasingly long journeys to which animals are subjected in their transit from the grazier to the slaughterman."

"The ignorance, carelessness, and brutality are not only in the rough-handed slaughtermen, but in the polite ladies and gentlemen whose dietetic habits render the slaughtermen necessary."

"I say ethical principle, because it is beyond doubt that the chief motive of Vegetarianism is the humane one. Questions of hygiene and of economy both play their part, and an important part, in a full discussion of food reform; but the feeling which underlies and animates the whole movement is the instinctive horror of butchery, especially the butchery of the more highly organized animals, so human, so near akin to man."

"In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility." But it was not until after the age of Rousseau, from which must be dated the great humanitarian movement of the past century, that Vegetarianism began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the disuse of flesh-food."

"As man is truly “humanised”, not by schools of cookery but by schools of thought, he will abandon the barbarous habit of his flesh-eating ancestors, and will make gradual progress towards a purer, simpler, more humane, and therefore more civilised diet-system."

"The charge of "sentimentalism" is frequently brought against those who plead for animals' rights. Now "sentimentalism," if any meaning at all can be attached to the word, must signify an inequality, an ill balance of sentiment, an inconsistency which leads men into attacking one abuse, while they ignore or condone another where a reform is equally desirable. That this weakness is often observable among "philanthropists" on the one hand, and "friends of animals" on the other, and most of all among those acute "men of the world," whose regard is only for themselves, I am not concerned to deny; what I wish to point out is, that the only real safeguard against sentimentality is to take up a consistent position towards the rights of men and of the lower animals alike, and to cultivate a broad sense of universal justice (not "mercy") for all living things. Herein, and herein alone, is to be sought the true sanity of temperament."

"[The] notion of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day—it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a 'great gulf' fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood."

"If "rights" exist at all—and both feeling and usage indubitably prove that they do exist—they cannot be consistently awarded to men and denied to animals, since the same sense of justice and compassion apply in both cases."

"Oppression and cruelty are invariably founded on a lack of imaginative sympathy; the tyrant or tormentor can have no true sense of kinship with the victim of his injustice. When once the sense of affinity is awakened, the knell of tyranny is sounded, and the ultimate concession of "rights" is simply a matter of time."

"We have to decide, not whether the practice of fox-hunting, for example, is more, or less, cruel than vivisection, but whether all practices which inflict unnecessary pain on sentient beings are not incompatible with the higher instincts of humanity."

"The Animals, you say, were "sent" For man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, Why came they aeons before Man did, To spend long centuries on earth, Awaiting their Devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from Heaven, Were, sure, the maddest gift e'er given— "Sent" for Man's usage (can Man believe it?) When there was no Man to receive it!"

"No League of Nations, or of individuals, can avail, without a change of heart. Reformers of all classes must recognize that it is useless to preach peace by itself, or socialism by itself, or anti-vivisection by itself, or vegetarianism by itself, or kindness to animals by itself. The cause of each and all of the evils that afflict the world is the same the general lack of humanity, the lack of the knowledge that all sentient life is akin, and that he who injures a fellow-being is in fact doing injury to himself. The prospects of a happier society are wrapped up in this despised and neglected truth, the very statement of which, at the present time, must (I well know) appear ridiculous to the accepted instructors of the people."

"Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty."

"I shall die ... as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian."

"The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone."

"And, after all, the humane spirit, which is the motive power of all true schemes of reform, is, by its very essence, independent of belief in what is commonly called "success." We work for an ideal, not because we believe the ideal is destined to be triumphant, but because we are impelled so to work, and cannot, without violence to our best instincts, act otherwise. We protest against cruelty and injustice for the same reason, not merely because we feel that the dawn of a better day is at hand, but because such a protest has to be made, and we know intuitively that we must help to make it. Of the event we can have no absolute assurance—it rests for other minds and other hands than our—but we can at least be assured that we have done what was natural and inevitable to us, and that, whether successful or unsuccessful, there was no other course for a thoughtful man to take."

"I realise that you don't want to know what is going on in Russia or let your readers know... I feel utterly disgusted... The hypocrisy of it all, the salesmanship, the Kinglsey-Martin-Bernard-Shaw-Sidney-and-Beatrice-Webb slop that frothed around that dark tyranny and famine made me sick."

"While working at the BBC, Muggeridge had earned the label "NSIT" ("not safe in taxis"). His niece [Sally Muggeridge], took a relaxed view of such matters, telling the Daily Mail: "I grew up in the Sixties and know about these things..."It was all the more remarkable the he had been able to effect such a life-changing transition in his 60s to a born-again Christian, adopting a much more Spartan lifestyle: not only giving up sex, smoking and drinking, but also becoming a vegetarian.""

"To carry personal responsibility for keeping God alive in the modern world would be a grievous burden for anyone, even Muggeridge, whose search for the Kingdom has been fascinating to observe but who, since he found it, has been sadly in danger of becoming Christianity's most bizarre exhibitionist. Face contorted, hands clawing in the air to pantomime his inner anguish, world weary and longing for an apocalyptic end to a Naughty Age, Malcolm reviles the medium which feeds him and begs reassurance that he is still loved from the assorted personalities who gather about him like Plato's disciples. 'Why?' his strangulated cry goes up - tempting a heavenly retort 'Why indeed?'"

"The Webbs ridiculed another visitor to the USSR who saw things differently. This was Malcolm Muggeridge, the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. Muggeridge journeyed by train through the famine-stricken Ukraine, witnessing the consequences of official measures. Desperate peasants crowded railway-station platforms as he travelled south. The bloated bodies of starving children orphaned by the deaths of executed or malnourished parents horrified him. The dismissiveness of local party and government functionaries when he questioned what was going on failed to fool him. He refused to be lathered with communist soft soap. Unfortunately his editor in Manchester usually preferred a lighter treatment of the Soviet Union. Muggeridge resigned but not before he got at least some of his dispatches printed. Indeed the Manchester Guardian also accepted an account by Gareth Jones, the Russian-speaking former secretary of David Lloyd George. Jones was horrified by what he witnessed in Ukrainian villages, and gave vivid speeches on the subject after returning to Britain. Muggeridge wrote up a searing account of his own experiences in his book Winter in Moscow."

"The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectual, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers."

"Only a handful of Western reporters - notably Gareth Jones of the Daily Express, Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian, Pierre Berland of Le Temps and William Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor - had the guts to publish accurate reports about the famine. The bulk of the press corps in Moscow, notably Walter Duranty of the New York Times, knowingly connived at the cover-up for fear of jeopardizing their access to the nomenklatura."

"It is a frightening thought that a man as prejudiced as Muggeridge was allowed such power in an organisation such as the BBC, and in other equally powerful organs of the media. Here was a man who was known to be deeply anti-Semitic ... , whose entire life and actions were determined by prejudices, and who was openly carrying on with extramarital sexual liaisons despite pronouncing pious values. He also tried to use his position to stop other people from using contraception. He was a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and of other American war exercises. He cast doubt on the suffering in Hiroshima; he participated in CIA funded clandestine activities... He had absolutely no room in his psyche for relativism in religion, for tolerance and understanding, and he fervently believed that Christianity should go out with the sword as well as the Gospel to conquer inferior cultures. He would have no hesitation in twisting and bending facts in order to promote Christianity — in this he had an ally in Teresa."

"The whole atmosphere [of a party hosting a pro-democracy, anti-communist Albanian National Committee] was spoilt... by Malcolm Muggeridge, who declared in a loud voice that Albania was a ridiculous country anyway that ought to be partitioned as soon as possible between Greece and Yugoslavia."

"You are one of those obsessed demoniacal creatures who ought to be avoided at all costs; they bring misfortune into the lives of others; they ruin the lives of others. The real good people are humble and silent (like your Kitty is). But beware, God sees all vanity and pride and you cannot fool him."

"Malcolm, what does worry me about you is that you are a born defector. I won’t say that you mess on your own doorstep, at least not until you have moved. And then when you have moved you go back round and set fire to the basement. You worked for the Manchester Guardian and have never ceased to abuse it. You went to the Soviet Union expecting a socialist paradise but never found it, but you have no sympathy for anyone else who was similarly misled. One of your best friends was Kingsley Martin and you wrote some of the best things you’ve done in his magazine the New Statesman, and yet in some of your most brutal anecdotes he is the butt of them, you never stop saying how gullible the New Statesmen are on the left, you were an outstanding editor of Punch and you have hated it ever since. You made an outstanding international reputation on television and now you tell us it is an idiot’s lantern. You have had as I understand it a very active and varied sex life but now you tell us that the very act itself is appalling and degrading and ludicrous. What I would like to see at the age of 71 you should join the Roman Catholic church, they could hardly make you less than a Cardinal. And in not more than ten years say at the age of 80 I prophesy that you would leave it in a spectacular blaze of publicity denouncing it as a laughable, and farcical, and a dangerous institution."

"Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time."

"You see, when I was young, people used to say the poor had too many children. Or, at the time of the famine in Ireland, they would say that the Irish had too many children. We were taking the food from Ireland, and the Irish were starving, and we said they were starving because they had too many children. Now we who are sated, who have to adopt the most extravagant and ridiculous devices to consume what we produce, while watching whole vast populations getting hungrier and hungrier, overcome our feelings of guilt by persuading ourselves that these others are too numerous, have too many children. (...) They ask for bread and we give them contraceptives! (...) In future history books it will be said, and it will be a very ignoble entry, that just at the moment in our history when we, through our scientific and technical ingenuity, could produce virtually as much food as we wanted to, just when we were opening up and exploring the universe, we set up a great whimpering and wailing, and said there were too many people in the world. It's pitiful."

"There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness… is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ‘’the pursuit of happiness'’ is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world."

"Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [Kierkegaard] pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or the clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise."

"I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted."

"We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy…One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant…I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still."

"One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency. The contrast is well exemplified in two exact contemporaries — Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir; both highly intelligent and earnestly disposed. In all the fearful moral dilemmas of our time, Simone Weil never once went astray, whereas Simone de Beauvoir, with I am sure the best of intentions, has found herself aligned with apologists for some of the most monstrous barbarities and falsehoods of history."

"It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits — like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding — inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention."

"If you say to me that men are so made that the strongest kicks the weakest in the teeth and then the strongest survive, and go on to argue that if you apply this to economics you will get a happy society, you have done an irreparable wrong as we know, as we have seen."

"I wonder whether, in the history of all the civilisations that have ever been, a more insanely optimistic notion has ever been entertained than that you and I, mortal, puny creatures, may yet aspire, with God’s grace and Christ’s help, to be reborn into what St Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God. Or if there was ever a more abysmally pessimistic one than that we, who reach out with our minds and our aspirations to the stars and beyond, should be able so to arrange our lives, so to eat and drink and fornicate and learn and frolic, that our brief span in this world fulfils all our hopes and desires."

"The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realise, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth."