Non Fiction Authors From England

"I believe that the accumulated experience of mankind, and his wonderful discoveries, are of great value. I only point out that they do not constitute real-progress in human nature itself,..."

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

"Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal."

"The fruit of the tree of knowledge, always drives man from some paradise or other."

"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."

"It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally."

"Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy."

"The old civilisation, with all the brilliant qualities which make many moderns regret its destruction, rested on too narrow a base. The woman and the slave were left out, the woman especially by the Greeks, and the slave by the Romans."

"True contemplation considers Reality (or Being) in its manifestations as well as in its origin. If this is remembered, there need be no conflict between social morality and the inner life. Eckhart recognises that it is a harder and a nobler task to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than selfimposed mortifications. "We need not destroy any little good in ourselves for the sake of a better, but we should strive to grasp every truth in its highest meaning, for no one good contradicts another." "Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him." There is much more of the same kind in Eckhart's sermons — as good and sensible doctrine as one could find anywhere."

"The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our minds."

"No word in our language — not even "Socialism"— has been employed more loosely than "Mysticism." … The history of the word begins in close connexion with the Greek mysteries. A mystic is one who has been, or is being, initiated into some esoteric knowledge of Divine things, about which he must keep his mouth shut…"

"Obviously, he was the first — he was the Governor. Right from the start with those very precocious sketches for the Cambridge Footlights and through Beyond the Fringe, he was an exceptional talent... Every 10 years or so you always get a new generation of comedians but they all acknowledge their debt to Peter."

"He's one of those people who is completely and utterly irreplaceable. One of the things he did was to form the basis of what one would call the new comedy of the 1960s and 1970s. His achievement is absolutely extraordinary."

"I didn't know dirty words could be done that artfully."

"I remember being moved to tears when Peter said: "I know I was funny but I know I won't improve, I won't get any better". I was lucky to be around when he was at his peak. Verbally he was the most witty man that I have ever come across and strangely inventive."

"I realised what everyone else had been talking about: the brilliance of Peter's humour. It was brilliant and it was luminous. And it was... easy. Not easy for you and me to come to... but easy for him. It just rolled out of him... almost as if he didn't need to think about it."

"The first time I saw Peter what made the impression was the visual content of what he and Dudley Moore were doing. It was Not Only, But Also..., and Pete and Dud were dressed up as nuns and were bouncing up and down on a trampoline. I rolled off my seat. I thought I'd ever seen anything so hilarious or so surreal or so... well... beautiful. I spent the next four or five years trying to emulate that sort of visual surprise."

"Peter never had any regrets in his life. I never heard him voice any regrets. He didn't regret the fact that he lost his early facility, he didn't regret the fact that he lost his looks, which he did quite spectacularly, he didn't regret the fact that Dudley had gone on to fame and fortune in Hollywood. The only regret he regularly voiced was that, at the house we all shared in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1963, he'd saved David Frost from drowning."

"He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness... He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them."

"He got used early to the adulation of a wide public and eventually decided that he could do without it; long before the end, fame had to chase him far harder than he chased it. But among his fellow practitioners his lustre was undimmed, unequalled. and unchallenged. … Just as the astronauts riding up on their rockets all worshipped Chuck Yeager, the jet pilot who never joined them in space because he flew too well with wings, so the media millionaires all knew that Cook was the unsurpassable precursor who had done it all before they did, and done it better."

"It is a sad fact that when people are really enjoying themselves and laughing immoderately, they can afterwards remember very little of the conversation, very few of the jokes. There was the famous occasion when Peter addressed a group of revellers at a lunch celebrating 25 years of Private Eye. Almost everyone who was there, myself included, will tell you it was the funniest, most brilliant speech they had ever heard. But ask us to recall the jokes and there will be a complete blank. Peter's funniest performances were generally of this impromptu, unscripted variety."

"I'll leave with a story whose victim, Sir David Frost, won't mind it being told, because he tells it himself. David Frost rang Peter Cook up some years ago. "Peter, I'm having a little dinner party on behalf of Prince Andrew and his new bride-to-be Sarah Ferguson. I know they'd love to meet you, big fans; Be super if you could make it: Wednesday the twelfth." "Hang on... I'll just check my diary." Pause and rummaging and leafing through diary noises. And then Peter said "Oh dear. I find I'm watching television that night.""

"Being British in this part of the century meant living in the country that had Peter Cook in it. There are wits and there are clowns in comedy, I suppose. Peter was a wit, it goes without saying, but he was funny in an almost supernatural way that has never been matched by anyone I've met or even heard about. It wasn't to do with facial expression or epigrammatic wit, or cattiness or rant or anger or technique: he had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty or dancers have line and grace. He had an ability to make people gasp and gasp and gasp for breath like landed fish."

"The funniest man who ever drew breath."

"Have you the wing?"

"And wuv, twue wuv, wiww fowwow you fowevah —"

"Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togethew today. Mawwage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam."

"You are now to retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of "Not Guilty"."

"You will probably have noticed that three of the defendants have very wisely chosen to exercise their inalienable right not to go into the witness box to answer a lot of impertinent questions. I will merely say that you are not to infer from this anything other than that they consider the evidence against them so flimsy that it was scarcely worth their while to rise from their seats and waste their breath denying these ludicrous charges..."

"All right, you great git, you've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even you'll be ashamed of yourself! No wonder you've so few friends; you're unbelievable!"

"I've done a good deed. I gave that little twit his soul back. Wasn't that generous?"

"Tell God not to go away. I'll be back in a minute."

"And the magic word: Julie Andrews!"

"In the words of Marcel Proust — and this applies to any woman in the world — if you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is that they're coming out with, till ten minutes past four in the morning... you're in."

"Job was what you'd technically describe as a loony."

"There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas... I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising."

"Now, then, what'd you like to be first? Prime Minister? Oh, no — I've made that deal already."

"It's the standard contract. Gives you seven wishes in accordance with the mystic rules of life. Seven Days of the Week, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Seas, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers..."

"What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages."

"You realize that suicide's a criminal offense — In less enlightened times they'd have hung you for it."

"The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room."

"Well, it's always very difficult to say what prompts anybody to do anything, let alone getting underwater and teaching ravens to fly. But I think it probably all dates back to a very early age, when I was quite a young fellow. My mother, Lady Beryl Streeb-Greebling, you know, the wonderful dancer — 107 tomorrow and still dancing — she came up to me in the conservatory — I was pruning some walnuts — and she said "Arthur" — I wasn't Sir Arthur in those days — she said "Arthur, if you don't get underwater and start teaching ravens to fly, I'll smash your stupid face off," and I think it was this that sort of first started my interest in the whole business of getting them underwater."

"The leg division, Mr Spiggot. You are deficient in it to the tune of one. Your right leg, I like. I like your right leg, it's a lovely leg for the role. That's what I said when I saw it come in. I said, "that's a lovely leg for the role". I've got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is — neither have you. You fall down on your left."

"We believe this to be the work of thieves, and I'll tell you why. The whole pattern is very reminiscent of past robberies where we have found thieves to be involved. The tell-tale loss of property — that's one of the signs we look for."

"I would like to like to make one thing clear at the very outset and that is, when you speak of a train robbery, this involved no loss of train, merely what I like to call the contents of the train, which were pilfered. We haven't lost a train since 1946, I believe it was — the year of the great snows when we mislaid a small one."

"I've always been after the trappings of great luxury. But all I've got hold of are the trappings of great poverty. I've got hold of the wrong load of trappings, and a rotten load they are too, ones I could have very well done without."

"I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin'. I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as being a judge was concerned... I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal."

"If a dog starts biting you, you can't kick it up the throat like it deserves. People always say "Oh dear, poor little dog, he was only trying to be friendly. That's the way he tries to be friendly, sniffing at your ankles and biting you, you cruel, wicked man.""

"I've been reading a very interesting book recently. It's called The Universe and All That Surrounds It by T J Bleendreeble. It's an extremely good book about it. It's about seventy pages long, so it's fairly comprehensive about the whole thing and it's fairly interesting. Bleendreeble specialises in the universe. He doesn't branch out much beyond that. But he's quite interested in this limited field."

"Poor old Spotty Muldoon. He thought of splitting the atom the other day. If only he could have had the idea about thirty years ago, he'd have made a bloody fortune."