people-from-york

"There is not perhaps any man so good a judge of the difficulty of writing a book, as an actual author. He soon discovers how many qualifications are necessary, how much science is required, and which are the points of most difficult access. He soon finds out his own deficiencies; and, as regards his powers, that some difficulties may be insurmountable. That essay, which sometimes originates in study and amusement, gets insensibly into growth, and is perpetuated. For, having been undertaken in the spirit of an inquirer, it is frequently carried on in the capacity of a student. This student, however, soon assumes the master, and pronounces his decisions on critical subjects, as authoritatively as if all learning and languages were at his fingers ends. ...No man’s industry is mis-spent, if he merely clear the obstruction from any path ; and the very attempt to shew what's right, frequently exposes that which is wrong; so that the immediate blunders of one person rectify those of another; and he ever must deserve well of society who attempts improvement. ...Bibliography is a dry occupation,—a caput mortuum,—it is a borrowed production, which brings very little grist to the mill; and so difficult and tedious is the object, of laying before our eyes all the real or reported copies or editions of the works enumerated, that almost every line of our reports may be suspected of falsehood. How are we to collect, how to produce, how to examine, the originals? Many books are so scarce, so sequestered in private hands, or in the mansions of the great, that even the keen eyes of lucriferous booksellers cannot find them. And if they cannot, who the deuce can?"

"Low entropy states are not closer to death. Death is characterized by dissipation, decay and dispersion. It is the ultimate high entropy state—literally, the edge of our existential world, when we are gently absorbed back into the universe."

"A sentry on the Congo is a dare-devil aboriginal chosen from troops impressed outside the district in which he serves, for his loyalty and force of character. Armed with a rifle and pouch of cartridges he is located in a native village to see that the labour for which its inhabitants are responsible is duly attended to. If they are india rubber collectors, his duty is to send the men into the forest and take note of those who do not return with the proper quantity. When food is the tax demanded, his business is to make sure that the women prepare and deliver it; and in every other matter connected with the Government he is the factotum, as far as that village is concerned, of the officer of the district, his power being limited only by the amount of zeal the latter may show in checking oppression."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"Men ignorant of letters, studious for their bellies, and ignominiously lazy."

"Lesser historians, timid or inhibited, aimed at correctness; Hill had wider ends to serve. He has served that cause with more profound influence on his time than any of his peers. Among the English Marxist historians, that galaxy of talent from the 1960s, Hill was and is a prince of academe... Now that Marxism can no longer harm, the point is not to refute Hill but to appreciate him. Every scrap of his writing is to be treasured; every essay, every review overflows with historical skill. Every part of his work includes the whole. This collection of studies focuses on crime, and crime seen from the viewpoint of the ordinary man as social protest. This thesis is not new: its classic formulation was by E. P. Thompson 20 years ago. Nor am I more persuaded now than I was then: it strikes me as an Alice in Wonderland vision in which all the criminals are victims and all their victims become criminals. I am not persuaded that "the land-less" were "the law-less". Court records show that the poor are the chief victims of crime, however much Hill's literary sources romanticise criminals as Robin Hoods. Yet this hardly seems to matter beside the learning and deftness with which Hill makes his theme so fascinating."

"Most men and women of the seventeenth century Britain still lived in a world of magic, in which God and the devil intervened daily, a world of witches, fairies, and charms. If they failed, the royal touch would cure scrofula."

"Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege."

"Just as Oliver Cromwell aimed to bring about the kingdom of God on earth and founded the British Empire, so Bunyan wanted the millennium and got the novel."

"Our laws will then be made in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and interpreted not by judges in Luxembourg but by judges across the United Kingdom"

"The simple fact is that the mandate (in June's referendum) was to leave the European Union - full stop. We need to keep that in mind when we are going through that process."

"There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside."

"If we do a free trade agreement with Europe it will be beneficial for both sides, as it were, on its own two feet, without having to pay anything to do it. That's what we're aiming for."

"It is time for Britain to take control of its own destiny."

"If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy."

"There is a proper role for referendums in constitutional change, but only if done properly. If it is not done properly, it can be a dangerous tool. The Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, who is no longer in the Chamber, said that Clement Attlee—who is, I think, one of the Deputy Prime Minister's heroes—famously described the referendum as the device of demagogues and dictators. We may not always go as far as he did, but what is certain is that pre-legislative referendums of the type the Deputy Prime Minister is proposing are the worst type of all. ¶ Referendums should be held when the electorate are in the best possible position to make a judgment. They should be held when people can view all the arguments for and against and when those arguments have been rigorously tested. In short, referendums should be held when people know exactly what they are getting. So legislation should be debated by Members of Parliament on the Floor of the House, and then put to the electorate for the voters to judge. ¶ We should not ask people to vote on a blank sheet of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards. For referendums to be fair and compatible with our parliamentary process, we need the electors to be as well informed as possible and to know exactly what they are voting for. Referendums need to be treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it."

"Project managers who believe that closing down a project will wreck their careers are tempted to carry on in the hope they will have a slight chance of saving their reputations. Both courses carry the risk of disaster for those responsible for a project, but one—abandonment—is often far better for the company."

"DD [David Davis] is manufactured exactly to specification as the perfect stooge for [Cabinet Secretary Jeremy] Heywood: thick as mince, lazy as a toad, & vain as Narcissus."

"He's the only man I know who can swagger while sitting down."

"He works incredibly hard but he always likes to take August off."

"[On concerns over reputed rising authoritarianism in the UK] We're never going to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, despite all the waffling on about it. It's not going to happen. So there’s always that backstop."

"Free speech is one of our fundamental rights — it is not a gift from the state to be withdrawn at the whim of a government, but the birth right of our citizens. I sympathise with the aims of this government to maintain law and order — but that must not be at the expense of our precious rights and freedoms..."

"[E]very law we write must be written on the presumption that it will be a government very unlike ours who will be in charge at some point in the future."

"You can change the leader, you can't change the numbers. We've got to focus on the issue here, which is delivering on the Brexit demand of the British people. That means leaving the customs union and leaving the single market."

"Nobody has ever pretended that this will be easy. I have always said that this negotiation will be tough, complex and, at times, confrontational."

"We are none of us infallible—not even the youngest of us."

"We need a proper referendum that will come to a resolution on the issue, with remain on the ballot paper."

"I think the interesting thing about Windrush is that perhaps for the first time the public opinion has been ahead of the politicians in seeing that there is a terrible injustice here and it should not be allowed to pass."

"The immediate preoccupation is to work with people in other parties to stop Brexit, but in the longer term there may well be realignment because of the deep splits in the parties and I want my party to be at the centre of it."

"Liberal democracy itself is under threat notably in the USA, in eastern Europe and perhaps here. Authoritarians and extremists of both right and left are on the march."

"I think it's very clear that people in Scotland, as in other parts of the United Kingdom, don't want Brexit to happen. They want to stop it and it can be stopped, and the best mechanism for stopping it is to have a people's vote. I think momentum is building up behind that and I'm trying to work with people in other parties to make sure it happens."

"Whether you see yourself as a liberal, social democrat, progressive, or centrist there is a home for you here, particularly as we fight Brexit together"

"We're absolutely solid that we need to vote against Brexit and stop it."

"Brexit is not inevitable - it can and it must be stopped,"

"We are absolutely solid that we need to vote against Brexit and stop it"

"Are we going to make a terrible mistake, leaving behind our influence in Europe's most successful peace project and the world's biggest marketplace?"

"We have long argued it is the right and logical thing to do for the people to have the final say on Brexit."

"[We should] go back to the people [with another referendum]"

"[Young people felt their future had been] taken away from them by a very narrow majority"

"I understand how angry people are on both sides. There are some angry Leavers and there are some very angry Remainers too, particularly young people who feel their future has been taken away from them on the basis of a very narrow majority, where a significant majority of the electorate did not vote and many young people did not get an opportunity to vote."

"I'm afraid the referendum resolved nothing and we do have to go back to the people and ask if what is now on offer is what they really voted for. We have got completely different views about what Brexit actually means. What has emerged over the last three years is that the prospectus on which the Leave vote was achieved was based on a tissue of lies to be frank."

"Brexit will make us poorer and risks breaking up our United Kingdom. We must stop it and we will."

"The House has noticed his remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from national treasure to Treasury poodle."

"We have to be careful of Vince Cable, he's extremely sharp and clever. In fact, he's almost as sharp and clever as he thinks he is."

"[There is a] fundamental economic issue of whether any company which uses data from individuals to make money should pay the owner of that data for its use... The new oil is data. Data is the raw material which drives these firms and it is control of data which gives them an advantage over competitors"

"We didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour,"

"We're being held to ransom by these pinstripe Scargills..."

"The big, looming, monetary issue is "quantitative easing": that is, printing money. What happens is that the government borrows from the Bank of England, not from the markets. It expands the money supply to keep the economy going and also to counter deflation without simultaneously increasing government debt. The attractions are obvious, as are the dangers. The Robert Mugabe school of economics provides a salutary warning about uncontrolled monetary expansion in generating hyper-inflation. The road to Harare is not as long as we might hope. Monetary easing may prove to be necessary but will have to be managed with great skill and care: Too little easing and the crisis drags on – as in Japan. If there is too much, the authorities face the messy task of mopping-up liquidity by issuing bonds which add to the burden of borrowing or else we lurch back from deflation to inflation. So interest rates may soon become yesterday's story."

"These masters of the universe must be tamed in the interests of the ordinary families whose jobs and livelihoods are being put at risk... The Tories won't say anything about the current crisis as they are completely in the pockets of the hedge funds."

"The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr. Bean, creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos."