Oh dear, there isn’t too much happening this month and it doesn’t hep that I’ve been both swamped with stuff which has to be done, a recalcitrant PC and struggling with an ongoing ear infection. Why do these things always come along together? Maybe they’re London buses?
Anyway, enough of my woes, let’s to our monthly selection of quotes — and even these are rather thin on the ground this month.
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
[Carl Jung]
No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your “religious freedom”. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.
[President Barack Obama]
Try not to think of it as a debate. Try to think of it as couples therapy. Two people with irreconcilable differences fighting for custody of a child that most people have given up on.
[John Crace; Guardian; 09/09/2016; commenting on the Labour leadership contest]
It’s wonderful being able to make people so angry when one is so old.
[Edith Sitwell to Anthony Powell]
I admire those with hairstyles. I don’t have a hairstyle. Most days, it has zero caterpillars in it. That’s about as good as it gets.
[Unknown; but with thanks to Katy Wheatley]
I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
[William Blake (1757-1827); Politicians and Politics]
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are.
[TS Eliot; Ash Wednesday]
Compare that with …
I am sure you will agree with me, Lady Warminster, in thinking, so far as company is concerned, enough is as bad as a feast, and half a loaf in many ways preferable to the alternative of a whole one or the traditional no bread. How enjoyable, therefore, to be just as we are.
[Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, spoken by Edwardian novelist St John Clarke]
To us, the moment 8:17 AM means something — something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance — did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.
[Aldous Huxley]
Someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional décor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage – even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.
[Terry Pratchett; Equal Rites]
More next month!