Here’s this month’s collection of quotes various for your edification and/or amusement …
When deaths occur in industries other than prostitution, the usual response is to ask how working conditions can be made more secure, not whether the industry should be scrapped.
[Frankie Mullin; http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/12/can-we-end-violence-against-sex-workers]
Trollope’s mass is greater, of course, but as in Dance individual novels can be read as single coherent volumes but are strengthened and deepened by their part in a wider sequence, in which everyday life engages with and is counterpointed by the public world of affairs.
[Prof. John Bowen]
Along the walls frescoes tinted in pastel shades, executed with infinite feebleness of design, appealed to Heaven knows what nadir of aesthetic degradation.
[Anthony Powell; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant]
Let’s not kid ourselves: everything we think we know now is just an approximation to something we haven’t yet found out. That is the frustrating, exhilarating lesson history teaches us about fundamental theories of nature.
[Richard Webb; New Scientist; 19 November 2016]
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
[Haruki Murakami]
The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.
[Madeleine L’Engle]
An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.
[Sir Henry Wotton; 1604]
Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
[George Burns; 1896-1996]
Theresa May announces Quantum Brexit
Turns out the reason Theresa couldn’t be more specific when she kept saying “Brexit means Brexit” is because she was working on a highly complex plan with Britain’s top quantum scientists, which she had placed inside a secure box. Under this plan, the UK is to remain both inside and outside the single market and both maintain free movement and abandon it at the same time … as long as no one ever opens the box. However, if we open the box, May warns, all Britain gets is a cat.
Quit blaming your parents for everything wrong in your life. Be grateful they saw you through your teenage years and didn’t kill you.
Hating the haters is still hate. Being intolerant to those who are intolerant is still intolerance. Being bigoted against bigots is still bigotry. Bullying the bullies is still bullying. Lying about the liars is still lying.
[Brad Warner; http://hardcorezen.info/my-epic-battle-against-intolerable-evil/5090]
My prick no more to bald cunts shall resort;
Merkins rub off and often spoil the sport.
[John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; 1647-1680]
The government was not claiming power to repeal or amend or in any other way to alter Acts of Parliament. No power to alter the law of the land was being claimed.  However, a power to notify (under Art. 50) was being claimed notwithstanding that it will result in changes to domestic law.
[Law & Lawyers Blog; http://obiterj.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/brexit-litigation-in-supreme-court.html]
It is a poor family that hath neither a whore nor a thief in it.
[Old English Proverb]
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit honour, or private interest of any one man, family or class of men.
[John Adams; 1735–1826; 2nd President of USA]
Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order.
[Sydney Brenner]