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]

This month’s collection of quotes interesting, thought-provoking and amusing.
To escape from the world means that one’s mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.
[Dogen]
It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done.
[Terry Pratchett]
One does try not to be an Old Git, but they don’t make it easy.
[Alan Bennett]
We are all expected to do unethical things as a matter of course. Resistance isn’t just shouting; it requires quiet, time-consuming adamance.
[Prof. Constantine Sandis]
It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
The internet has filled the world with nonsense news stories designed to confirm people’s existing prejudices and led every hate-filled dimwit conspiracy theorist to feel as if they are part of a movement rather just a lonely troll in a basement.
[Ian Dunt at http://eroticreviewmagazine.com/articles/the-new-authoritarianism/]
Note to self: No matter what, no matter how hard or painful or awkward or scary the situation, all you can really do is show up as yourself. So be the SELFIEST SELF you can be. The most you. The truest you. You will figure it out, you magnificent mess, you.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
[George Orwell, 1984]
A hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock.
[Graffiti at Pompeii, ca. AD 79]
If we pluck and trim our doorways like good spiders; the flies come strolling in.
[Aristophanes (446-386BC), on the subject of pubic hair]
Tobacco kills 52,000 people a year from lung cancer, and there’s no telling how many lives have been ruined through drinking. But to my knowledge, no one has ever died of a blow job.
[Florynce Kennedy, 1916-2000]
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
[Robert A Heinlein]
At 16, my dress sense was in the first full flower of its baroque glory … Bad taste is a destiny. It took me about 50 years to learn that I should dress as plainly as possible, and even then I had a tendency towards lime-green shirts.
[Clive James]
We live in a time in which the very nature of reality seems to be crumbling. But reality is fine. Reality won’t change according to how we choose to describe it. It’s just that our way of engaging with it may be shifting radically … I think this crazy-pants stuff that’s going on right now points to something even weirder … We no longer have any faith at all in the political system. Or in religion. Or in much of anything. Maybe there is a huge mass of people out there who don’t believe it even matters who gets elected president. And maybe, at the root of it, this is because we don’t know if we, ourselves, are as real as we thought we were.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/multiple-worlds-fake-news-rick-and-morty-trump-and-reality/5062]
The mind is so wonderstruck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience … Often, the pleasure of the experience is confused with the experience and the insight lost in the ecstasy, so that in trying to retain the secondary effects of the experience the individual misses its point — that the immediate now is complete even when it is not ecstatic.
[Alan Watts]
Evolution is not “survival of the fittest” but “survival of the good enough”.
[Dr Bethany Brookshire]
He who knows only his own side of the case (argument) knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
[John Stuart Mill]

Here is our monthly selection of amusing, interesting and thought-provoking quotes encountered in the last few weeks.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
[Mark Twain]
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
[Thomas Paine]
Everyone knows silence is a beautiful thing. Conservatives know it. Liberals know it. People who believe in a literal interpretation of ancient scriptures know it. People who believe in the scientific method know it. Everyone who follows any religion knows it. Even terrorists know it. There is nothing about silence that anyone can argue about. You can’t compare one kind of silence to a different kind of silence. It’s always exactly the same.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/zen-and-the-art-of-rock-guitar/4927]
It may be that this current wave of refugees is human society acting as a single entity to try to balance itself out. I know a guy in Germany who keeps bees. He said you can’t understand bees if you just consider individual insects. You have to think of the hive as a single entity. I wonder if people are like that too.
We don’t act this way consciously, of course. Our so-called “leaders” are just worker-bees with delusions of grandeur. The best they can accomplish is to follow the hive directive while pretending they invented it themselves. I believe a lot of forces are at work that individual human beings can never truly understand because they don’t operate on the level of the individual. The individual is totally inconsequential.
I know a lot of people believe that the human collective must be stupid, that it always devolves into the lowest common denominator. I believed that myself for a very long time. But now I’m starting to wonder if the human collective might be smarter than any of us as individuals. We may be forcing ourselves into these head-on confrontations knowing unconsciously that it’s the only way things will ever get solved.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/resist-xenophobia/4939]
The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be? One’s things were characteristic or were nothing.
[Henry James]
The way a government treats refugees is very instructive. It shows how they would treat the rest of as if they thought they could get away with it.
[Tony Benn]
The difference is important. Freaks lead. Frauds follow. Freaks want out. Frauds want in. Freaks are truth-tellers. Frauds are attention-hounds. Freaks are driven by their weirdness. Frauds perform weirdness for the delight of strangers. Freaks are tenacious. Frauds are thin-skinned. Freaks are in it for life. Frauds are in it for laughs — and when the party’s over, they can always move back home to Connecticut and start studying for the LSAT.
[Chris Richards, Washington Post, 28/10/2016]
All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.
[Anthony Powell]
But do not lie about all day under a punkah in a dressing gown, reading trashy novels; be trim and neat as you would be in your home in England and when, you lie down, take off all your garments as though going to bed at night and have a complete rest. Then after a cup of early tea, get into fresh dainty kit once more and be ready to meet the “goodman” at tea or wherever it is. You will often feel inclined to give in to slack ways when the heat is severe, but believe me it is better for you both mentally and physically to keep yourself up to the mark, and you will be far better in health and much happier for this little self-discipline.
[Advice to ladies in India during the Raj]
Telling people nudity is good for them is like trying to persuade them to eat healthily. Best way to promote naturism is to just be natural.
[@Ladygod1va]
A long time ago, I found myself working in unfamiliar mountains where I knew nobody. Within days of arriving, I came across a lone rowan by a rock and for the following months, this became ‘my place’. We’re all topophiliacs. We have a predisposition to invest locations with attachments. We should perhaps look at that extended tract of blue and green and grey that was Doggerland and Britain in 9000 BC and see most of it as ‘space’, an abstract, unknown entity. Faintly sketched onto this space were the ‘places’ that were known to foragers and hunters. The story of Britain is a contest between space and place, between the unknown and known, the insecure and secure, the unconfined and confined. Space was imagined from afar; place was experienced from within.
[Nicholas Crane; Making of the British Landscape]
A king can stand people fighting but he can’t last long if people start thinking.
[Will Rogers; humorist; 1879-1935]
One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.
[Iris Murdoch; A Severed Head]
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.
[PJ O’Rourke]
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than develop a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a “third way”.
… … …
the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation.
[George Monbiot at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot]
And the pièce de résistance of the last month …
The thing about forward guidance is that it is guidance that is forward. Which isn’t to say it’s meant to be in any way accurate. Indeed, it would be surprising if it were. The most important thing about forward guidance is that the underlying economic determinants should be correct, not that it should be helpful.
[Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, to Parliamentary Select Committee, 14/11/2016; reported at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/15/mark-carney-bank-of-england-brexit-treasury-select-committee]

We’re not doing very well at posting this month, mainly because everything is both manic and upside down. However here is this month’s collecton of interesting/amusing/thouyght-provoking quiotes.
If organic chemistry was easy it would be called biology.
The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.
[Dalai Lama]
As much of the history of England has been brought about in public houses as in the House of Commons.
[Sir William Harcourt, 1872]
I don’t have a solution, but I do admire the problem.
[R]omantic relationships are tricky because they are so clearly a nest of mutual delusion. A romantic relationship is a collaborative delusion with someone else in which you encourage the other person to think that you will, can, or should make them happy, and vice versa. Even if your relationship is more subtle and nuanced than this, the hidden subtext is that you expect the other person to make you happy, or at least less unhappy.
[Gesshin Greenwood at http://thatssozen.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/get-unstuck.html]
I have not read a work of literature for several years. My head is full of pebbles & rubbish & broken matches & bits of glass.
[James Joyce, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 June 1921]
As I’ve grown older I’ve learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is a piece of cake.
A real girl isn’t perfect and a perfect girl isn’t real.
[Harry Styles]
In the morning you beg to sleep more, in the afternoon you are dying to sleep, and at night you refuse to sleep.
Oh you want to have your cake and eat it too? Darn right, what good is cake if you can’t eat it ?
Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
[Frank Herbert, Dune]
Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
[Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle]

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!

Here’s another selection of interesting, thought-provoking and amusing quotes encountered in the last few weeks.
Nothing is stronger or better than this, that a man and his wife live together, sharing one heart and one mind, a great grief to their enemies and a joy to their friends; but best of all they know it themselves.
[Homer, The Odyssey]
When a German dives into a sentence, you won’t see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.
[Mark Twain]
If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.
[Cicero]
To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
[Mark Twain]
The strategy relied on forlorn hopes that the “confidence fairy” would lift Greece out of this policy-induced nose-dive.
[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in a Daily Telegraph article, 29 July 2016, on how the IMF has screwed up Greece; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/28/imf-admits-disastrous-love-affair-with-euro-apologises-for-the-i/]
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
[Douglas Adams]
Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
[Oscar Wilde; Lady Windermere’s Fan]
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
[Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching]
Usually when people predict an end to religion, what they’re hoping will take its place is a world of pure scientific rationality based on a strictly materialistic view of the universe. I think Richard Dawkins and his followers would like to see that.
The problem with that is, pure materialism has failed us just as badly as pure spirituality. The pure spirituality of the Middle Ages provided a lot of uplifting fantasies, but left most people living in filth and squalor. The pure materialism that took hold in the 19th century, and continues to dominate us today, provided flush toilets, the Internet and a generally higher standard of living. But it left people feeling empty inside while runaway technology and the waste it produces threatens us with extinction.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/the-age-of-reality/4716]
As soon as dogs realise we have bones hidden under our skin all hell is going to break loose.
[unknown]
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
[Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard]

Lots of quotes in this month’s selection …
The handicap under which most beginning writers struggle is that they don’t know how to write. I was no exception to this rule. Worse bilge than mine may have been submitted to the editors of London in 1901 and 1902, but I should think it very unlikely. I was sorry for myself at the time, when the stamped and addressed envelopes came homing back to me, but my sympathy now is for the men who had to read my contributions. I can imagine nothing more depressing than being an editor and coming to the office on a rainy morning in February with a nail in one shoe and damp trouser legs and finding oneself confronted with an early Wodehouse – written, to make it more difficult, in longhand.
[PG Wodehouse on his early writing career]
It is best to accept the real conditions of contemporary life as soon as possible. One has got to put up with them for better or worse, and the only hope of changing them is in facing them, not in living in a dream of the old world. But I am tired of saying what is so obvious to me.
[Stephen Spender, letter to Isaiah Berlin, 1932]
It is such a rest to be folded after all my wandering … I have the most entire faith in the healing qualities of sunshine and sun warmth.
[Aubrey Beardsley, letter to John Gray, 3 April 1897]
In principle I agree with bringing in an appropriate set of book shelves. However, I view the acquisition of another mirror as superfluous.
[Hermann Broch, letter to Armand Broch, Spring 1928]
A story — a good story — writes itself; that is, it develops spontaneously under the pen. One incident entails another, as in life, and the denouement, as in life, is beyond control. Remember, I am speaking of good stories; bad ones can be written on preconceived lines, but I don’t care to write bad stories; at least I don’t care to publish them with a waste-basket within easy reach.
[Ambrose Bierce, letter to John O’Hara Cosgrave, 19 November 1905]
I sent an American acquaintance three pages of typescript & asked “Is the American slang authentic?” Weeks passed. Now I have back 50 pages on Embassy paper giving the opinions of three public relations officers.
[Evelyn Waugh, letter to Nancy Mitford, 22 November 1954]
I sometimes fear that people think that Fascism arrives in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up the neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you … it doesn’t walk in saying, our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.
[Michael Rosen]
Knowledge is always provisional. It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to get caught up in a futile search for some kind of ultimate knowledge. It ain’t gonna happen.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/but-what-if-were-wrong/4584]
Being natural & matter-of-fact about nudity prevents children from developing an attitude of shame or disgust about the human body.
[Dr Lee Salk]
When considered rationally, there is no justification for believing that anything happens to anyone upon the moment of his or her death. There is no reasonable counter to the prospect of nothingness. Any anecdotal story about ‘floating toward a white light’ or Shirley MacLaine’s past life on Atlantis or the details in Heaven Is for Real are automatically (and justifiably) dismissed by any secular intellectual. Yet this wholly logical position discounts the overwhelming likelihood that we currently don’t know something critical about the experience of life, much less the ultimate conclusion to that experience. There are so many things we don’t know about energy, or the way energy is transferred, or why energy (which can’ t be created or destroyed) exists at all. We can’t truly conceive the conditions of a multidimensional reality, even though we’re (probably) already living inside one. We have a limited understanding of consciousness. We have a limited understanding of time, and of the perception of time, and of the possibility that all time is happening at once. So while it seems unrealistic to seriously consider the prospect of life after death, it seems equally naïve to assume that our contemporary understanding of this phenomenon is remotely complete …
… We must start from the premise that — in all likelihood — we are already wrong. And not ‘wrong’ in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.
[Chuck Klosterman; But What If We’re Wrong?]
You know how cats are attracted to the people who give them the least attention? Teenagers are basically cats (children aged four to 10 are Labradors, obviously, and the under-fours are the product of some unholy union of howler monkey and honey badger).
[Emma Beddington at https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jun/25/why-your-teenager-thinks-youre-an-idiot]
The raven is about rebirth, recovery, renewal, recycling, reflection and healing. He signifies moving through transitions smoothly by casting light into the darkness.
[unknown author]
There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.
[Emma Goldman, social activist (1869-1940)]
there is … enormous moral and political confusion that mixes together the desperation of those who know they are losing, the opportunism of those ready to change sides, the guilelessness of those who haven’t understood anything, and even the desire for revenge in those who are about to arrive.
[Carlo Lucarelli]
“A great illusion is that government is carried on by an infallible, incorruptible machine,” Pennistone said. “Officials — all officials, of all governments — are just as capable of behaving in an irregular manner as anyone else. In fact they have the additional advantage of being able to assuage their own conscience, if they happen to have one, by assuring themselves it’s all for the country’s good.”
[Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers]
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
[Oscar Wilde]
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.
[Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948]
In a poll, we ask people what they think when they don’t think. It would be more interesting to ask what they think after they had a chance to think.
[James Fishkin, Political Scientist]
Find your strengths. In your allegiance, what are you best at? Your unique sweet spot (the place where you can make the most difference) is determined not by what you want to do, but where your skills meet a community need.
[Kat Craig; Guardian; 20 June 2016]
As Gove doesn’t rate experts, I presume his policy advisors will be made up of clairvoyants, astrologers and Coco the clown.
[Robert Talbut, Chaiman, EFG Asset Management; Times; 2 July 2016]
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
[Samuel Johnson]
Boris Johnson, who in the judgment of naturalists is the only leading politician bred directly from Highland cattle, had been expected to declare himself a candidate for the Tory leadership. Boris, after all, was a booming voice in the Leave campaign, and he has long been both a marshal and a mascot of the right. He also enjoys a profile as high as anyone in the land; friend and foe alike refer to him by his first name — a distinction that he shares with Britney, Whitney, Dolly, Rihanna, and Oprah. The brand recognition is secure.
[Anthony Lane, New Yorker]
If democracy ever dies, it won’t be the Red Army; it’ll be the media that destroy democracy: by denying people the voice so they can tell the government what they want.
[Tony Benn]
How insulting to God is the arrogance of mankind, when we take it upon ourselves to cover and hide His creation and claim that it is an improvement?
[unknown author]
The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything . How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out . How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.
[Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive]