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]

Another mid-monthly round-up of quotes interesting and amusing …
The pain of being alone motivates us to seek the safety of companionship, which in turn benefits the species by encouraging group cooperation and protection. Loneliness persists because it provides an essential evolutionary benefit for social animals. Like thirst, hunger or pain, loneliness is an aversive state that animals seek to resolve, improving their long-term survival.
[Emily Singer; Quanta Magazine]
You can’t let one setback ruin your life. You’ve got to just keep being a squirrel.
[Mikel Delgado quoted at ]
Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate’. Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need’. It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
[From A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living]
It may be remarked with equal truth that ignorance is often the effect of wonder. It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of enquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate enquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive, they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing, and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties.
[Samuel Johnson]
To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
[Lao Tzu]
With all this opportunity, this comedy and tragedy, how near all men come to doing nothing!
[Henry David Thoreau; Journal; 29 May 1857]
We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well.
[Alain de Botton; New York Times; 29 May 2016]
Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
[Alain de Botton; New York Times; 29 May 2016]
The difference between lying and bullshit is less a question of a statement’s relation to the truth than of the motivation of the person making it. A liar wants his audience to believe what he says; a bullshitter doesn’t care, as long as he gets what he wants.
[Harry Frankfurt]
The person of superior integrity does not insist upon his integrity. For this reason, he has integrity.
[Lao Tzu]
When you are in your middle seventies you have passed your prime as a cat-catcher.
[PG Wodehouse]

Our mid-monthly round up of recently encountered quotes, inspirational, educational and amusing.
If porn is inherently & in all contexts destructive, then SEX is inherently & in all contexts destructive.
[Emily Nagoski]
Most people can’t fathom why naturist families have such positive, wholesome relationships. Children from clothes free families grow up with relatively few body confidence issues.
[British Naturism]
Save the Earth; don’t give birth. This is the really radical ecological message people aren’t willing to face: the most damaging thing you can do environmentally is breed.
[Mark Walsh & Dane Burman quoted on Facebook]
It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.
[Bill Murray]
I sympathise a little with Hunt [UK Health Secretary] — he was born into military aristocracy, a cousin of the Queen, went to Charterhouse, then Oxford, then into PR: trying to get him to understand the life of an overworked student nurse is like trying to get an Amazonian tree frog to understand the plot of Blade Runner. Hunt doesn’t understand the need to pay doctors — he’s part of a ruling class that doesn’t understand that the desire to cut someone open and rearrange their internal organs can come from a desire to help others, and not just because of insanity caused by hereditary syphilis.
[Frankie Boyle]
You go through life blind but with the delusion of sight. Try not to be fooled by what you think you see & what other people think they see.
[Brad Warner on Twitter]
The proposals the Secretary of State outlined did not appear to depart significantly from the Human Rights Act — we note in particular that all the rights contained within the ECHR are likely to be affirmed in any British Bill of Rights. His evidence left us unsure why a British Bill of Rights was really necessary.
… … …
If a Bill of Rights is not intended to change significantly the protection of human rights in the UK, we recommend the Government give careful thought before proceeding with this policy.
… … …
Given the seemingly limited aims of the proposed Bill of Rights, the Government should give careful consideration to whether, in the words of the Secretary of State, it means unravelling “the constitutional knitting for very little”. If for no other reason, the possible constitutional disruption involving the devolved administrations should weigh against proceeding with this reform.
[House of Lords European Union Select Committee; Report The UK, the EU and a British Bill of Rights; May 2016]
To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom … You consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.
[Barrack Obama]
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has twice mentioned weights and measures authorities enforcing this [tobacco regulations] in a heavy-handed or a light-touch way. Can the Minister comment on which he thinks they will do?
Lord Prior [the Minister]: I certainly hope that enforcement will be more Italian than traditionally British, if I may put it that way.
[House of Lords debate on the new Tobacco Regulations from the EU]
Wind chimes are made from the metallic bones of robots that tried to overthrow us. Hang them outside your house as a warning to the others.
When you are dead, you don’t know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are stupid.
Not every day is a good day,
live anyway.
Not everyone tells the truth,
trust anyway.
Not everyone will love you back,
love anyway.
Not every game will be fair,
play anyway.
We act as if the Earth was a craft ball someone told us to bedazzle.
[Rob R Dunn]

Here’s our monthly round up of interesting, inspiring or amusing quotes encountered in the last few weeks. In no special order …
… one of the great mantras of our times, that anything bad that happens to us must be somebody else’s fault. It cannot be us who are to blame …
[Christopher Snowdon at Spectator Health]
No cookbook can cure the fact that we are meat rotting from the inside, unable to recapture the fading glow of youth.
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
[Mark Twain]
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
[President Kennedy]
As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.
[HL Mencken]
I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.
[Tony Benn]
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
[HL Mencken]
Brexit is like the English civil war, when families and friends found themselves split between King and parliament. Other historical divides — as over the reformation, the corn laws or Irish home rule — tended to cohere round religion or self-interest.
[Simon Jenkins; Guardian; 31 March 2016]
Political psychologists increasingly dismiss reason as having any role in electoral decision … Thus Brexit. It is declining into a sort of primitivism, a debate over what is inherently unknown. Argument is hijacked by hobgoblins.
[Simon Jenkins; Guardian; 31 March 2016]
Battle not with voles, lest ye become a vole; for if you gaze into the burrow, the burrow gazes back into you.
Dogs are for people who need to be worshiped as gods. Cats are for people who are strong enough to put up with gods standing on their chests at 5:00 AM and demanding a sacrifice.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
[Groucho Marx]
Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
[Richard Branson]
Machiavelli defines the central thrust of human nature as ambition, the drive for power bringing with it wealth and corruption.
[Sarah Dunant; BBC News Magazine]
Being a little weird is just a natural side-effect of being awesome.
[Sue Fitzmaurice]
More next month.