So here’s this month’s collection of quotes – some interesting, some amusing …

No Park – no Ring – no afternoon gentility –
No company – no nobility –
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flow’rs, no leaves, no birds,
November!
[Thomas Hood (1799–1845), No!]

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
[Alan Moore, V for Vendetta]

Government ministers are like economists – ask two of them this question and you get three different answers.
[Graham Page]

When I ceased to accept the teachings of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believed.
[Leslie Stephen]

I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as “the truth” or “the way”. This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including “woke” culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.
Antifa and the Far Right, for example, with their routine street fights, role-playing and dress-ups are participants in a weirdly erotic, violent and mutually self-sustaining marriage, propped up entirely by the blind, inflexible convictions of each other’s belief systems. It is good for nothing, except inflaming their own self-righteousness.
[Nick Cave at https://reason.com/2019/10/21/nick-cave-slams-woke-culture-as-self-righteous-and-suppresive/]

Some of us … are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left’s ever-expanding ideological junk pile.
[Nick Cave at https://reason.com/2019/10/21/nick-cave-slams-woke-culture-as-self-righteous-and-suppresive/]

Cat: a pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs and patronizes human beings.
[Oliver Herford (1863-1935)]

Saw someone with a shirt saying:
      Truth + God = Life
I hope they realise that it also follows …
      Truth = Life – God
      God = Life – Truth
Seriously, do the maths people.

Europe is not a market, it is the will to live together. Leaving Europe is not leaving a market, it is leaving shared dreams. We can have a common market, but if we do not have common dreams,
we have nothing. Europe is the peace that came after the disaster of war. Europe is the pardon
between French and Germans. Europe is the return to freedom of Greece, Spain and Portugal. Europe is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Europe is the end of communism. Europe is the welfare state, it is democracy.
[Esteban González Pons on the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome]

When I talk to managers I get the feeling they are important. When I talk to leaders I get the feeling that I am important.

Psychopathic traits such as risk taking, overconfidence and superficial charm can make men more attractive to romantic partners, despite them having little interest in committed relationships, researchers at Canada’s Brock University have found.
[Science Focus magazine, 12/2019]

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, writer (b.14 Nov 1947)]