Our monthly collection of quotes …
Boris Johnson is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next. Twenty years have passed since the Conservative party first selected him as a candidate. Michael Howard and David Cameron made him a shadow minister, and Theresa May gave him the Foreign Office. Thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment. Yet, knowing this, the majority of Conservative MPs, and party members, still voted for him to be prime minister. He is not, therefore, an aberration, but a product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone.
[Rory Stewart; Financial Times; 21/01/2022]
[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous … Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.
[Parmenides]
At the same time he managed to retain in a reasonably flourishing state … what General Conyers would have called his ‘personal myth’ … The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]
People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer … can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer … is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.
[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]
Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I’d long decided there were no answers. I’m beginning to suspect there aren’t really any questions either, none at least of any consequence, even the old perennial, whether or not to stay alive.
[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]
Think about it … Every single corpse on Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person. Stay lazy my friends.
[unknown]
I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!
[Not William Shakespeare; attributions to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill are also unsupported. See, inter alia, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/24/wit-battle/]
Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candour and patience, to study both sides of the question …
[Bishop George Horne (1730-1792)]
The [Covid] vaccines, I am informed by passionate people with degrees from Twitter State University, are making the coronavirus strains worse, turning vaccinated people into destructive super-spreaders, making them far more likely to die from the next variant, giving them ADE, making them sterile, giving them heart attacks, giving them cancer, destroying their immune systems, giving them HIV outright, rearranging their DNA, rearranging it so that their DNA is now covered under evil Pharma patents and they are now thus owned by drug companies, rearranging it so that they are now technically another species entirely, targeting this particular ethnic group over here, deliberately sparing this particular ethnic group over there, filling everyone’s bodies full of tracking devices, filling them full of alien nanotech micro-bots, filling them full of 5G antennas, filling them full of aborted foetal cells, filling them full of Satanic messages and portraits of Bill Gates and trial memberships for Amazon Prime and God knows what else.
[Derek Lowe, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/usefulness-rebuttal]
Life’s too short. It was too short even before I got vaccinated and thus apparently turned myself into a reptilian middle-management demon from Zeta Ridiculoon. That’s me, all right: 50% RNA by body weight, and the rest is brimstone and shredded takeout menus.
[Derek Lowe, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/usefulness-rebuttal]
Received an interesting-looking new book in the mail: Understanding European Wines by Charlie Boston. I don’t know the author, but I do know the guy who’s written an introduction about Anthony Powell and Wine. It goes straight to the top of Mount TBR.
Earlier this week there was a long read article in the Guardian by Dr Clare Gerada, a senior GP and former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners. In the article Dr Gerada draws on her own experience to show how the GP’s role has changed in the last 30 years. No wonder the NHS is haemorrhaging GPs because it is not a pretty tale.