This week's quotations

Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steals,

Them as 'as coats to their backs an' taakes their regular meals.

Noa, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meal's to be 'ad.

Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.

Lord Tennyson



"They [women] don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about." Kingley Amis




"I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Col. Knox says ⅛ of the world's population speaks 'English', and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say 'baa baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian." - J.R.R. Tolkien




Evil people are just too tedious to be taken seriously. Ivo Mosley





There's something repellent about the self-conscious "traveller", boring one to death about their bus trip from Alice Springs, or even worse as a travelling companion - endlessly searching for an "authentic" place to eat, and rejecting all the perfectly attractive choices for failing to meet this criterion. Seamus Sweeney





The only true lasting benefit which the statesman can give to the poor man is so to shape matters that the greatest possible liberty for the exercise of his own moral and intellectual qualities should be offered to him by law. Lord Salisbury



Solitude shows us what we should be; society shows us what we are. Lord Salisbury



"I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow... it is the honest state."

~ D. H. Lawrence



Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.

Arthur Schopenhauer


We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.” ~ Hilaire Belloc



"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." - falsely attributed to Goethe.




"Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other life is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell.
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell." - Sir Richard Burton