Quotations

Emile Cioran

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Alexandre Dumas fils

It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.



Pelle Neroth Taylor

I read a very interesting book about men in prison and women in prison. Women prisoners much more manipulative and disloyal, always ratting on their fellow prisoners and sucking up to the wardens. Male prisoners presented a totally United front. The concept of totalitarian societies and women fascinates me. The West has become more unfree with the growth of female power. I am guessing it's mostly female cops monitoring Twitter

Robin Skynner

An intense preoccupation with politics is usually a means of putting painful personal conflicts outside ourselves, disowning them.


Tallulah Bankhead

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

Peter Drucker

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Taki in this week's Spectator

As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer’s daughter. Not so fast, as they say. I live among farmers and haystacks up here in the Alps, and I’ve yet to run into a farmer’s daughter who is worth the buckshot in the bottom. I was thinking of such matters all last week while skiing with my son and his two children. How happy I feel now, surrounded by wife and children and grandchildren — something I’ve avoided throughout my life while chasing daughters.



Rod Liddle in today's Sunday Times

I have always been intrigued by the term “women of colour”. It is used, usually, as a designation for females with protected characteristics and who are thus in some way oppressed, characterised by their victimhood. And yet it implies, directly, that there must be “women of no colour” out there. Are these wholly transparent, wraith-like creatures not rather worse off? Nobody can see them.

You might bump into one on the pavement, I suppose — without realising what it is you’ve bumped into. You mumble an apology but she is gone — possibly to buy shoes, which many women enjoy doing, for feet that she cannot see. It is time that women of no colour were seen. But how, but how?