Quotations

Karel van Oosterom@KvanOosterom·
Internationally, we the Dutch are seen to be direct and blunt. Our checklist for travel to the Netherlands lives up to that reputation.

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.” Jean Monnet, architect of what is now the EU, wrote this privately in 1952. 

"[I] had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people". George Bernard Shaw

“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.” James Joyce, Ulysses

"Good wood, bad wood - the same ashes, but not the same flames." Nicolae Iorga

"Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most." Aldous Huxley in his lovely first novel Crome Yellow (Brave New World is a far-sighted political polemic that is more accurate than 1984, but rubbish as a novel). Facebook conversations remind me of these lines.