Quotations

Laura Kipnes

Sure, there have always been offended people, but those people used to be conservatives. Who cared if they were offended, that was the point. At some point offendability moved its offices to the hip side of town.

Laura Kipnis

By the time #MeToo hit, transgression’s sheen was already feeling pretty tarnished. #MeToo was about a lot of things and among them was a cultural referendum on the myth of male genius, which as thousands of first-person accounts have elaborated over the decades, is pretty frequently accompanied by sexual grabbiness and bad breath. Sexual transgressiveness has always been the perquisite of gross men in power, but there is also an added perk, which is that treating the boundaries of less powerful people as minor annoyances makes insecure men feel like creative geniuses, like artists and rock stars. Post #MeToo, the emblematic transgressor was starting to look less like Vito Acconci at Sonnabend and more like Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the Sofitel.

Margaret Thatcher on Today BBC Radio 4 6 June 1987.

‘The fundamental reason of being put on earth is so to improve your character that you are fit for the next world.'

Enoch Powell, Speech to the Royal Society of St George, on St George's Day, April 23rd 1961.

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There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly,


"What do they know of England who only England know?"

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling's "Recessional" or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.

'And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.

'So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.

'Perhaps, after all, we know most of England "who only England know".

'So the continuity of her existence was unbroken when the looser connections which had linked her with distant continents and strange races fell away. Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt no country but this to be their own. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt there was this deep this providential difference between our empire and those others, that the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her - in modern parlance "uninvolved".' 

Enoch Powell, Speech in Grimsby on 20 May 1977:

'It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at.'

Maurice Cowling

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939...from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.

Cyril Mango, 'Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome' (1981), p. 30, quoted by Laudator Temporis Acti:

As far as we can judge, the main links of solidarity were two: regional and religious. People identified themselves with their village, their city or their province much more than they did with the Empire. When a person was away from home he was a stranger and was often treated with suspicion. A monk from western Asia Minor who joined a monastery in Pontus was 'disparaged and mistreated by everyone as a stranger'. The corollary to regional solidarity was regional hostility. We encounter many derogatory statements concerning 'the cunning Syrian' who spoke with a thick accent, the uncouth Paphlagonian, the mendacious Cretan. Alexandrians excited ridicule at Constantinople. Armenians were nearly always described in terms of abuse. Even demons, as we shall see in Chapter 7, had strong feelings of local affiliation and did not want to consort with their fellows from the next province.

Idem, p. 162:
These naively reported incidents prompt a number of observations. We may note, first, the strong local feeling exhibited by the demons: those of Gordiane considered themselves tougher than those of Galatia; the demons that hailed from Cappadocia refused to let themselves be confined at Germia, and their plea was considered reasonable by St Theodore.

Robin Lane Fox, 'Pagans and Christians' (1988) p.352:

As for homosexuality, Paul and the early epistles agreed with the accepted Jewish view that it was a deadly sin that provoked God's wrath. It led to earthquakes and natural disasters, which were evident in the fate of Sodom. The absence of Gospel teaching on the subject did not amount to tacit approval. All orthodox Christians knew that homosexuals went to hell, until a modern minority tried to make them forget it.