"The return to the office is well under way, just as summer in the northern hemisphere begins. Pretty soon, people will be able to resume the habit of staring wistfully out of the window, hoping it will still be sunny at the weekend." The Economist today.
"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." Saul Bellow
"What is a man but his old stories?" Sir John Mortimer
"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past." George Orwell, 1984
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” (Aldous Huxley, lecture to the Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961)
“The cry 'Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!' was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.” Louis de Bonald
"Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned." Saul Bellow. The internet nowadays.
"Where is the Tolstoy of the Papuan New Guineans?" Saul Bellow
"The unexamined life is not worth living. But the unlived life is not worth examining." Anonymous
"The examined life may lead to alcoholism." Saul Bellow
"There’s a two-word reason why the island of Ireland will probably not be severed in two this June, with one part remaining a member of the EU and the other leaving. It is “Boris Johnson”. By default, he has become the leader of the so-called Brexit campaign, and it is his personality, and the worship it has generated within the odious media-bubble of London, which should ensure most people in the UK vote to stay in the EU." Kevin Myers, The Times, April 16th 2016.
ReplyDelete"Personally, I loathe what the EU has become: a bloated, self-regarding, sanctimonious over-regulated monster, governed by a ruling caste of overpaid bureaucrats and ideological human-rights lawyers. Yet so all-intrusive have the fungal tendrils of Brussels-rule become that a British departure, or anyone’s for that matter, may be beyond ordinary humans — the equivalent of Florence Nightingale performing a heart-lung transplant." Ibid.
ReplyDeleteThese days lives are lost not in libraries, but on the timesuck of triviality that is the internet 😉
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more - I hope this blog is not wasting our time. It might be.
DeleteThese days lives are lost not in libraries, but on the timesuck of triviality that is the internet 😉
ReplyDeleteThese days lives are lost not in libraries, but on the timesuck of triviality that is the internet 😉
ReplyDelete