Pete: 'They called Galileo a loony.'
Dud: 'They also called a lot of loonies loonies.'
What is so very depressing is that the EU vote - and the Scottish Referendum before it - has revealed how "patriotism" (my god, I feel old fashioned and archaic just typing that word) has not only been expunged as a virtue in the public consciousness and is now seen positively as a vice. This has been the relentless work of - in my opinion - left-wing politicians and academics since the war who have always recognised that by breaking up the unity of one community into smaller, sometimes artificial groupuscules ('working class', 'youth') they can then create political majorities which can be used to give them power. I mean who today can say, loudly, 'I am proud to be British' except old ladies in racist rants on buses or Sun columnists or madmen on the internet?
' Patriotism...is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity and increases his arrogance and conceit.' Emma Goldman. She was a Communist but I wonder how many British people nowadays who are not Communists (so excluding Jeremy Corbyn) also think patriotism a bad thing.
Alex Woodcock-Clarke shortly before the Brexit referendum.
“The ideas of modern Socialism have not sprung from proletarian brains. They were originated by intellectuals, sons of the bourgeoisie, not of wage-earners.”
Ludwig Von Mises
'Women think with their hearts not their brains.' A Romanian woman said this to me in 2012 Do Englishwomen say things like that? Do Romanian women still? The answer to the second question is of course.
'Women think with their hearts not their brains.' A Romanian woman said this to me in 2012 Do Englishwomen say things like that? Do Romanian women still? The answer to the second question is of course.
"I am a believer in the fact that it is for the good of the world that the English-speaking race should hold as much of the world’s surface as possible."
Theodore Roosevelt
The American is the Englishman left to himself.
The American is the Englishman left to himself.
Alex de Tocqueville
"We are great because we are a part of the great Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere; a section detached only after a century and a half of heavy colonisation and English rule, which gave to our land the ineradicable stamp of British civilisation."
"We are great because we are a part of the great Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere; a section detached only after a century and a half of heavy colonisation and English rule, which gave to our land the ineradicable stamp of British civilisation."
H.P. Lovecraft
“A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species."
“A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species."
Gore Vidal, American novelist, aphorist and liberal Democrat in 2000.
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