Quotations

“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.” Harry Patch (1898-2009), briefly the oldest man in Europe, and the last surviving trench combat soldier of the First World War from any country.

"Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?" Harry Patch, November 2004

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Scott Fitzgerald

"Granted that there is no room in history for "what if" scenarios. But what would the Arab Spring look like in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?" Geoffrey Aronson, Foreign Policy, How the Arab Spring presages a shifting world order, May 17, 2011

"Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies." Schopenhauer. Not true at all, but one understands his point.

"Pleasures when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments." Marcus Aurelius. True, if headmasterly.

"Only poor man and ugly woman know the reality of people." Anonymous

'It's a matter of what one doesn't spend time doing. I don't watch TV. I don't follow the news. I don't follow sports. I don't eat out. I don't go to pubs. I don't do gardening. I don't do any of the things that normal people apparently do. That leaves lots of time for reading books!' Dfordoom