Psychopaths are very sane

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

So said Dostoevsky, but he was mistaken. The psychopaths I have known were not happy, but not unhappy. Their emotions are very shallow.

The Norwegian mass-murderer who killed so many young people (I prefer not to name him and help him have the fame he craves) was not mad. A madman could not have killed so many people so efficiently. He seems to me, though I am not a psychologist, a psychopath and psychopaths are saner than normal people. 


I published an article on this subject in 2005 in Vivid, which I republish here: 

The Psychopath in the Office

The word ‘psychopath’ instills a pleasurable ripple of fear into anyone who saw a conscienceless killer in a Hollywood film such as Basic Instinct or The Silence of the Lambs.  But psychopaths exist outside the movies. Only a fairly small minority are violent criminals, more are confidence tricksters but most are not criminals at all. Many hold positions of power (think of Saddam Hussein or Slobodan ). Psychopaths are also known as sociopaths and the syndrome is also named Anti-Social Behaviour Disorder. The Victorians used the term ‘moral insanity’ but in fact psychopaths are exceptionally sane. They simply have no consciences and no empathy. Every reader of this article has knowingly or otherwise met some. Long-term their goal is always to accumulate power or money by any means available and to damage and abuse those over whom their power extends.

 ‘Industrial psychopaths’ is the term recently coined by psychologist Paul Babiak, author of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work,  for psychopaths who hold good jobs. They can be priests, academics, charity workers, actors or media stars, HR managers or accountants but very frequently  they are found in professions that enable them to have power over others: in particular, the medical and legal professions (they are especially attracted to becoming judges and prosecutors), the police and armed services and, most irresistible of all to psychopaths, in politics.How do you recognise a psychopath in a social or business setting? You probably wouldn’t. They are pathological liars, masters of dissimulation and excel at interviews, the perfect theatres for their talents. In the West‘s increasingly atomised and competitive world, where ambitious go-getters are valued and efficiency sometimes prized above moral scruples, the psychopath’s qualities resemble those of the successful business leader. In developing economies where power structures are fluid and standards of business and political ethics are hazy psychopaths thrive. Present-day Romania is a perfect breeding ground for the species.

The psychopath thrives in situations of rapid change. The industrial psychopath identifies and ingratiates himself with the people whom he identifies as easily manipulated and those with power who can help him reach the top. According to Professor Babiak, 'During the manipulation stage, the psychopath spreads disinformation to enhance his image and disparage others. He is adept at creating conflict between those who might pool negative information about him. This is followed by a confrontation stage in which he abandons the pawns who are no longer useful to him and takes steps to neutralise detractors. Finally, the most successful psychopath enters an ascension phase during which he abandons his patrons - those who have helped his rise to power.' In the Romanian expression “treading on dead bodies to the top”. 

No-one knows what are the causes of the condition although research suggests that the psychopath’s brain functions abnormally and that a lobe may be missing. There is no cure. No-one can be given a conscience transplant.

Professor Robert Hare, Professor of Psychology at Vancouver University, is the world’s  leading authority on psychopaths. He estimates that about 1% of the population are psychopaths. Hare says they are "amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories...They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are often very likeable and charming. To some people, however, they seem too slick and smooth, too  insincere and superficial. Astute observers often get the impression that psychopaths are play-acting, mechanically ‘reading their lines.’  Psychopaths are always highly intelligent (a parallel can be drawn with autists) and often possess photographic memories but their knowledge tends to be wide but superficial. They can be superb linguists and readily assimilate the latest jargon expressions as they emerge. Lacking normal human feelings, they are actors who learn how to behave by mimicking those around them. They may therefore come across as affected, insincere or false. Hare says they have a "narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the centre of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules.” They can seem very  charismatic but are rarely popular with those who work or interact with them closely. A few perceptive people sense at once that they are evil.

The psychopath will always prefer what he can gain by trickery, dishonesty or force majeure to the fruits of honest toil, which bores him. He  is usually lazy and unfocused where routine work is concerned  although at networking or marketing he can be a workaholic. As a boss he will steal his subordinates’ ideas, pick on victims to bully and very often sexually harass staff but also use manipulative skills to retain subordinates’ loyalty (Adolf Hitler remembering his secretaries’ birthdays).  In business psychopaths will take pride in using every dishonest subterfuge from bribes to blackmail to acquire mandates or retainers, happily getting away with  substandard work as a result. They are exceptionally astute at reading others and are adept at gleaning  information about those around them to feed their sense of power and enable them to exploit others. If they judge it safe to do so, they will delight in hurting those whom they can injure (I know of one HR Manager who framed a series of staff members with no ulterior object beyond the fun of sabotaging their careers). Psychopaths inhabit a Hobbesian universe where power is the only value and love of power means love of mischief.

The female psychopath (there are thought to be roughly two male psychopaths for every one female psychopath) is exactly as pitiless as her male counterpart but will use the advantages open to her as a woman to help her career path. If attractive she will exploits her looks, sleep her way to promotion or with clients to make deals happen, while at the same time she may be ready to concoct false charges that she herself is the victim of sexual harassment rather than the perpetrator. If appropriate she will cultivate the image of a devoted wife or mother as a useful cover.

Industrial psychopaths of either sex can be very effective at PR, at sales and marketing and their management techniques can be effective in the short or medium term but in the long term their business enterprises are likely to founder, their companies fail, their partners part ways from them or their employees vote with their feet. Psychopathy causes enormous damage in all our lives. We have seen in recent years the consequences when a succession of fraudulent businesses have collapsed. Who will psychoanalyse Enron or Worldcom, Bancorex or FNI?

So what should we look for as pointers to alert us against this dangerous breed of people when for example conducting interviews? The tell-tale signs include contradictory lies, oleaginous flattery, haughty body language, the penetrating and prolonged ‘psychopathic stare’ with which they fix their victims, poor spelling, an excessive interest in status and material things, their love of belittling others, boasting particularly about their lack of scruples and all sorts of unusual ways of talking, dressing or behaving, designed to draw attention to themselves.

Hare and Babiak have joined forces to create a new diagnostic tool, the “B-scan”  intended to help businesses keep psychopath- is a series of questions asked of referees rather than candidates, looking for sixteen key qualities including: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, , unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

How many do you know?

For more by me on the subject of psychopaths, please click on 

Vampires do exist

The wisdom of psychopaths and monks

Psychopaths are motivated by envy

Sir Jimmy Savile, psychopath 

The Psychopath in the Office

The Psychopath in the Office

How many do you know?

The word ‘psychopath’ instills a pleasurable ripple of fear into anyone who saw a conscienceless killer in a Hollywood film such as Basic Instinct or The Silence of the Lambs.  But psychopaths exist outside the movies. Only a fairly small minority are violent criminals, more are confidence tricksters but most are not criminals at all. Many hold positions of power (think of Saddam Hussein or Slobodan ). Psychopaths are also known as sociopaths and the syndrome is also named Anti-Social Behaviour Disorder. The Victorians used the term ‘moral insanity’ but in fact psychopaths are exceptionally sane. They simply have no consciences and no empathy. Every reader of this article has knowingly or otherwise met some. Long-term their goal is always to accumulate power or money by any means available and to damage and abuse those over whom their power extends.

 ‘Industrial psychopaths’ is the term recently coined by psychologist Paul Babiak, author of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work,  for psychopaths who hold good jobs. They can be priests, academics, charity workers, actors or media stars, HR managers or accountants but very frequently  they are found in professions that enable them to have power over others: in particular, the medical and legal professions (they are especially attracted to becoming judges and prosecutors), the police and armed services and, most irresistible of all to psychopaths, in politics.

How do you recognise a psychopath in a social or business setting? You probably wouldn’t. They are pathological liars, masters of dissimulation and excel at interviews, the perfect theatres for their talents. In the West‘s increasingly atomised and competitive world, where ambitious go-getters are valued and efficiency sometimes prized above moral scruples, the psychopath’s qualities resemble those of the successful business leader. In developing economies where power structures are fluid and standards of business and political ethics are hazy psychopaths thrive. Present-day Romania is a perfect breeding ground for the species.
The psychopath thrives in situations of rapid change. The industrial psychopath identifies and ingratiates himself with the people whom he identifies as easily manipulated and those with power who can help him reach the top. According to Professor Babiak, 'During the manipulation stage, the psychopath spreads disinformation to enhance his image and disparage others. He is adept at creating conflict between those who might pool negative information about him. This is followed by a confrontation stage in which he abandons the pawns who are no longer useful to him and takes steps to neutralise detractors. Finally, the most successful psychopath enters an ascension phase during which he abandons his patrons - those who have helped his rise to power.' In the Romanian expression “treading on dead bodies to the top”.
No-one knows what are the causes of the condition although research suggests that the psychopath’s brain functions abnormally and that a lobe may be missing. There is no cure. No-one can be given a conscience transplant.
Professor Robert Hare, Professor of Psychology at Vancouver University, is the world’s  leading authority on psychopaths. He estimates that about 1% of the population are psychopaths. Hare says they are "amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories...They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are often very likeable and charming. To some people, however, they seem too slick and smooth, too  insincere and superficial. Astute observers often get the impression that psychopaths are play-acting, mechanically ‘reading their lines.’  
Psychopaths are always highly intelligent (a parallel can be drawn with autists) and often possess photographic memories but their knowledge tends to be wide but superficial. They can be superb linguists and readily assimilate the latest jargon expressions as they emerge. Lacking normal human feelings, they are actors who learn how to behave by mimicking those around them. They may therefore come across as affected, insincere or false. Hare says they have a "narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the centre of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules.” They can seem very  charismatic but are rarely popular with those who work or interact with them closely. A few perceptive people sense at once that they are evil.

The psychopath will always prefer what he can gain by trickery, dishonesty or force majeure to the fruits of honest toil, which bores him. He  is usually lazy and unfocused where routine work is concerned  although at networking or marketing he can be a workaholic. As a boss he will steal his subordinates’ ideas, pick on victims to bully and very often sexually harass staff but also use manipulative skills to retain subordinates’ loyalty (Adolf Hitler remembering his secretaries’ birthdays).  In business psychopaths will take pride in using every dishonest subterfuge from bribes to blackmail to acquire mandates or retainers, happily getting away with  substandard work as a result. They are exceptionally astute at reading others and are adept at gleaning  information about those around them to feed their sense of power and enable them to exploit others. If they judge it safe to do so, they will delight in hurting those whom they can injure (I know of one HR Manager who framed a series of staff members with no ulterior object beyond the fun of sabotaging their careers). Psychopaths inhabit a Hobbesian universe where power is the only value and love of power means love of mischief.

The female psychopath (there are thought to be roughly two male psychopaths for every one female psychopath) is exactly as pitiless as her male counterpart but will use the advantages open to her as a woman to help her career path. If attractive she will exploits her looks, sleep her way to promotion or with clients to make deals happen, while at the same time she may be ready to concoct false charges that she herself is the victim of sexual harassment rather than the perpetrator. If appropriate she will cultivate the image of a devoted wife or mother as a useful cover.

Industrial psychopaths of either sex can be very effective at PR, at sales and marketing and their management techniques can be effective in the short or medium term but in the long term their business enterprises are likely to founder, their companies fail, their partners part ways from them or their employees vote with their feet. Psychopathy causes enormous damage in all our lives. We have seen in recent years the consequences when a succession of fraudulent businesses have collapsed. Who will psychoanalyse Enron or Worldcom, Bancorex or FNI?

So what should we look for as pointers to alert us against this dangerous breed of people when for example conducting interviews? The tell-tale signs include contradictory lies, oleaginous flattery, haughty body language, the penetrating and prolonged ‘psychopathic stare’ with which they fix their victims, poor spelling, an excessive interest in status and material things, their love of belittling others, boasting particularly about their lack of scruples and all sorts of unusual ways of talking, dressing or behaving, designed to draw attention to themselves.

Hare and Babiak have joined forces to create a new diagnostic tool, the “B-scan”  intended to help businesses keep psychopath- is a series of questions asked of referees rather than candidates, looking for sixteen key qualities including: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, , unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

How many do you know?

©Paul Wood 2011

Vampires do exist

Vampires do exist. They are called psychopaths or sociopaths (the words are interchangeable) and are in a true sense the undead. They appear to be very vivacious but this is an illusion. They draw their energy from those around them, especially their victims. 

They have no consciences. Their characteristics include extreme manipulativeness, total egocentricity, shallow emotions, fearlessness, callousness (they lack 'warm' empathy but have 'cold' empathy, meaning they are very good at reading others' emotions), superficial charm, charisma and antisocial behaviour. 

I came to know at least two of these perverse and dangerous people in Romania. Both were good-looking and highly intelligent women. One of them, let us call her Paula, matched President Mitterand's description of Mrs. Thatcher - 'the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe'. 

The eyes are significant - the penetrating and prolonged psychopathic stare is part of the way in which they mesmerise their victims, while spinning lies or playing games. Another is by conversational hypnosis. They have soothing and caressing voices which enable them to lull their victims into acquiescence and even to implant ideas (commands) into the victims' minds, although when they are not using this mode their voices are very cold and tellingly ugly. Voices, unlike physical appearance, are, by the way, one of the best ways of reading people. 


Psychopaths like positive people because they need to find sources of energy. People without power or energy are of no use to them.

For psychopaths most of mankind are zombies. Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is pure psychopathy, expresses the psychopath's contempt for the mass of humanity:

Do you ever feel as if the world is full of zombies? Mindless people who merely obey the dictates of society and their own emotions, showing no sign of rationality, letting others decide who and what they’re going to be in this life, regurgitating moral nostrums as if they were pearls of the highest wisdom, attacking those who are not like them and wanting desperately to turn all outsiders into exact replicas of themselves... ?

One characteristic psychopaths  have which has not, to my knowledge, been remarked on is that they find their lives very tiring. It is draining to be a psychopath, constantly manipulating, lying and simultaneously juggling mind games with various people on various levels. Like autists, psychopaths often have photographic memories and minds that work very quickly and this too is tiring. My two psychopaths looked young and seemed vivacious both admitted that they tired very quickly and I came to realise that they were very old in their hearts. Undead. This is why, unlike the vampires of myth, both liked early nights.

Psychopaths are so good at reading and manipulating people that I finally concluded that it is about more than lightning-quick intellects: they have psychic powers, as many people do. They get into the minds of those they interact with. Paula told me that she sometimes had prophetic dreams and always knew if she was going to get her way at an encounter before it began. She could usually read people perfectly. She only failed, she told me, with stupid people and with 'a few people who wouldn't let me in at all and all of those, I discovered later, hated me. Not for any reason', she added, unconvincingly. On one of the first occasions when I met Paula, I had a psychic experience myself. I saw a black aura around her, blotting out the sunlight from a summer evening at the Marriott Hotel. 

A down to earth material explnation, on the other hand s that is the psychopath's inability to feel stress which lets him see calmly and unemotionally. Psychopaths and Tibetan monks, who learn calm from meditation, detect deep emotions that are invisible to others, according to the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Kevin Dutton. 



Psychopaths cannot be bargained with or trusted under any circumstances. Psychopaths are dangerous and should be steered very well clear of. Apart from the harm that they delight to inflict on those around them, if they judge it safe and politic to do so, they carry around with them black clouds which occlude the happiness and joy of life. They feel savage glee and rejoice in tricks and lies but the happiness they obtain from life is most of the time thin. They are black holes. Carlyle said that 'In the moments of our greatest happiness there is something that prevents us being wholly happy. That something is nothing other than the shadow of ourselves.' That shadow makes up the psychopath's whole existence.

Dr. Martin Israel, the author of a leading work on pathology, who went on to become an Anglican priest and a famous authority on psychic forces, believed that psychopaths are: 

especially powerful mediums of destructive cosmic forces, and their power is related to their intelligence and their ability to communicate on a psychic level with other people. The murderous type of dictator, so common in our century, typifies this trend to its most devastating extent.

This, I believe, is exactly right. Stalin is a very good example.

Israel goes on to say:

The end of the powers of evil, wherever we may place their origin, is world domination. But behind this outer desire for conquest there is a hidden, deeper lust for total destruction. The evil impulse looks for the death of all life, the corruption of all beauty and the perversion of all truth and justice.

Female psychopath

This detail from Bosch's curious painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Paula's favourite painting, reminds me of her (she is, like most psychopaths, very promiscuous). The penetrating beak, the huge mouth, the underbelly being feasted on by hommes moyens sensual who are on their way to self destruction and, especially, the grasping hands. 

The picture, Paula said, is 'as much about contemporary New York as Holland centuries ago. I have stared for hours at every detail trying to imagine the story behind each figure.' No doubt she did so to learn as much from it as she can, because psychopaths  are only interested in knowledge they can use. 

What did she learn from it? Everyone in the painting is suffering or will suffer as a result of their weaknesses, except the pitiless satanic creatures who efficiently administer the punishments and are enjoying their task. 

The Satanic agents in the Garden of Earthly Delights are the only pure figures. They are like psychopaths, in fact, for psychopaths are curiously inhuman. They are evil yet not corrupt, are in fact incorruptible, although possessing all the deadly sins themselves. Psychopaths feel emotions such as savage glee, lust, greed, and most of all contempt and boredom but their emotional range is very limited and they do not have normal feelings, especially not feelings of  affection, or consciences which derive from such feelings. They are the proof that Aristotle and Kant were wrong to think that virtue proceeds from reason, for psychopaths  are very sane and completely rational. Conscience and virtue are functions of love not reason. 

Psychopaths, when they let down their guards, seem like creatures from outer space, not humans at all, though Diana, the second psychopath I knew, said to me once that 'I still hope somewhere in me is a little shred of humanity'. I felt sorry for her, which seemed absurd. Diana also said to me, while listening to a Bach concerto: 'This was written from pure hatred.'

Psychopaths, by the way, also seem oddly to transcend their nationality, social class and even their sex. Paula and Diana, for example, in many ways seemed like homosexual men in women's bodies.

I asked Paula what this detail from the Bosch painting meant to her, but all she said was, in the dreamy voice she affects:

'It's so enjoyable to be eaten'. 

She added:

'Victims want to be victims. I really believe that.'

And on this occasion she was telling the truth. This is, curiously, what all psychopaths  believe and perhaps at a deep level they are often right. 

There seems to be a genetic basis, although this is not certain, to psychopathy. Psychopaths' brains when scanned differ from those of normal people, but brains develop in childhood, just as personality traits do. One interesting fact is that psychopaths are more likely to have blue or green eyes than the general population. If this is true then Romania has fewer psychopaths per capita for blue and green eyes are rare in this country of brunettes. But I wonder.



For more about psychopaths by me please click here and here.



Note: I have come across this interesting blog on the subject by the well-known Romanian-American novelist, Claudia Moscovici.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths and Monks

An interesting article in the current edition of Forbes Magazine, on the ability of psychopaths to read people. 

Ironically, both psychopaths and Tibetan monks detect deep emotions that are invisible to others. Psychopaths are much better at recognizing “those telltale signs in the gait of traumatized assault victims” notes The Wisdom of Psychopaths author, Kevin Dutton. 

Tibetan monks, steeped in meditative practice, are also especially adept at reading feelings that are hidden from the rest of us, Paul Ekman discovered. Ekman, is the preeminent expert on lying and on the six universally expressed emotions in the face — anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust and surprise. Scarily, psychopaths score especially high on the Hare Self-Report Scale of psychopathy in seeing those core expressions, especially the ones that make us most vulnerable, fear and sadness, according to Sabrina Demetrioff.

The explanation is the monks' deep meditation and the psychopaths' congenital lack of fear which makes them calm and unstressed.

Relaxation releases intuition, something I have learnt from experience and was once told by a high-performing psychopath. Another reason to practice meditation.

The purpose of the characteristic, long, penetrating stare of the psychopath has not been completely explained by psychologists but staring them out, while it may make you feel you have defeated them, may be what they want and dangerous. In Nietzsche's words:

When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares into you.

The stare is a means of asserting power but more importantly of reading people and returning the stare may in some way allow them to read you better and even, who knows, enter your mind. 

The psychopath inhabits a private melodrama in which he is the evil villain. Anyone who has known psychopaths well knows that, when they take off their masks, they seem completely inhuman. And there is evidence that they are in a true sense reptilian as Thomas Sheridan explains here. There is a persuasive theory that they have an evolutionary need to propagate themselves which is why male and female psychopaths alike typically have many children, starting young, whom they abandon or shamefully neglect. One woman psychopath I knew of delighting in donating her eggs for in vitro fertilisation and I am very sure she was not the only one: another argument against test tube babies.

Psychopaths have very good brains and they also have emotions, but they cannot love, except, in their own way, close members of their family, whom they consider extensions of themselves. Psychopaths therefore have no conscience, for conscience is a function of love, not reason. The psychopath's inability to love is the reason for his insatiable desire for power for this, unlike love, he does understand. As Carl Jung put it:

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Psychopaths are not sadists - as one explained to me, its not about causing pain - its about power.  Sadists feel your pain - psychopaths do not. Psychopaths are only concerned about themselves. They are inhuman, sadists are humans.

For more information about how to learn the wisdom of psychopaths, a very useful wisdom indeed, by the way, for honest men as well as for knaves, here are 'Count' Victor Lustig's ten tips.

'Count' Lustig practices the psychopathic stare.

Lustig was an inter-war conman and is or was famous for selling the Eiffel Tower, as scrap metal. He also once scammed Al Capone of $5,000. Interestingly, he spoke five languages: psychopaths are often very good linguists, in my experience. They often have photographic memories but there are other reasons too why languages are attractive to them - every language is both a vehicle for deception and a mask.

Psychopaths delight in giving advice and especially in mentoring younger psychopaths. Lustig wrote the following list of rules for aspiring con-men. 

(Source: Fakes, Frauds & Other Malarkey)

1. Never look bored.
2. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
3. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
4. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.
5. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
6. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
7. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
8. Never be untidy.
9. Never get drunk.'

For more by me about psychopaths, please click here and here. 

Psychopaths are motivated by envy

The psychopath, like everyone, is attracted to the qualities he has repressed in himself. Therefore, according to Melanie Klein, he is drawn to good people, whom he envies and wishes to embrace but also to harm, thus relieving his painful feelings of envy. In the same way, good people are sometimes attracted by evil ones, because evil people do the things good people do not dare even want to do. This is why stories about psychopaths sell more than stories about saints.

Envy is one of the psychopath's principal emotions. If the psychopath cannot possess good qualities himself he can devalue people he recognises as good, by insults or harming them, in some cases even by murder. Psychopaths envy everything, for evil is a vacuum, negation. Evil is a very real thing (read crime stories in the press or read some history) and, paradoxically, also nothing, a kind of black hole. 

Envy and pride, not greed or cruelty, are at the heart of evil.  Particularly, envy of another's spiritual good, which the Church has always considered one of the greatest of all sins, a sin against the Holy Spirit. The myth of the fall of Lucifer is accurate, understood in psychological terms.

'His [Othello's] life had a daily beauty in it which made mine ugly.' 

was the only explanation Iago gave for his crimes at the end of Othello. Some people think this a cop out on the part of Shakespeare. In fact, it is good psychology and good theology.

This is one reason why psychotherapy for psychopaths is dangerous (the psychotherapist can be in emotional and even physical danger). Another is the fact that psychotherapy may make the psychopath worse, not better, in the sense of being better able to understand himself and better able to achieve his ends. In any case, as Freud said, the patient needs a conscience for therapy to work. It only works if the subject wants to be a better person. ('How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to be changed.')

The evil eye, which has always been feared in traditional societies, is supposed to be motivated by envy and inflict bad luck. It is interesting that evil people, or at any rate psychopaths, do stare in a remarkably strange way.

Ira Einhorn, environmentalist, psychopath and murderer

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors murderers, who tortured and killed children

For more about the evil eye, click here.

The war by experts against the rest

The thing is that obeying experts is not following the science. The scientific method is to question received opinions and to test them repeatedly against experience.

This goes for history more than any other science, if history is one (I always found that debate completely barren, like the American one about whether the Nazis were left-wing).

This is the way people like taxi drivers and barbers work, which is why they know everything.

A war is going on in the developed world between graduates (especially ones under say 40) and the non-graduates, exemplified by the taxi driver and barber class. 

It's part of the war between big cities and small towns and is essentially a battle for control by the expert class. 

Covid is about that, obviously.

So is climate change.

Immigrants and refugees are too, because the expert class favours both. 

So was Brexit. Lord Chancellor Gove's remark is misquoted often but was very true.

“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”

Another wonderful Daily Telegraph obituary - for Clarissa Dickson Wright

Clarissa Dickson Wright was after my time, which is to say her television programmes were, my time being when I started work and stopped watching television except for the news. This week, however, she was the subject of another great Telegraph obituary.

Some lives are picaresque novels, far more than careers counsellors and writers would have us believe and Miss Wright's was one of these. Not quite so much so as the life of the subject of the funniest obituary of all time, Denisa, Lady Newborough, but comparably interesting.

Her descriptions of Mr. Blair are priceless. 

She observed the budding union between [Cherie] Booth (“desperately needy”) and Tony Blair (“a poor sad thing with his guitar”). Later still she observed that the “wet, long-haired student” that she had known had been replaced by a man with “psychopath eyes. You know those dead eyes that look at you and try to work out what you want to hear?”)

I wonder what changed him. I know what she means about dead psychopathic eyes but I would not have fingered him for a psychopath.

I went in my youth to meet the deputy editor of the Telegraph and told him the obituaries were the best thing in the paper and he said he agreed. They are the best history of the 20th century - the John Aubrey's Brief Lives de nos jours. They outdo Anthony Powell, himself the biographer of Aubrey.

Much as one likes fat people in principal it is worth noting that they die in their fifties and sixties, so note this well dear reader before passing on. On the other hand, Kingsley Amis said that

'No pleasure is worth foregoing for the sake of 10 more years in a nursing home.'

You might decide this goes for steak and kidney pudding, trifle and other glories of English cuisine.

Review of R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny" - Part 1

John F. Kennedy, aged 28, wrote these words in his diary on holiday in Germany in the summer of 1945, after visiting the Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's Lair.

“After visiting these two places you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him."

They now read very oddly, although there is no question that Hitler was one of the most significant figures who ever lived. Kennedy did not foresee that the hatred that surrounded Hitler in 1945 has not lessened at all in 72 years. 

Loss of belief in Man is a consequence of loss of belief in God

It is very sad that many people think animal lives are as important as human lives. Worse, they feel that this is a noble sentiment. 

Loss of belief in Man is a consequence of lack of faith in God.

Love of animals is beautiful but often strongly felt by misanthropes, sentimentalists and extremists. Goering wept whenever one of his dogs died, despite all the indications that he was a psychopath.

I spoke to a friend who is Green Party member who thinks animals as important as humans. He much prefers to put it this way, rather than the other way around. He is not alone in thinking this in the Green Party, a party that attracts many very worrying people and is much the most extreme and frightening mainstream-ish party in European countries, whether Germany, England or elsewhere. 

It is not benign at all, but people think it is.

Friends are the theatres of our actions

'Your reference group determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.' 

Dr. David McClelland, an American psychologist of whom I had never heard, noted for his "need for achievement" theory.

Your reference group are the people with whom you habitually associate. He found that changing the reference group completely transforms the way someone thinks.

That seems easy, to me, but for most people it is probably not so easy and not so easy for me, really. 

The actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov said that he thought ones friends are not the people with whom one has most in common but the people who got there first.

Evelyn Waugh might have invented mass murder at a conference on “reducing reoffending”

I was in Paris and busy when another Islamist atrocity partly on London Bridge took place in the middle of a British election, as happened in the last election. I am pleased that the parties did not suspend campaigning for a day or the BBC suspend political programmes,
as absurdly happened in 2017.

A young Cambridge man, Jack Merritt, was murdered foully, stabbed to death, and I offer my condolences to his loved ones. The killer, Khan, whom he had mentored, had hours earlier given a talk about reforming prisoners at an event Jack Merritt helped organise. He bravely tried to disarm him and died doing so.

He worked at the University of Cambridge’s criminology department. The event held at Fishmongers’ Hall in the City of London was called Learning Together and an attempt at “bringing students in Higher Education and Criminal Justice institutions together in transformative learning communities”.

The aim was to form connections that “make society more inclusive and safer by reducing reoffending”. Khan, however, wanted to reoffend. With the mirthless sense of humour of a psychopath he used the occasion to go on what the tabloids call a killing spree. He stabbed to death another Cambridge graduate, Saskia Jones, and injured more people.
Mr Merritt’s grieving father David described his son, a Labour supporter, as “a beautiful spirit who always took the side of the underdog” and who believed deeply in the concept of prisoner rehabilitation.

On Twitter he said: ‘My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.” 

English journey

Robert Frost said home is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. I didn't have to go to England but went because Brexit made me realise not how much I love my country - I knew that very well every day - but how rarely I visited. 

And I like to go to politically exciting places like Iran, Pakistan and North Korea. This summer that meant the UK. 

And I still haven't written up my journey. Here's a start.

I arrived in England at midnight. I had bought a ticket with Easyjet from Nice to Luton and a room in a mediaeval hotel in St Albans. This was not a good idea as my plane was delayed over an hour and I was told I was lucky. Easyjet planes are often delayed three hours.

St Albans. The staff at the station, who had never heard of my hotel, the best known in the town, told me it was too far to walk, which it was not. I ordered a minicab from a dreamy and rather sweet Kashmiri with a beard that stretched almost to his waist. He told me there was a large Muslim community in the St Albans. He had been to Kashmir a number of times and felt equally Pakistani and British.

St Albans is one of the loveliest old towns in England. And a great place to stay if you visit England, as it is very close by train to London but very far away indeed, its buildings Georgian and earlier. It existed, of course, in Roman times, when St Alban was martyred.

Lunch in Inner Temple with two charming people mourning the referendum result and dinner with a friend whose life's work Brexit represented. She, like all the really passionately anti-EU people I know in Britain, is Jewish. I don't think this has any significance, except to disprove the idea that Jews are less patriotic than other people.

What fun Soho is, how beautiful and serious the women are. Morally serious, I mean, not unlaughing. The intelligent people in their late 20s are what make every city. The ones in London are very impressive, unarrogant, stylish but modest. 

England is the best country in the world and nowadays has lovelier women than Romania, although this is partly because the hot Romanian girls are now mostly in London (you, gentle female Romanian reader in Bucharest, are, of course, the exception).

Dinner the next night with a City friend, a former young fogey and strongly Brexit. He said, ruefully, 

My commonplace book

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." - Pablo Picasso

So, as I was saying, the rule is don't think what to write, write what you are thinking and then develop and expand the thought.  Ronnie Smith

Ah best to just get something down however ghastly it is then work on it. Writing is rewriting.

Nick Cohen

"Never mistake motion for action."

Ernest Hemingway

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on"

Alan Watts

‎'She was good, quiet, dull, and amiable, and young only because she was twenty-three.'

E.M Forster

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation - but I think this is equally true of us all.

Graham Greene

I think that most books are written in a language thirty years out of date, a generation out of date. The rhythms of thought that are actually out there don't correspond. We write in a kind of pedagogic code. Maybe writing does lag behind the times. I wanted to suggest the new rhythms of thought which change all the time. I think that the modern consciousness gets more and more to be an ungodly mix. 

Martin Amis

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril."Sir Winston Churchill


The Victorians liked sex. If they hadn't there would have been no Edwardians. Me

You can't sit around thinking. You have to sit around writing.
~ David Long



There always comes a time when you have to choose between thinking and acting. It's called growing up.
~ Albert Camus

Everything comes and goes; marked by lovers and styles of clothes.
~ Joni Mitchell

Toryism has always been a form of paternal socialism.  

Harold Macmillan

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”


Henry in “William, Prime Minister” (1929)

"Practice only impossibilities." 

John Lyly

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.” 

Henry David Thoreau

"Aristocracy may have its faults but ratocracy, which is what in practice a meritocratic system produces, is proving even worse."

Peregrine Worsthorne

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

Dorothy Day

“These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.” 

The narrator in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited




And even now, when opinion across Europe is unanimous that immigration must be controlled, and that Muslims must be integrated into the secular culture, liberal politicians are refusing to admit to a problem or to confess that they are the cause of it. They still preach “multiculturalism” as the sign of our “vibrant” future; they still condemn “racism and xenophobia” as the enemy; they still try to state and solve the problem by the promiscuous multiplication of “human rights.” Their Enlightenment creed makes it all but impossible for them to acknowledge the fundamental truth, which is that indigenous communities have legitimate expectations which take precedence over the demands of strangers. True, indigenous communities may also have duties of charity towards those strangers—or towards some of them. But charity is a gift, and there is no right to receive it, still less to force it from those reluctant to give.


The fact is that the people of Europe are losing their homelands, and therefore losing their place in the world. I don’t envisage the Tiber one day foaming with much blood, nor do I see it blushing as the voice of the muezzin sounds from the former cathedral of St. Peter. But the city through which the Tiber flows will one day cease to be Italian, and all the expectations of its former residents, whether political, social, cultural, or personal, will suffer a violent upheaval, with results every bit as interesting as those that Powell prophesied.

Roger Scuton

All this need not be a total disaster. It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years.

Charles Moore

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” 

"A problem cannot be solved by the same mind set that created it."

Albert Einstein

‘The past is attractive because it is drained of fear’ (Carlyle)

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche

 ‘

... the devouring aspect of the unconscious, which suffocates life and prevents the human being from developing. It is the swallowing or the regressive aspect of the unconscious, the looking-backward tendency, which grips when one is overcome by the unconscious. ....pull towards death.

..it is the infantile shadow must be sacrificed  - that which always pulls us back into being dependent, lazy, playful, escaping problems and responsibility and life.

"If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift [of renewal], so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities."

“You have to be lonely so that the unconscious becomes stronger."

" The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth. ... People living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality." 

Marie Louise von Frank

"The criminal aberrations of the Catholic clergy threaten the physical and moral health of our young people."  Joseph Goebbels May 30, 1937

‎"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." 
Wittgenstein

People are of immense importance but the relations between them are not. 
EM Forster

"The stupid person's idea of a clever person." 
Elizabeth Bowen on Aldous Huxley

Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally... Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves." 
Don Miguel Ruiz 

Always start at the end and work backwards. 

If you don't have faith in yourself, you don't have enough faith in God. 

‎"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on" (Alan Watts) 

The drunkenness of things being various - Louis MacNeice

It's only work if somebody makes you do it.

Calvin and Hobbes

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The way you see yourself will determine how people see you

Paulo Coelho

"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is"  
Carl Jung

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," 
Mark Twain 

‎"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it." 
William Durant

Friendship without the everyday becomes an allegory. 
Jules Romains

 Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth. 
Mike Tyson

Jowett’s words, as quoted in Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks: ‘We have sought truth and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?’

“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” 
Sigmund Freud.

"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me." 
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo

"They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now" 
Bob Monkhouse


"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, but Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right." 
Hillaire Belloc

A woman asked a barman for a double entendre, so
the barman gave her one.

To speak another language is to possess another soul
Charlemagne (?)

 The idea is to die young as late as possible.
Ashley Montagu

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
- Albert Einstein

'For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.' Earnest Hemingway (when challenged to write a short story in six words)

"The habit of ignoring nature is deeply implanted in our times. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life." 
Marc Chagall


I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
-- Maya Angelou

reculer pour mieux sauter ....
anonymous - Napoleon?


"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
-- Groucho Marx


‎"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... "- Louis Hector Berlioz

Bowmen bend their bows when they wish to shoot: unbrace them when the shooting is over. Were they kept always strung they would break and fail the archer in time of need. So it is with men. If they give themselves constantly to serious work, and never indulge awhile in pastime or sport, they lose their senses and become mad." -- Herodotus

"At the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends" -Martin Luther King

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato

"Anyone can sympathize with the suffering of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success"- Oscar Wilde.

We read to know that we are not alone.
~C.S. Lewis


No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others... Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false. ~P. D. James

Those whom the gods love grow young. ~ Oscar Wilde


The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
- Einstein

"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" - Marcel Proust

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind" - John Stuart Mill

A smooth sea never a skilled mariner made.
- English proverb



“... We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"I like deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

"Ficition is obliged to possibilities. Truth isn't." -- Mark Twain

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." -- Kurt Vonnegut

‎"Even awake I was sleeping. Dumped in a foreign city, where I ain’t known hardly a soul, the language a constant door in my face. It weighed on me, the
loneliness, the jealousy."
HALF BLOOD BLUES by Esi Edugyan 

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." George Washington


If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
-Groucho Marx


Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process
he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss,
the abyss also looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844

Novelist Bob Leuci:
“There’s an invisible link that connects all people who perceive themselves as writers.”

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, And a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

It is the same everywhere. The Athenians look on this constant change with a mixture of abstract pride and private bewilderment. Much of this architectural restlessness may spring from the sudden boom in tourism. One's first reaction to this new windfall is delight: Greek economy needs these revenues; one's second is sorrow. Economists rejoice, but many an old Athenian, aware of the havoc that tourism has spread in Spain and France and Italy, lament that this gregarious passion, which destroys the object of its love, should have chosen Greece as its most recent, most beautiful, perhaps its most fragile victim. They know that in a few years it has turned dignified islands and serene coasts into pullulating hells. In Athens itself, many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine. Docile flocks converge on them, herded by button-eyed guides, Mentors and Stentors too, with all Manchester, all Lyons, all Cologne and half the Middle-West at heel. The Athenians who ate there for generations have long since fled. (Fortunately, many inns survive unpolluted; but for how long? The works of writers mentioning these places by name should be publicly burnt by the common hangman.) Greece is suffering its most dangerous invasion since the time of Xerxes.

..In dark moments I see bay after lonely bay and island after island as they are today and as they may become … The shore is enlivened with fifty jukeboxes and a thousand transistor wirelesses. Each house is now an artistic bar, a boutique or a curio shop; new hotels tower and concrete villas multiply. 
Patrick Leigh Fermor

Anxiety is fear of one's self.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.

Love is only a seeking for love in return, 'Do, ut des' (I give, that thou shalt give). If the patient notices that love is not given in return or that it has not reached that degree which he expected, defiance enters in place of the love, which in turn manifests itself as active resistance.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding.


Wilhelm Stekel:

Paul Theroux's 3 rules of travel: 'Travel on the ground — avoiding air travel. Travel alone when possible. Keep notes. That’s it.'

“enjoy each moment. appreciate what is. be completely here and now. that is where eternity is found.”
Peter McWilliams

I am always prepared to recognize that there can be two points of view- mine, and one that is probably wrong.
J.G. Gorton

"Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money." -- Gerald Brenan

What you think of yourself is much more important than what others think of you. Seneca.

One of the good things about getting older is that you find you're more interesting than most of the people you meet. – Lee Marvin 

‎"The measure of a man is his unflappability - but this comes not from hardening and defending against painful thoughts, emotions and experiences but by being willing to experience it all" ~ (Ken Wilber)

Every major question in history is a religious question. Hilaire Belloc

"To have laughed often and much; won the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; earned the appreciation of honest critics and endured the betrayal of false friends; appreciated beauty; found the best in others; left the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

'The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 

 “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent, because the European enlightenment is more important than people.” Dostoevsky

Growing up, all I wanted to be was a pilot  and when I left the RAF in my early twenties all I wanted to do was travel, which is what motivated me to go into journalism. I just saw writing a novel – stupidly – as a way of making a bit of money. A means to get me out of a jam. Frederick Forsythe

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. ~ William James

"One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory."

- Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, at the United Nations, 1974

The Euro was an archetypal modernist project, maybe the last modernist
political project,  in which an elite group decided it had a solution,
and resolved to impose it by any means necessary regardless of whether
the public wanted it or not. In this limited sense only, the Euro is
comparable to the Leninist doctrine that the vanguard communist party
could act in the interests of the working class without ever asking
the permission of the working class.

Nick Cohen

.....the top five things that made me happy. It went like this: (1) my marriage, (2) my faith, (3) getting trashed, (4) going on holiday, (5) my friends

Julie Burchill

When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year, and which now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble reaching this conclusion: the poor, unemployed and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely.

Orhan Pamuk

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming. 
Soren Kierkegaard

"As I never tire of pointing out, Winston Churchill presided over the war effort from 1940-45 with great distinction without always being entirely sober." 
Michael White.

'A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.' -- Ecclesiastes 10:19

'The eurocrats deluded themselves in particular about the nature of Greece, which has not thrown off its Ottoman legacy and where government is regarded as a source of favours rather than a provider of taxpayer-financed services.' Sir Samuel Brittan

 “Youth – nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it?

Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability —I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the Earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.”  Richard Halliburton (1900–1939)

Men are those creatures with two legs and eight hands. Jayne Mansfield

Nadia Comaneci: Do not pray to have an easy life; pray to be a strong person!

‎‎"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Henry Miller

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
- W.B. Yeats

Rodney Dangerfield: My mother didn't breast feed me. She said she only liked me as a friend.

"The people's voice is odd.

It is and it is not the voice of God."

Alexander Pope

Am I alone in wishing Osama spends the afterlife queuing in airport security? Amanda Craig

The most luxurious thing in the world has nothing to do with aristocracy or attractiveness. It's time. Being able to take a nap on a Sunday or having the opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine in a beautiful setting at 1600 are luxuries well beyond any palace poshness. Barry Kolodkin

“I have wandered all my life, and I have also travelled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.”  Hilaire Belloc

"The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there." 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Ambassador to the United Nations.

 “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” Carl Jung

"'Federally funded cowboy poetry.' That phrase has never existed in any language in the entire course of human history. That's an innovation of our time and the fact that that combination of words can be used with all seriousness by the Senate majority leader of the world’s superpower is an indication of the depths we're in." -Mark Steyn

I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. (R.L. Stevenson)

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

“According to a new study, thinking too hard about a problem leads to poor choices - difficult decisions are best handled by our unconscious minds.”

Oddly enough, I am reminded of an exchange my wife once witnessed between Francis Bacon and the columnist Jeffrey Bernard in a Soho restaurant. Bacon asked Bernard whom in the world he would most like to bed. Bernard said Cyd Charisse and Monica Vitti, then asked the great painter about his ultimate fantasy.

"I'd like to get into bed with Colonel Gaddafi," replied Bacon after some thought. It turns out that all these governments and the previously revered LSE have a lot in common with Francis Bacon.

Henry Porter

The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

Be where you are and look forward. That is where contentment and happiness live. 
Ronnie Smith

"Where there is an ebullient sense of humour, the holy spirit cannot be far away."

Of one thing I have no doubt: until we can love ourselves there is no possibility of our loving anyone else, even a person as close to us in physical relationship as a parent, spouse or child. Only when we love ourselves with the intensity of charity that will accept all aspects of ourselves as infinitely treasurable, even when they are palpably immature if not frankly perverse, can we be still and flow out in charity to all around us.

If, on the other hand, I acknowledge the darkness that is mine and lift it up to God in prayer, He will, through His healing grace, effect an inner transformation of my psyche, so that I will be driven by love and compassion for others and not by motives of self-improvement. The paradox about self-awareness is that once we have achieved it we should let it go. It is far removed from the self consciousness of the selfish man grasping for material or spiritual gifts to boost the self that he really hates, or that of the neurotic person enslaved by the imagined contempt of others for the self that he despises.

....every relationship is sacred. This applies especially to the most intimate of all relationships, the sexual one. It is a sacrament, and is defiled to the detriment of all participating in it. It is worth remembering that in the properly consummated sexual act, an act in which both parties have lost themselves in love for each other, each experiences a new reality, one that transcends the narrow isolation of personal gratification. Such an experience is the glimpse of mystical union destined for Everyman - by which I mean the person who does not aspire to great spiritual understanding but lives in a useful mundane way - by God's grace. I believe that this is the primary purpose of sexual union; the other two, growth into a full person and the procreation of the race, are secondary to it. It follows from this that sexual intercourse is a holy action, and should not be contemplated except in a spirit of awe and gratitude. How far man has fallen from this understanding is a measure of his distance from the divine nature implanted in him. I should add at the same time, that those exceptional people called to the state of celibacy in the cause of a greater love for all mankind, may also experience mystical union in their unceasing self-giving to others.

The wise person delays marriage until he has attained sufficient intellectual and emotional balance to judge clearly how he wishes to order his life. The practice of self-control, which is the last fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5.z2), should govern all physical explorations of sex until there is a deep love for the other person.

Martin Israel

Skill to do comes of doing.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly.

Loneliness, when accepted, becomes a gift that will lead us to find a purpose in life.
Paulo Coelho

Mr. Kremlin was distinguished for ignorance for he had only one idea and that was wrong. Disraeli.

No man is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him. Disraeli.

"The human being needs a ruthless father, writes [the psychoanalyst] Fromm. It's difficult to be free and entirely independent, to make decisions about your life. ... To put it clearly, we [in Romania] don't live in a traditional civilian democracy but in post-communism, a society with its own special rules where the flight from freedom becomes nostalgia for the slavery of the past. Many console themselves however they can: Some have more courage, ... others live like unhappy orphans lost in their 'nostalgia for the father' whose commands ensured that you - the eternal child - never had to make decisions. ... The fact that the number of 'orphans' who long for an authoritative force in their lives is growing shows that the current system is not stabilising. On the contrary, fewer and fewer people will trust it as long as it fails to provide solutions." Ion Vianu 

" Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
Alfred North Whitehead  

Silence is the language of God;
It is also the language of the heart.
Dag Hammarskjöld

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Yogi Berra

..some frighteningly destructive people seem to have had all the social ingredients for a happy, constructive life. They are called psychopaths, but this categorization does nothing to explain their character. It is they who are especially powerful mediums of destructive cosmic forces, and their power is related to their intelligence and their ability to communicate on a psychic level with other people. The murderous type of dictator, so common in our century, typifies this trend to its most devastating extent.

In order to escape the terrible impact of truth that impinges on the naked soul, the person flees from one source of social activity to another, if he is what is generally called a "normal" individual. He strives desperately to sustain the status quo by shallow conviviality or by interesting himself in some group activity, which may be educational, artistic or political. The end of this is not so much the education of the mind as the establishment of new associations that will be able to fill the threatening vacuum and allow the even flow of life to proceed. It is a fearful thing to fall into the void that is one's unfulfilled inner life, almost as terrible as falling into the hands of the living God that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews describes. Indeed the two experiences touch each other; I will never know God until I know the inner hell of my unredeemed nature and the darkness that lies outside the cosy calm of intellectual assurance which I have until now identified with the whole of my life.

The most exalted knowledge is of spiritual origin. It speaks of a morality that is native to the human soul, that may well be inculcated by a religious tradition but is affirmed rather than initiated by it. This natural morality is a quality that categorically separates the human being from other animals. If it is completely absent the person becomes a dangerous criminal devoid of a conscience, and is diagnosed as a psychopath.

The light of the demon-possessed individual with a yearning for absolute power consuming their soul is alluring and scintillating, its strength magnifying itself and deceiving its object so that its source lies unrevealed except to those of spiritual sight who can discern the emptiness of the chalice from which it emanates. This falsified light also comes primarily from God, who is the source of all life, power and light, but it is shown to be perverted by the corrupted will of the creature who has grasped at a divine status.


Martin  Israel

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.

- Groucho Marx

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. Oscar Wilde

‎"Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories", Roger C. Schank - cognitive scientist.

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural’ than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger’s claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are .. Nietzsche

People are called to believe in Jesus, and to trust in God’s providence – not in their own efforts. Edward Norman

Spiritual formation is progressive. With each step those who try to love Jesus will discover how great is his love for them. Edward Norman

‎"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." Anthony Haden-Guest.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. Margaret Thatcher

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
Carl Jung, Dreams

IWhatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. (Goethe)

Live, work, act. Don't sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas. (Ibsen)

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. - William James

 have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. Leonardo da Vinci

‎"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world." George Bernard Shaw

When the famous actor David Garrick asked what was the greatest pleasure in life, Johnson “answered fucking and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink though all could not fuck”

All philosophy is disguised psychology
Nietzsche

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." 


Camille Paglia:

The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important.

Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith.

Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands' funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums.

The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society' - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement.


Edward Norman

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.


John Quincy Adams

Millions of modern people of the white civilization that is, the civilization of Europe and America have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. they take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.

Belloc

In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?

A.J.P Taylor:

"What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood"

Sarkozy

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand. ~ Saint Augustine

"People are fully alive to the danger of superstition in priests...in course of time they may find out that professors may be just as bad." Lord Salisbury

‎"I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and therefore it is meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination." Evelyn Waugh

‘They say I am against reform. I am not against reform. There is a time for everything. And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted.’ Duke of Cambridge

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best. ~ Epictetus

At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is ‘not done' to say it . . . [And] anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, whether in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. 
George Orwell

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom. 
Cicero

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. Aristotle

. 

‎"Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual." 
Angela Carter

‎'I’m talking nonsense, I know, but I would rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés.' 
Thomas Mann - Magic Mountain

Personally the last person I want to know about is myself.

It’s a dry quality that you get with English eccentricity at its best; Irish eccentricity is much more outlandish. Crazier. English eccentricity is something you hardly notice until all of a sudden you realize that you’re in the presence of an eccentric mind. It’s not like that at all with an Irish eccentric; you know about it all very easily and quickly. English eccentricity has a suburban quality—it’s like a very neatly trimmed garden in which you suddenly realize that the flower beds aren’t what they seem to be. There’s a kind of well-turned-out quality about English eccentricity, whereas the Irish equivalent is higgledy-piggledy, and sometimes even noisy. The marvel of the English version is that it’s almost secretive. I’ve never quite believed in the obvious English eccentric, the man who comes into the pub every night and is known to be a dear old eccentric. I always suspect that that is probably self-invention. What I do believe in is the person who scarcely knows he’s eccentric at all. Then he says something so extraordinary and you realize he perhaps lives in a world that is untouched by the world you share with him.

I don’t like the Church of England. I feel much more drawn towards Catholicism when I’m in England—not that I’d do anything about it. I always feel that Protestantism in England is strangely connected with the military. All the cathedrals here are full of military honors. It’s part of an establishment with the armed forces; tombs, rolls of honor, that sort of thing.

William Trevor

From the crooked timbers of humanity no straight thing was ever made. 

Kant

"Veşnicia s-a născut la sat"
Lucian Blaga