Tuesday 8 October 2013

'The life of nations, no less than the life of men, is lived largely in the imagination'

SHARE

Roger Scruton
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. 


Charles Moore

All this [mass immigration] 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. 


James Wood (reviewing Scruton’s England: an Elegy in the London Evening Standard)
There is always a danger of confusing one's childhood with the universe.

T. S. Eliot
... how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of -a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. 

Jon Cruddas

If you think back, before Britain, to Shakespeare’s England, then one of its great strengths was that it invited in people from all over the world when they needed a friendly place which offered them more freedom than tyranny elsewhere.

Jon Cruddas
Look at how much we have benefitted from the waves of immigration………..I think Englishness is for everyone who settles here and feels English.

Maurice Cowling
Secularization so far from involving liberation from religion, has involved merely liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand that it is a religion to which they are committed.

Lee Jasper, race relations adviser to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, 2000

At the moment ethnic minorities are about 40 per cent in London. The demographics show that white people in London will become a minority by 2010. We could have a majority black Britain by the turn of the century.

Reccep Erdogan, 2008 in Cologne
I understand the sensitivity you show towards the question of assimilation. Nobody can expect that you tolerate assimilation. Nobody can expect that you submit yourself to assimilation. Then assimilation is a crime against humanity.


Loretta Napoleoni, ‘Europe must move beyond mere tolerance ‘, Guardian, Tuesday 25 January 2011
The new generation of teenagers is the first born inside the united Europe's multicultural melting pot, one no longer just populated by Europeans. Multiculturalism may well be our saviour, wresting us out from the straitjacket of our history, thrusting the old continent into an environment where other ethnicities, less cynical and more positive, will play a big role in its future.

Lord Bragg
I love my country but not in the way that Roger Scruton or Peter Hitchens do, which is based on a single idea that is stuck in the past somewhere. My England is not just the past, it's the here and now. History resonates. It's all around us and it's always there, whether I am walking up to the Roman hill fort near where I was brought up in Barking or wandering through the streets of Soho today. I can feel it now, I don't long to go back to any other time.

Enoch Powell
The life of nations, no less than the life of men, is lived largely in the imagination.

George Walden, 2006, ‘Time to Emigrate?'

The truest thing that's been said of contemporary Britain is that the Left has won in culture and the Right has won in economics. Put them together and a pigging-it lifestyle is what you get. Egalitarianism plus the market gives you the lowest behavioural denominator, plus the highest regard for cash.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are written.

Susan Sontag
The white race is the cancer of human history.

Edmund Burke 
A nation is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation: but it is an idea of' continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultary and giddy choirs; it is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dis­positions, and moral and special habitudes of' the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time....'

Edmund Burke 
Society ... is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partner­ship cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

No comments:

Post a Comment