Sunday 27 September 2020

Quotations

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This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.
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Grayson Perry, interviewed about his televised trip around the USA. (He's a Labour Party supporter.)

“The right, I hate to say it, are on the whole more reasonable. More open-minded, more forgiving.”

Seen on someone's Facebook wall: 

"I'm a liberal and I loathe liberal smugness. It's a form of snobbery. Liberals are the worst kind of snobs. Self righteous presenters, thin skinned and rather dim, really. Most of the really rebellious people are conservatives."


The childless Emmanuel Macron:

"Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight or nine children." (N.B. Ursula von der Leyen and Amy Coney Barrett both have seven children.)

Wyndham Lewis on Canada:

"The most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness." That's rather how Toronto seemed to me in 1980.

Damian Thompson, reviewing a biography of the painter Lord Berners, by Peter Dickinson.

"He developed an effective technique for ensuring an empty seat opposite you in a railway carriage, which is to stand at the window beckoning people in to join you.

"And it was he who discovered that the question "Death, where is thy sting?" is immensely more evocative in the Dutch Authorised Version of the Bible (1619): Dood, waar is uw prikkel?

"When Berners died in 1950, Heber-Percy thought it would be a nice idea to send the family portraits to the new Lady Berners as a present. Alas, it was not to be. In a life crowded with elaborate pranks, Gerald Berners had found time to paint moustaches on the ladies and lower their dresses down to the navel - thus proving that, to quote Alan Bennett, if a thing isn't worth doing, it's worth doing properly."

George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1925):

Socrates. Is there not often a lifelong and tender affection between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters?

The Stranger. There is: sometimes sugary, sometimes seasoned with a little sarcasm.

Socrates. At least young children, red-cheeked and vigorous, running and romping about with shrill cries, must be a perfect delight to you?

The Stranger. Yes, for half an hour.

Socrates. You find more peace, no doubt, among wrinkled white-bearded elders sitting in the sun or tottering on knotted staves, well pleased with themselves and their old saws?

The Stranger. They, too, are picturesque, but at their best in the background. Otherwise such old men are a danger to philanthropy.

Socrates. I see that your preference, like mine, is decidedly for the plastic and generous temper of young men, who embody human health and freedom to perfection.

The Stranger. Yes, but our preference in this matter is three-quarters illusion. In reality, what is a youth but a tadpole? And what can be more odious than their conceit when they have some cleverness and transgress their sphere?

5 comments:

  1. Two-thirds of Britons think coronavirus restrictions do not go far enough.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/26/two-thirds-britons-think-coronavirus-restrictions-do-not-go/

    In August, the Terrence Higgins Trust published advice suggesting people avoid kissing, wear a face covering and choose positions that aren't face-to-face during sex. The organisation maintains that the safest form of sex is with yourself. 

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/sex-what-law-rules-covid-risks-safe-catch-household-coronavirus/

    "during the 2016 Campaign, 95 percent of the presidential-campaign donations made by civilian Federal employees went to the Democratic nominee. Among employees at the State Department ... the statistic was 99 percent."

    Casey Mulligan, "You're Hired!"
    memoir of a year spent as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers. "during the 2016 Campaign, 95 percent of the presidential-campaign donations made by civilian Federal employees went to the Democratic nominee. Among employees at the State Department ... the statistic was 99 percent."

    Casey Mulligan, "You're Hired!"
    memoir of a year spent as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers. 

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In August, the Terrence Higgins Trust published advice suggesting people avoid kissing, wear a face covering and choose positions that aren't face-to-face during sex. The organisation maintains that the safest form of sex is with yourself.

      The Terrence Higgins Trust appears to be a homosexual organisation. And they advocate sex without kissing and without face-to-face contact and wearing masks - mindless anonymous animal sex without any emotional contact. But I'm sure there's no connection between those two facts. No connection at all.

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    2. Two-thirds of Britons think coronavirus restrictions do not go far enough.

      And a large majority of Victorians support the police state coronavirus policies of the current premier.

      Totalitarianism is not just on the rise in the West. It's popular. Totalitarianism is not being imposed on the West. It's being enthusiastically embraced and welcomed.

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    3. 'Totalitarian democracy' is a paradoxical term popularized by Israeli historian J. L. Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy

      Delete
    4. Toma, thanks for that link. Sounds like Talmom was on to something - and he came up with it in 1952!

      Delete