Quotations

"The only thing you can actually change in your life is your future." Simona Kijonkova

"Like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the EU continues because it cannot be either reformed or replaced." Professor Robert Tombs

“In 2015 the British spy agency GCHQ announced LGBT day. Their headquarters were bathed in the colors of the rainbow flag, trying to put this pretty liberal-left face on this militaristic institution. You see this over and over now where every major authoritarian institution of militarism and corporatism now drapes themselves in identity politics and woke ideology… Its all about deceiving you into believing that these institutions are kind and gentle and noble and loving and fair because their weaponising identity politics to distract you from the reality of what neoliberalism and imperialism are.” Glenn Greenwald, on Zer0 Books podcast.

“Of course, dutiful, loyal supporters of the president and his polices, good citizens who do nothing to attract negative attention from the powerful, have no reason to fear the surveillance state. This is the case in every society: those who pose no challenge are rarely targeted by oppressive measures, and from their perspective, they can then convince themselves that oppression does not really exist. But the true measure of a society’s freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.” Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (2014)

"Alcohol makes other people less dull. If it makes me more boring, I might even pay that price." Christopher Hitchens

"My mother was too young for my father. She was bored, which is a sad thing for a beautiful young woman to be." Christopher Hitchens. His mother committed suicide in Athens in a pact with her lover, a defrocked clergyman. Hitchens had to identify the body, assuming she had been murdered.

"People who put their trust in money and capital are fools. It’s going to disappear like fairy gold." Christopher Hitchens

“With changes already in motion to really redefine inclusive colours within lingerie, last year the team was driven to go harder and faster, fuelled by the global conversation on racial inequality, following the horrific death of George Floyd, as well as clear customer feedback on industry standard colour names such as ‘tobacco’.” Press release about a new range of underwear from iconic British clothing chain Marks & Spencer.

"I have several times considered writing essays about her [Dame Agatha Christie's] work: for example, about the doctors in her books, the moral judgments and observations that she makes, and even one proposing that, in fact, both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are serial killers, this being the hypothesis that most economically explains why there are so often murders wherever they go, it being the only hypothesis, indeed, that fulfills Occam’s Razor, namely that entities (such as murderers) are not to be increased unnecessarily." Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple)