Monday 12 September 2022

Quotations

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"We are Americans at puberty. We die French." Evelyn Waugh's diary, 18 July 1961

“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 in The Origins of the Second World War. Both countries, of course, were 'liberated' from Hitler by Stalin and the Marxists.

On V.E. Day the diarist Henry ('Chips') Channon, M.P. for Southend-on-Sea, threw a very grand party in his house in Belgrave Square. The guests included exiled royalty and many peers and peeresses. He said to the heiress Emerald Cunard, ‘This is what we were fighting for’ to which she replied, 'What, are they all Poles?’

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” T.E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

"Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war." Edward Luttwak in 2008.

"The rise in Government interference in private lives continued: surveillance cameras multiplied, cigarettes and junk food were demonised, and private opinions were monitored. Even Tony Blair got into trouble, after an account of the 1999 Welsh Assembly elections, serialised in The Mail on Sunday, revealed that he had railed against ‘the f***ing Welsh’. North Wales Police immediately launched an investigation into whether this was a hate crime. ‘It is not trivial,’ pronounced the chief constable. Turner disagrees. ‘It was, though. It was really very trivial indeed. It was a man shouting at the telly in the privacy of his own home.’" Craig Brown reviewing All In It Together by Alwyn Turner

"Providing an advisory notice to users gives us an opportunity to mitigate harm and contextualize the records. It creates a space to share with the public our ultimate goals for reparative description, demonstrate our commitment to the process, and address any barriers that we may face in achieving these goals." Report last year by the US National Archives and Records Administration's Task Force on Racism. The NARA preserves original copies of all Acts of Congress, presidential directives and federal regulations.


“Cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. ” Sarah Rooney

"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." Walter Bagehot

"Hungary is not an immigrant country, does not want to become an immigrant country and cannot accept being forced to change this….[Hungary] has no colonial past….If instead of defending our borders, the European Commission is willing to finance solely measures and organisations that aim to facilitate the admission of migrants, then we will only give incentives to hundreds of thousands of migrants who wish to move to Europe, instead of curbing migration…."
Viktor Orban 2017


"The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches." Edward Norman. Now it's anti-discrimination, not welfare, which has taken that space.

"The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it's still on the list." Anonymous female psychopath

“If we teach standardized, handbook grammar as if it is the only ‘correct’ form of grammar, we are teaching in cooperation with a discriminatory power system.” Patricia A. Dunn and Kenneth Lindblom, English Journal, January, 2003. (The Anglo-American left-wing educational establishment is remaking the world, rather as nationalist schoolmasters remade Wilhelmine Germany and laid the groundwork for the Nazis. Admittedly, Hitler went to school with Wittgenstein in Austria.)

1 comment:

  1. It seems to me that about 4.5 million of the Polish dead were Jews. Wikipedia gives the 1930 Jewish population of Czechoslovakia as around 300 thousand. I cannot imagine that A.J.P. Taylor was ignorant of the rough numbers.

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