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"But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair."
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"There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again."

"The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are... All men die, and most men miserably. That two soldiers on opposite sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness is most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant, should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the most terrible things in this terrible world."

"It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered."

"What branch do you want to go in? "I don' give a god-damn, said Pilon jauntily. "I guess we need men like you in the infantry. And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. "Where do you want to go? "I want to go home, Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too."
Explore more quotes by Rory Bremner


"When I was growing up, there were just the three channels, so as a nation we all sat down to the same meal at the end of the day. Now there's been this explosion."


"I've no idea what they make of me. People usually don't recognise themselves in an impression."


"It is a weird thing, because most people tend to get more conservative as they get older, but I find myself going the opposite way. I am sure that by the end I will be selling Marxist pamphlets on the Holloway Road."


"When you consider what Tony Blair was saying about liberty, human rights and that sort of thing, it would be terribly revolutionary to sell the speeches he and Jack Straw made in 1994."


"If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none dare criticize it."


"British politics is more nuanced. Part of the problem with New Labour is that they are a moving target."


"I remember driving home one evening while they were reviewing the papers on the radio. One of the articles was about me separating from my wife. It's a weird thing to listen to a news report about the break-up of your marriage."
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