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Quotes by British Authors
"The Commonwealth has had consistently bad press. It was originally seen as a kind of hangover empire. People have long predicted its demise."
"I think that if politics is just about getting your backside on important seats, then it's a pretty worthless endeavor."
"Always let your talent and tenacity do the talking. Never your tantrums or sense of self righteousness or entitlement. For it is your talent and tenacity that will carve out, shape and seal your possibilities and destiny."
"Obviously Victoria and Mel B have become mothers and there is a part of me that wants to be a mum."
"We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity."
"I don't believe in God personally but I have great respect for those people who do and different people have different religious views in this country."
"With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem."
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship."
"Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it."
"Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society."
"My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it."
"There's no point pretending to be someone or something we're not."
"Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914."
"Ronnie Barker will forever be remembered as one of the great comic actors."
"He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates."
"Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home."
"Preserve the spirit of a 'lost' age, when time moved slower."
"There's another way we are getting behind business - by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it's time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain's small businesses."
"In my experience of these things, parties which shout about dirty tricks and the like tend to do so because they fear a direct hit in some vulnerable part of their political anatomy."
"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them."
"The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war."
"The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved."
"I appeal to all Britishers to answer this call to arms for the defence of all the principles that we Englishmen have been the first to proclaim in the world."
"I would recommend that anyone who wants to do comedy on TV to do radio first."
"Charles was very intent to use his years as Prince of Wales to make his mark while he still had freedom of maneuver that he wouldn't have as King. The first subject he really went for was architecture. It made an impact."
"We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do."
"Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit."
"The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight."
"The Busted thing happened when I was 16. I saw an opportunity, took it and it was better than being at school. It was a fun job but I'd never claim Busted was anything other than a pop band."
"Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own."
"If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid."
"I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else."
"Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive."
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