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Quotes by British Authors

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

"We've always had a pretty competitive and pretty ferocious battle with British Airways... It's lasted now about 14 years, and we're very pleased to have survived it."

"I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you."

"My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness."

"Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them."

"I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get."

"Let no one who loves be unhappy, even love unreturned has its rainbow."

"Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison."

"Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping."

"I just play him as myself, I don't ease myself into any role really. I stick a beard on and play me."

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible."

"Conflict is the beginning of consciousness."

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

"The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization."

"If a commodity were in no way useful, - in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification, - it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it."

"In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing."


"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."

"Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other."

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."

"The Cardinal is at his wit's end - it is true that he had not far to go."

"Advice is seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least."

"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

"Fly (poem from the book Blue Bridge)Delicate, / butterfly winged, / we vainly push against the sky, / each trying to find our place.Yes, we are going to die, / let's not beat about the bush. / Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, / maybe even years from now. Meanwhile, / we have someone who loves us, / someone to love. / Surely there is no need to hesitate."

"I think life without Coronation Street would be unthinkable. It's part of all our lives."

"I personally could never come to terms with my label of 'Criminally Insane'. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don't mean to say I'm mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don't make insanity!"

"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."

"A coquette is like a recruiting sergeant, always on the lookout for fresh victims."

"I certainly did feel inferior. Because of class. Because of strength. Because of height. I guess if I'd been able to hit somebody in the nose, I wouldn't have been a comic."

"My influences were Peter Sellers and the great British character actors."


"I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night."

"After Versace was murdered, the first person to call me was Mandela."

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?"

"Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame."

"No matter how eloquently a dog may bark he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest."


"I personally don't have a problem with naked bodies on television."
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