top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by British Authors
"Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right."
"He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below."
"The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places."
"God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world."
"People need to be peppered or even outraged occasionally. Our national comedy and drama is packed with earthy familiarity and honest vulgarity. Clean vulgarity can be very shocking and that, in my view, gives greater involvement."
"If you don't mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there."
"An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!"
"Death hath a thousand doors to let out life: I shall find one."
"It was fantastic to work in Cornwall partly because my family live there so I was able to do lots of visiting and eat lots of cake. They live all over Cornwall and all over Devon."
"I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime."
"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them."
"I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible."
"They're not bombarding me with offers, although the ones that have come along have been too preposterous to contemplate, so it's not as if I spend every day resisting $20 million pay cheques."
"Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again."
"As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone."
"Theologians have a great problem because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything."
"Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality."
"People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching."
"It was so quiet that morning in Paris that the heels of my two companions and myself were loud on the deserted pavements. It was a city of shuttered shops, and barred windows, and deserted avenues."
"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."
"The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians."
"I am a coach on the outside of the establishment and that works."
"I'd worked in Clockwork Orange with Stanley Kubrick and since Stanley was such a prestigious director this opened all sorts of doors for me - one of them being Star Wars."
"All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation."
"The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved."
"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."
"The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally."
"If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid."
"Air warfare is a shot through the brain, not a hacking to pieces of the enemy's body."
"I don't go by the rule book... I lead from the heart, not the head."
bottom of page