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Quotes by British Authors
"It was my Mum who got me into singing properly - she knew I had to do something with my voice because she knew I was talented. She was the one who pushed me into joining a choir all those years ago, when I was about 12. I remember she told me to start with the choir and just see where it took me."
"In our modern world of interdependent nations, hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations."
"The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists."
"For the first half of this century, High Court judges have been cautious to the point of timidity in expressing any criticism of governmental action; the independence of the judiciary has been of a decidedly subordinate character."
"Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious."
"Starbucks was founded around the experience and the environment of their stores. Starbucks was about a space with comfortable chairs, lots of power outlets, tables and desks at which we could work and the option to spend as much time in their stores as we wanted without any pressure to buy. The coffee was incidental."
"The successful pilots succeeded because they did not open fire until they were close to the target."
"A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man."
"One of the things that goes with getting older is that one becomes more conservative - and I emphasise that when I use the word conservative I do not mean politically."
"If I'm in danger then it's usually my fault and it's up to me to get myself out of it. I am not in it just to get an adrenalin rush. No way!"
"Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief."
"I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before."
"I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry."
"Secrets affect you more than you'd think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret who's actually using you?"
"I'd like to do some more classical work if I do some more theatre."
"To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rule is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another."
"Whether the family of the Clarkes were of Norman extraction cannot be easily ascertained."
"There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating."
"Remember that the word of God is not sent to particular persons, as if by name; and do not think you have no part in it, because you are not named there."
"We spend more time developing means of escaping our troubles than we do solving the troubles we're trying to escape from."
"I really enjoyed the last scene at the Ewok celebration after the battle."
"Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me."
"It was announced as a French victory by the French Minister of War. I did not see any sign of victory but only the retreat of the French forces engaged in the battle."
"Man's idea of God, and a God's collusion, is an essential part of the equation to wage war."
"The world is a bell curve. Classroom test scores, employee performance in a company or how many people really, really like you. No matter the population you're studying, they always fit neatly across the standard deviations of the famous bell curve."
"Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace."
"Once you start, there is no end to who is to go in and who is to be left out."
"This is what happens. You tell your friends your most personal secrets, and they use them against you."
"It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness."
"I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland."
"What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly."
"Enthusiasm is the divine particle in our composition: with it we are great, generous, and true; without it, we are little, false, and mean."
"The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods."
"No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely."
"The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence."
"Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?"
"The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire."
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