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Abortion

“If it is permitted for a mother to kill her child, who is it not permitted to kill?” -- MOTHER THERESA

 

“I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing — direct murder by the mother herself.” – MOTHER THERESA (in her 1979 Nobel speech)                    

 

“People disagree about whether 40-year-olds have souls. We don't leave 40-year-olds unprotected against homicide in order to avoid imposing our theological views on each other.” - RAMESH PONNURU (A Senior Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, in 2008)

 

“It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a post-religious Paganism.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“Roe vs. Wade was heavy-handed judicial intervention that was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” – RUTH BADER GINSBURG (and yet the rat-like lefty Supreme Court Justice continued to support it to the end.... funny how that works...)                      

 

“There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment.” – WALKER PERCY

 

“It seems to me clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.” – MAHATMA GANDHI

"There is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and someone." -- DONALD WINNICOTT (The famous English pediatrician and shrink)

"If abortion is healthcare, slavery is job creation." -- DARREL B. HARRISON (A black broadcaster from Atlanta who is Dean of Social Media at "Grace To You" Ministries) 

"If someone has to die as a result of rape, then we should kill the rapist, not the unborn child." -- KELSEY GRAMMER

"To say that the fetus is a person if the mother wants it and it's not if she doesn't is not science, it's spin." -- WILLIAM McGURN

 

"A liberal's perfect day, have an abortion in the morning and watch a giraffe give birth in the afternoon." -- BILL POWERS (an American veteran and conservative, on the Twoot)

 

"When you’re a progressive all roads lead to abortion." -- KYLE SMITH

"The reason you don't let women kill their babies is not moral, it's civilizational." -- MICHAEL WALSH (18 August 2023)

“There is no war on women, the war is on their babies.” – DR. BEN CARSON

 

“If it’s not a human being, then why are you harvesting organs from it?” – DR. BEN CARSON

 

"Abortion does not make you un-pregnant. It makes you the mother of a dead child." -- KAYA JONES (A Christian Grammy-winning singer)

 

"Why would a bacteria be considered life on Mars and a heartbeat not be considered life on Earth?" ~ RYAN FOURNIER (May 26, 2018. On the Twoot, President of “StrategiesDC”)

 

“It's not a ‘choice’ decided by a woman and her doctor. The doctor, for one thing, is generally not involved in the act of conception. Therefore, it's a ‘choice’ among the mother, the father, and society. And in a healthy society, it's no choice at all, is it?” – MICHAEL WALSH

 

“I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortions has already been born.” – RONALD REAGAN

 

"Abortion is no more healthcare than a facelift is." -- JOE MALLEIS (my pal from Grand Rapids, Michigan)  

 

“I don’t care how you argue it (abortion), it’s got to be wrong. If it isn’t wrong, how come everybody keeps quiet about it and pretends it doesn’t exist? I mean, if it was okay everybody would be announcing their abortions in The Times, having parties to celebrate another successful zap and giving medals to the guys in Harley Street for their contribution to the balance of payments.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE (he’s British, which explains the “pretends it doesn’t exist” part – and he wrote this in 1994)

 

“Masks are a sacrament of the new leftist Democrat religion. Other sacraments include abortion.” – NICK SEARCY (the American actor, on 30 Sept. 2021)

" 'When you have sex, don't have murder as your backup plan' is not a huge ask." -- FRANK J. FLEMING (of the Daily Wire, in May 2022)

"The pro-abortion movement will not allow pictures of aborted babies to be displayed. They don't allow debate -- all the while saying it's the religious right who are trying to stifle science. I cannot help bu be suspicious of one side of an argument that won't allow the other side to talk. There is something very questionable going on here." -- BEN STEIN


"I'm not prepared to leave abortion to the whims of the public at the moment." -- JOE BIDEN (3 May 2022)

Abstention

“Count yourself rich by the things you can do without.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY (the art columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

 

Abstraction

"Saying 'something is an abstraction' isn’t the same thing as calling it a fiction. Pure mathematics is an abstraction, but it ain’t fiction." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.” – JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

 

“Academia” (Academics)

“The reason why academic politics are so much more savage than any other kind is that there is so little at stake.” - HENRY KISSINGER

 

“There are few things you can rely on in this turbulent world, but one is the tendency of academics to use language poorly, even when discussing language”. --- PEGGY NOONAN

 

“Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol.  The use of arcane and meaningless language as a means of career advancement is perhaps the most salient cultural characteristic of our age.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE (in Jan. 2008)

 

“The average Ph.D. Thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.”  – J. FRANK DOBIE (the newspaper columnist)

 

“Academics like to eat shit, and in a pinch, they don’t care whose shit they eat.” – STANLEY FISH (The famous liberal professor, at Florida International University when he said this. Previously at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Penn, Yale, Columbia and Duke. And I’m not even sure what he’s saying here is true – in my    experience, most academics are not the self-abasing wimps he describes here, but rather pompous hypocritical poseur limousine-liberals but nevermind, it sure looks like a good quote.)                                             

 

“The myriad '-studies' programs that cropped up over the last half century were created to give an academic patina to political activism on behalf of this or that aggrieved identity group.” – IAN TUTTLE (in NRO)

 

“If science could cross-breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Enter the campus radical. In the 1960s, the mob was the instrument of intolerance. By the 1990s, the mob had gained tenure. By the 2010s the mob and the mob's children possessed enormous power and influence throughout the higher-education establishment, and that power and influence passed into Hollywood and into corporate America.” – DAVID FRENCH (in NRO)

 

“A caliphate of sniveling morons.” – SOHRAB AHMARI (specifically about the U. of California—Berkeley, in Sept. 2017)

 

“Like monastic life, academic research is really all about the perfection of one’s own soul.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“The vacuous -isms generated by what is grandly called ‘theory’ that flutters around high above the facts, spouting jargon intended only for the like-thinking, much of it empty of any meaning or of evidence of an ability to think and communicate clearly – the modern equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes.” – DAVID ABULAFIA (and admirable prof of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University)

 

“The sheer bloody tedium of academic life – of more and more being said about less and less.” – ROBERT HARRIS (the novelist, in 1998)

“However bad you think it is in elite academia, it’s much much worse.” — WILLIAM A. JACOBSON (A prof at Cornell Law School…. on 10 Dec. 2024)

Accents

"Have you ever imagined an Englishman with that (upper-class) accent actually in bed? I can't see it myself." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic)

"I've come to the part of the film which is scaring me to death. I'm supposed to use my own accent. And I haven't got one." -- PETER SELLERS (he said this to his good friend Terry-Thomas, on the set of "The Naked Truth", in 1957)

"Accents are funny things. (In fact, there's nothing funnier.)"-- JACK JOLIS

"Of the scores of accents I encountered in New York I found the Filipino most inscrutable." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (the Russian writer who emigrated to America)


Accountability                                                                                                                                                                              

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." – THOMAS SOWELL


Accounting (+-ants)                                                                                                                          

"If there's a bad bookkeeping joke, I haven't heard it." – BART SIMPSON

“If there is one thing worse than a bent accountant it is a crap bent accountant.” – JAMES HAWES (the English novelist)                                           

 

"On its own, the very word 'accountancy' drains any surrounding sentence of any possible meaning." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Accuracy

"Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time" -- MALCOLM FORBES

ACLU

“See the ACLU, the most absurd bunch of Jews since the Three Stooges.” — DAVID MAMET (in 2022)

Acting/Actors

“Show me a great actor and I’ll show you a lousy husband; show me a great actress and you’ve seen the Devil.” - W. C. FIELDS (always nice to keep the perfectly serviceable word actress alive….)

 

“How is it that so few soap operas feature crocodiles? It’s because they have only one expression, and that’s three less than Michael Palin.” - JOHN CLEESE (eh?)

“The foolish can't write, but boy can they act." -- STEVE MARTIN (the great comic actor, in his 1999 book "Pure Drivel")

“Acting is merely the art of keeping large numbers of people from coughing.” -- SIR RALPH RICHARDSON

 

“Actors are like puppets and are not entitled to have views.” - NOEL COWARD

 

“We must be grateful for the existence of the acting profession. It gives all manner of psychopaths, neurotics, megalomaniacs and generalized ne’er-do-wells an outlet for their frenzy.” - ROGER LEWIS (the noted, and notedly scurrilous British Hollywood biographer who wrote, among others, the definitive life of my man Peter Sellers, to whom he gave a real pasting…)

 

“Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of an actor’s trade.” - MIRANDA RICHARDSON

 

“Acting is not quite the occupation of an adult.” – SIR LAURENCE OLIVIER

 

“He sometimes found special wonder in the fact that the profession of actor continued to be held in tolerance, let alone esteem.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS

 

“In my experience there are few people on earth simultaneously less interesting andmore self-involved than actors when they are offstage.” – JOHN PODHORETZ

 

"You get paid a fortune for kissing the most beautiful women in the world - not a bad job is it? That's why none of us retire early." -- MICHAEL CAINE (in 2017)

"I became an actor because I wanted to kiss a girl, and I got to kiss all of them, so I thought it a good profession." -- MICHAEL CAINE (on his 90th birthday, in March 2023, and he certainly seems to have an idée fixe about this girl-kissing business, doesn't he....)

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – KURT VONNEGUT   (in “Mother Night”)             

 

"Why do actors — people whose main talent is faking emotions — think that their opinions should be directing the course of political events in the real world? Yet it is a mistake that they have been making as far back as John Wilkes Booth." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Every generation, no matter how it repines the passing of old times, believes two things of itself: that it has worked out a better way to parent and a better way to act. They’re always wrong.” -- JULIAN FELLOWES (Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, “Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL” is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, and a Conservative peer of the House of Lords.)                                

“Dreaming about being an actress is more exciting than being one"-- MARILYN MONROE

"We are actors! We are the opposite of people." -- TOM STOPPARD

"No one can spend half a lifetime as an intelligence officer without acquiring the skills of an actor." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

Action/Activity

“If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” - LUCIUS HENRY CARY (The “Third Viscount Falkland”, in 1649)

“More good wine has been spoiled by keeping than by drinking.” -- CHRISTOPHER FILDES (a former economic columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

 

“Everyone’s very busy, though not exactly working.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

"If something's worth doing, it's worth doing badly." -- ROBERT LITTELL (in his 2002 CIA novel, "The Company")


 “Pointless activity is like getting on horseback on a ship.” - DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (I guess this was the precursor to the whole “fish on a bicycle” thing…)

 

“When solitary, be not idle. When idle, be not solitary.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"Too fucking busy and vice versa." -- DOROTHY PARKER 

"Whenever you undertake to do something, you should be aware that you will have against you: those who are trying to do the same thing, those who want to do the opposite, and the vast majority who want nothing done at all." -- CONFUCIUS

"Hey, I gave up on being a hero a long time ago. Sometimes the best you can do is set things in motion." -- CARL HIAASEN

“Activity is not real work, and much activity actually obstructs real work.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE (The TV series “The Office” leaps to mind. Or, for that matter, the old, absurd “Apprentice”)

“We are never doing as well as when we are doing nothing.” - ALBERT GALLATIN (adviser to both Presidents Jefferson and Madison. A model conservative and, I should think, the patron saint of slackers. Sounds like a good bloke)

 

"Never confuse movement with action," - ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"My motto is 'Ready, fire, aim', and you give me sly lectures and make sly fun of me about that. But yours is 'Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim....'." -- TOM WOLFE      (the protagonist of his great 1999 "A Man In Full")

"The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you're finished." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“Vigor that is not morally directed is crime or just flailing around.” - DIGBY ANDERSON (British journalist and gourmet, in 1994)

 

“The desire to destroy is a natural outgrowth of the cult of action. ” - JONAH GOLDBERG

"Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

“It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.” – MOLIERE (Real name: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin , big time Frogue actor and playwright, 1622-1673)

 

“The fascist state of mind can best be described as ‘Enough talk, more action!’ Close the books, get out of the library, get moving. Take action! What kind of action? Direct Action! Social action! Mass action! Revolutionary action! Action, action, action. Communists loved action, too. but that’s not surprising considering the family bonds between communism and fascism.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“...feverishly engrossed in a medley of elaborate futilities...” – SAKI

"I don't know what's going on and I don't know what to do. And when I don't know what to do, I go to sleep. Conrad had a name for it -- he called it 'do-nothing heroics'." -- REDMOND O'HANLON    (in his excellent 1996 "Congo Journey")

" ‘We have to do something!’ is liberal for ‘We're about to do something really, really stupid’." – MICHAEL GRAHAM (the great radio talk host )           

                                                                                               

“Deliberation is the function of many, action is the function of one.” – CHARLES DE GAULLE

“Never cut what you can untie.” – JOSEPH JOUBERT (Frog “moralist” and essayist, 1754-1824)

“Winning the Nobel Peace Prize for not doing anything seems to have persuaded President Obama that not doing anything brings peace as well as prizes. Yet the results don't support his instincts.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we can do, I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.” – RONALD REAGAN

"Riches do not make a man richer, they only make him busier." -- CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

“Nothing sudden is happening here. More is just suddenly being revealed.” -- DENIS JOHNSON (in his novel on Africa, “The Laughing Monsters”)                                                 

"Dans le doute, abstiens-toi.” (“When in doubt, do nothing.”) – MARSHAL MIKHAIL KUTUZOV (Napoleon's main adversary out east)                                

"In my new freedom, I remember thinking: if one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement." -- WALKER PERCY (from his novel "Lancelot". I used this as an epigram in my 2nd novel, “Pushkin Shove”, 1984.)                                                  

"Don't just stand there, un-do something!" -- ARTHUR LAFFER

"There was nothing to do, and I did it." -- RAYMOND CHANDLER (writing from Lake Tahoe)

“Action had a way of making the unpleasant clearly visible.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

 

“Imagination, like thought for Hamlet, could be the enemy of action.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“But they want me to do things, and things go wrong when you start doing them. At least, that is my experience.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“All human activity was useless, but some kinds were more pleasant than others.” – DAVID LODGE

 

"Doing nothing, he found, as he went through life, was very tiring." – KEITH WATERHOUSE

 

"Doing and saying nothing are great powers, but they should not be abused." -- TALLEYRAND

 

“If you talk enough, you don’t feel you have to do anything.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -- PETER DRUCKER

"There are only bad options. It's about finding the best one." -- TONY MENDEZ (The celebrated CIA officer who was behind the ARGO business....)

 

“Maybe life was all pointless in the end, but you still had a duty to make pretty patterns from your travel through time. You had to serve or create to keep futility at bay.” – MARTYN HARRIS

 

"Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Some people wonder what happened."-- TOM KOVACH (not the Delaware politician, but rather a prominent conservative on the Twoot from Mount Juliet, Tennessee.)

 

“Perhaps the two most dangerous words in all of politics are ‘Do something!’ They are also, alas, among the most common.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

 

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." - LEONARDO DA VINCI 

 

"The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society, except their constant criticisms, can feel both intellectually and morally superior" -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"Many of the world's problems would be solved if we cut down on gratuitous movement." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." – EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797)

 

“Never without the most compelling necessity disturb a thing at rest.” – JOHN RANDOLPH (The great early Virginian statesman, 1773-1833)

 

“As in any number of other endeavors, such as airplane transportation or ski-jumping, the difficult part is at the beginning and the end, not the middle.” – CALVIN TRILLIN  

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” -- H.L. MENCKEN   

 

“Activism”

“Political activism is a way for useless people to feel important.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"People who want to push you into a state of permanent political mobilization do not have your own happiness at heart.” -- WALTER OLSON  (the "libertarian scholar")                                         

 

Addictions                                                                                                                                         

“In our vices, we hear no other voices.” --  ALEX JAMES (the bass player of BLUR, who, at least as of 2008, also makes cheese and writes for the UK SPECTATOR)                                                                                                               


“I have an addictive personality; I’ll try anything a hundred times just to make sure I don’t like it.” - CRAIG FERGUSON

 

“Addiction is boring: boring to live with, boring and ugly and prurient to watch.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (Amen, brother....)

 

“Addiction is not something that happens to you, it is something that you do, that confers meaning on your life or disguises the absence of such meaning. The need for meaning is a permanent human one, but it is not easily satisfied.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Alcoholism is basically a disease of individualism. It afflicts people who from early childhood develop a strong sense of being psychologically alone and on their own in the world. This solitary outlook prevents them from gaining emotional release through associations with other people." -- GILMAN OSTRANDER (the American historian)


 “Addiction differs from other 'diseases' in that its treatment calls for a level of willingness and honesty that isn't germane in, say, the treatment of cancer.” – JOHN MEYER (An M.D. In New Canaan, Connecticut)

 

“You can make bigger bucks out of selling 'recovery' than by peddling drugs.” – DAMIAN THOMPSON (British journalist reviewing “The Biology of Desire” by Marc Lewis)

 

“I think the best way somebody can show they’re sorry is to fix themselves.” – MEL GIBSON

 "I like whisky. I always did, and that is why I never drink it." -- ROBERT E. LEE

"You can only give things up once they start to let you down." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

 

“All addictions draw on what is best in a person. If they did not, they would simply be boring character flaws.” -- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

"I think addiction is a tendency to compulsive, self-destructive behaviour (sic) that lurks in most of us." -- DAMIAN THOMPSON

"If reason worked on alcoholics, there'd be no alcoholics." -- DAVID MITCHELL     (the serious novelist, not the comic actor)

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.".--CARL JUNG

 

Admonition

" ‘You're better than that’ is almost never true.” – ANDY RICHTER


Adultery

“A survey has found that men spend twice as much on their mistresses for Christmas as they do on their wives. On the other hand, men spend half their income on the wives when the wife finds out about the mistress. So it all balances out.” – JAY LENO

 

“Adultery is like usury: Anything enduring into modern times but ancient enough to have an Old Testament injunction against it can safely be assumed to be a part of the human condition. So is lying.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“A mistress knows the man to be a liar, where the wife only guesses.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“But an affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“‘Just for coffee’ is as bad as screwing if you’re caught.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Pick a mistress with a spare car." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY  (I once, when I worked for them, dated a beautiful red-headed CIA girl, Gail F., who lent me here MGB for a few days when I crashed my Dodge R/T -- an act meriting beatification if there ever was one...) 

“The bride thinks I'm having an affair, a pleasant thought for me but consistently disappointing another woman sounds like too much work.” – WILLEM LAFLUER (A bloke on the Twoot, and I’m afraid I can’t absolutely guarantee that this is a real name of a real person.)

"I had even, in a way, been looking forward to the scene: telling your mistress it's all over may be painful but it's a responsible thing to do. I could have done with the credit. Not now, though." -- KEITH WATERHOUSE

"Jim wants me to go out with other men so that he will have something to write about." -- NORA BARNACLE     (the wife of James Joyce)

Adults/Adulthood

“The grown-up world was no different from school; it was a world where bullies came out best, where excuses satisfied no one, least of all oneself, where cowardice corroded one's soul and left one sick.” – BRIAN MOORE (The Northern Irish novelist who lived in Canada.)

 

"Adulthood is the ability to be totally bored, and still remain standing." -- JERRY SEINFELD

 

"To be an adult is to be a killer. Pacifists and non-combatants are just fooling themselves, letting others do the dirty work." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

"Being adult, it seems consists of not paying much attention." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"Adulthood. When the prospect of physical or sensual excess is no longer enticing." -- WILLIAM BOYD (Crikey, this means that quite a lot of my fellow chaps are still kids, then, what?)

Adventure

“I wouldn’t want to do it again. But it was part of the experience of my life. Life is sort of an adventure. Sometimes, the adventure gets out of hand.”-- ROBERT J. FLYNN (US Navy Commander, and A-6 Intruder pilot, on being a prisoner of the Red Chinese for 5 1/2 years. The reason why he was a prisoner of the Chicoms is that he was shot down in 1967 by Red Chinese MiGs near the North Vietnam/Red China border, where he had gone to evade enemy SAM missile fire on a bombing run over North Vietnam.)

 

“But an adventure isn't fun till it's over. If then.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

Advertising

“Paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space.” – T.S. ELIOT

 

“One joy of working in advertising is that you get paid to have the kind of conversations when sober which other people are only allowed to have when drunk or stoned.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (an English advertising exec, as well as being a journalist)

 

“A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Political advertising is always more dishonest than commercial advertising. The reason is simple: commercial marketing is a repeated play; political marketing is a one-shot game. Dishonest commercial advertising – for products bought repeatedly – might pay in the short term but costs you double in the long term as people cotton on to your deceit. In politics, only the long term counts.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Advertising, like tabloid journalism, reflects what people really care about – and always have done. Advertising and tabloid journalism – they’re the real thing.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Everything is so blooming full of itself, and nothing says what is really is any more.” – MELISSA KITE (British journalist, in October 2016)

 

"The commercials say just as much about a culture as the movies do. Ads always tell some interesting truths en route to telling a lie, and vice versa. You're being taught how you should want to be." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"We don't value things: we value meaning. Advertising creates meaning." -- MATTHEW LESH (Australian author, and with the Adam Smith Institute in London when he wrote this, in 2019)

 

“Advertising is the slightly more demure cousin of pornography.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“You know how guys in beer ads are always pictured doing stuff you wouldn’t do – or shouldn’t do – when you’ve been drinking beer? In the Beer Ad Universe guys continually engage in potentially dangerous activities like bungee-jumping, or roofing their houses, or talking to women.” – TIM CAHILL (in 1997)

"The most influential figures in advertising agencies are the 'creatives'. They are mostly in their twenties and consistently on the leading edge of 'wokeism'. Their mission is not to 'peddle the product'. It is to win the approval of their peers, for that way lies industry awards and professional advancement," -- MICHAEL CHAPMAN (The Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Ad Agency, UK, in June 2022)

 

"For white people, Big Advertising ("Madison Avenue") used to be aspirational -- now, post ‘woke’, it's... cautionary." — JACK JOLIS (in June 2024)

Advice

"Whatever advice you give, be short." -- HORACE (the old 1st century B.C. Roman poet, and he even took his own advice when it came to his name)

 

"Seize the day: trust the morrow as little as possible." -- HORACE (65-8 BC.  And now you know the rest of the story....)

 

"As Socrates knew, one problem with writing things down is: Your advice is there for everyone to see, and the bad can follow it as easily as the good." -- BILL KRISTOL

 

“The value of advice is not wholly dependent on the integrity of the advisor.” -- THE STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (Works for intelligence as well: "The value of intel is not wholly dependent o the integrity of the source.")

"Never get involved in a five-sided argument that's been going on for two thousand years." -- JAMES WEBB  (the Marine, author & ex Senator, on TV in 1979, on not getting involved in Lebanon)

“Old men give advice because they can no longer set a bad example.” – FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD    

"The problem is advice, which comes for free and no one values, rather than insight, which is hard-earned and tightly guarded." -- JOHN PHIPPS (an English freelance writer)

"How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning?" –  JONATHAN SWIFT

 

Advice (good)

“Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost.” – HENRY JAMES

 

“Go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them.” -- TONY BLAIR (Advice he actually gave his Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. Strewth.)

 

“A good strategy for reducing the number of discomfiting surprises in life, is to read the books that liberals denounce.” -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

"Never go into a joint venture with the government." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas." – DAVY CROCKETT (To his fellow Tennesseeans after they failed to re-elect him to Congress in 1834. He would, of course, die at the Alamo, as recorded by John Wayne….)

 

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” -- STEVE JOBS (At his “farewell address” to Stanford University. And it’s BAD advice, actually….)  

"As you go thgrough life I always want you to remember the old Persian axiom, 'Boost a booster,knock a knocker, but use your own judgment with a sucker." -- W.C. FIELDS

“Never look back. Never ask once again.” – MARIANO RIVERA

"Lieutenant, always make sure you take over the worst platoon. Surest way to look like a genius." -- MIKE POMPEO      (who graduated first in his class at West Point, and was given this advice by his 1st company commander in Germany in 1987)

"History only remembers the big-ticket items. Everything else is forgotten. Don't waste any more time than you must on the forgotten." -- BRIAN MULRONEY      (the ex-Conservative Canadian PM -- in the Reagan/Papa Bush days, and in fairness to him, this was advice he was giving to his fellow statesmen -- rather than to the ordinary shmendrik...)

"One must not be too good at what one attempts to do else everyone is after you to keep doing it." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"Never open a book with weather." -- ELMORE LEONARD (advice to his fellow writers -- no "it was a dark and stormy night")

"Never hit a golf ball or a child in anger." -- WALKER PERCY

"Never judge a country by its airport road." -- IVO DAWNAY (Boris Johnson's brother-in-law, and a chap who calls himself an "Anglo-European freelance journalist, boulevardier and curmudgeon". And he was referring to the country of Georgia, here, but it applicable to anywhere)

“Be yourself. Everybody else is taken.” – OSCAR WILDE

"A bar is a lot of use to a man after a brothel, but a brothel is of no use to a man after a bar." -- REDMOND O'HANLON (in his 1988 Amazonian memoir "In Trouble Again")


“If you want to please a woman, tell her something that you wouldn't want to hear another man tell your wife.” -- JULES BERNARD   (the eminent 19th century French neurologist)                               


"It is not true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What doesn't kill you now will simply kill you later." -- JOE QUEENAN

“The guiding principle in life should be ‘Don't be a jerk’." – KURT SCHLICHTER

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 “Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.” – LLOYD EVANS    No, I don't get it either. But it sounds cool.)                                                                                                       

"Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time." -- DALAI LAMA, THE

 

"When you lose, don't lose the lesson." -- DALAI LAMA, THE

"NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE" -- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE     (1772-1834, and the ALL CAPS are his...)

“Never cut what you can untie.” – JOSEPH JOUBERT (Frog “moralist” and essayist, 1754-1824)

 

“Never make the people laugh. If you would be succeed in life (sic) you must be solemn, solemn as an ass.” – JAMES A. GARFIELD (No wonder he was assassinated. Our 20th President – Republican, from Ohio. Had been a General in the Civil War. Serious chap. Killed by a nihilist, like those guys in The Big Lebowski)

 

«Never show up at a party at which you are the pinata.» -- LTC TONY SHAFFER

 

«Never memorize anything you can look up.» – ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

“You don't have to be big. You have to be remarkable.” - JOE PULIZZI (American business “consultant” and author)

 

"You should never go to the supermarket when you're hungry." -- DORIS DAY

 

"Never fire a warning shot. It is a waste of ammunition." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

 

“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” – MARK TWAIN

 

"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – ARTHUR ASHE

 

"Lay low, play dumb, and keep moving." -- LEE ATWATER

 

"Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack." -- ROGER STONE

 

“Never check an interesting fact.” – HOWARD HUGHES (The very one.  And, obviously, he said this back in the good old days before bloody Google ruined it for heroic bullshitters like myself and, presumably, him.)

 

"I tell him 'Attaway to hit, George'." -- JIM FREY (Kansas City Royals manager, when asked what advice he gives GEORGE BRETT on hitting.)

 

"Take license. They do." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

"Carefree days -- in retrospect, one of the secrets of life was to know them at the time." -- ALAN JUDD

 

“Waste not whatnot.” – NIGEL BARLEY                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “The great art of public presentation is that people should never know what to make of you.” – EVELYN WAUGH

 

“Graduates, ignore the speeches that tell you to ‘go out & change the world’. That way leads to madness and atrocity at worst; burnout and disillusionment at best. Just find a place to belong to and change that place ... a little eventually... but definitely not at first.” – BENJAMIN MYERS (American poet. In fact, in 2015 he was appointed as Poet Laureate of Oklahoma)

 

“Never without the most compelling necessity disturb a thing at rest.” – JOHN RANDOLPH (The great early Virginian statesman, 1773-1833)

 

“See the world as it is.” -- ALBERT JAY NOCK (the American libertarian, 1870-1945)

 

"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery." -- MALCOLM X (This sounds like what I always told my kids when they were small: "Be kind but take no shit" -- and I'm bound to say that I'm starting to warm to this Mr. X.)

“Never listen to the madman, but watch him closely." -- PAUL THEROUX

"If you can't be kind, at least be vague." -- JUDITH MARTIN (the famous "Miss Manners" columnist)

"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance” -- CHARLIE MUNGER

"Talk low. Talk slow. And don't say too fucking much." -- JOHN WAYNE      (Advice he gave to a young Michael Caine)

"Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut." -- WARREN BUFFETT

"Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do." -- J .D. SALINGER


"If you remember their names and what they do they'll think you're a god -- or a demi-god, at least." -- WILLIAM BOYD

Affection

“I think I need a hug. And by ‘hug’ I mean ‘beer’.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“Making love was one thing. Showing affection on the morning after implied a deeper commitment.” – NELSON DEMILLE

 

“Hugging is a word that may have entered our language in the 16th century, but prior to Princess Diana’s era, it just wasn’t a public spectacle. Like public crying, it was generally seen as vulgar, perhaps American, and it only really became a thing forcibly imposed on us.” – EMILY HILL (An English lady journalist and author, and, evidently still possessed of a stiff upper lip.)

 

“Affirmative Action”

“Race has no place in American life or law.” - JOHN F. KENNEDY (Hah!)

 

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." - JOHN ROBERTS (the Chief Justice, in writing the landmark 2007 decision against it.)

 

“In the Orwellian world of higher education, those who believe that race should have nothing to do with admissions decisions are routinely branded as ‘racist’.” - JAMES TARANTO (the then-editor of the WSJ’s Opinion Journal’s “Best Of The Web”)

 

“’Preferences’ are double unjust: they reward people who are not victims at the expense of others who did no wrong.” - JOHN O. McGINNIS

 

“The apologia for racial preferences has generated more lies by intellectuals than any other cause since the defense of the Soviet Union.” - JOHN O. McGINNIS

 

“To indulge in any racial preferences is not to award to a Race, but to the State the power to create differing classes of citizens, and to rule on who shall belong in each class.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“If the distribution of benefits according to a person's genes is wrong, if absolute renunciation of such is a hallmark of a just society, then affirmative action must be as unjust as chattel slavery. Is it less pernicious? For the moment, yes; is it less unjust? No. It is a distortion of law, which is to say, of conscience, in the name of sympathy – in the sin of Nadab and Abihu.” – DAVID MAMET (and if you're wondering who these Nadab and Abihu blokes are, they were two brothers in the Old  Testament who tried to do something with the best intentions in the world and brought down on their heads an all those around them they greatest of catastrophes. It's great stuff – you should check it out for yourselves....)

 

“To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities—such events can make people a little testy.” – DAVID GELERNTER

 

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical sixty years ago, a liberal thirty years ago, and a racist today." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination."-- THOMAS SOWELL

 

“People do not say so, but whenever they think others have got a post because of diversity requirements rather than merit alone, they have it in for them.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“The US has rigorously pursued affirmative action, especially in education, for nearly 50. Years. The experience is cautionary. Though brought in to compensate for historical prejudice, this redress has no endpoint. It is never over. Bring in affirmative action, and you’re stuck with it.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in June 2018 – and we should remember that Supreme Court Sandra Day O’Connor said, in 2003, that it should last for 25 years. Bullshit – but at least she gave it a finite date to end)

 

“Combating injustice with more injustice, and racism with more racism, is philosophically contradictory and pragmatically ham-fisted. Affirmative action has entrenched racial divisions and pitted minorities against one another.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“These finger-on-the-scales policies have often benefited the economically well-off who happen to tick a racial box. Intrinsically paternalistic, affirmative action has stigmatized and demoralized the very populations it was designed to help.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“Although still defended by most progressives, affirmative action policies have embittered not only America’s white citizenry, but also our large East Asian community, many of whose children have been actively discriminated against in college admissions because they work too hard, excel to much score too highly on standardized tests, and make too many sacrifices of ordinary teenage pleasures in the interest of career advancement. These applicants have not only been roundly punished, but insulted as well – for the only way that colleges have been able to keep admission numbers down among, say, diligent Chinese and Koreans is to give East Asians systematically low marks on ‘personality’. So maybe they’re smart, but they’re not nice or interesting people. That racist enough for you?” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“Keeping infuriatingly diligent Asians from veritably taking over America’s best universities has become a prime directive of their admissions departments – all in the interest of fighting racism.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“In recent decades, the whole foundational American principle of equality under the law has been eroded/ So the US now has Bad Racism and Good Racism.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (12 Dec. 2020)

 

“Affirmative action – racial quotas in hiring and education – is effectively a reparations vehicle. After 50 years of this dubious social deck-stacking in America, large racial economic disparities persist.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (24 April 2021, and I have news for you, honey – if you look at median incomes for black Caribbean and African immigrants, not to mention for Asians, their median incomes are greater than that of whites.)

"Affirmative action has undermined black confidence and inflamed white resentment." -- LIONEL SHRIVER


 “Despite its seeming popularity, affirmative action has always presented a problem for even its most ardent supporters: it is a racist policy. There is no other way to describe it. As a black American, I don’t use the term ‘racist’ lightly. But intentionally making it harder for people of a specific race to enter a certain sphere of society is the definition of racial discrimination.” – COLEMAN HUGHES (a young black writer, who graduated from – after making a bit of a counter-revolutionary political stink at  – Columbia; writer for “Quillette”.)

 

“The upshot of identity-based affirmative-action policies has been a decline in middle-class students; they are unable to afford the extraordinary tuition required to subvent the deans hired to enforce ‘diversity’ of enrollment and uniformity of opinion. The administrators now outnumber the academics.” – FRED SIEGEL (in September 2018)

"We don't need affirmative action in this country." -- CHARLES PAYNE (The wizard black TV money guy, on 7 Sept. 2023)

“Affirmative action is dishonest. It’s not about equality, it’s about covering ass.” – GLENN LOURY (the black Brown U. Prof who immortalized himself by uttering “Human nature has no history.”)

 

“Sadly, all colleges now have adopted systemic racism in the name of diversity.” – DON SURBER (on 23 August 2021)

 

‘When you lower the bar, everything gets lower’ ~ GORDON KLEIN (the UCLA prof who was fired for not agreeing to raise the grades of his black students, in 2021)

"And that’s the real tragedy of affirmative action: it takes the very racial categories created by the system of ‘white supremacy’ and freezes them in perpetuity." -- ANDREW SULLIVAN (Even a leftist who believes that America operates a regime of "white supremacy".... is against "affirmative action". In Oct. ‘22.) 

Afghanistan

“There’s only one way to deal with the Afghans and that’s to buy them.” - GEORGE MacDONALD FRASER

 

“Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over.” - SIR OLAF CAROE (the last administrator of the North-West Frontier of British India, writing in 1958)

 

“We cannot conquer it; we cannot leave it alone. We can only spare it our utmost vigilance.” - LORD SALISBURY (ROBERT CECIL) (in 1875, when he was Disraeli’s State Secretary for India. He would, of course, go on to become Prime Minister himself, in the 1880s.)

 

"The further you get from Afghanistan the more it seems like a proper country. Close up, it just looks like the point where all the surrounding countries ran out of puff. Geography has made it the chastity-belt of Asia -- never prized for itself but valuable for what it can prevent others getting their hands on." -- LLOYD EVANS (believe it or not, this bloke is the theater critic of the UK SPECTATOR, and to me he sounds here not unlike William Boot in Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop".  Good man; good stuff...)

 

“I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us.” – FREDERICK ROBERTS (the 1st Earl Roberts, then-British Commander in Afghanistan, in 1880.)

 

"In Afghanistan, the Western occupation accounts for 97 percent of GDP, and all we have built is another squalid Sharia state." -- MARK STEYN

 

“The Afghan Local Police are a hotbed of torture and pederasty. Almost every Afghan institution is, of course. But for most of human history they've managed to practice both enthusiasms without international subvention.” – MARK STEYN

"Afghanistan is a place where armed children with long memories set out to right wrongs done to the great-grandfathers of their grandfathers." -- ROBERT LITTELL 

“The loya jirga was the grand assembly of all the Afghan elders – the reason it had such an unsusual name was because the word “clusterfuck” had already been taken.” – TERRY HAYES

 

“In William The Conqueror’s time, practically the entire population of England was divided into two occupations: farming and soldiering. Modern Afghanistan isn’t so different.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (in May 2018)

 

“These are a powerful and violent people (the people of Kabul) and the greater part of them highway robbers.” – IBN BATTUTA (A Moroccan traveler – in 1332)  

 

"Among the Afghans, the two most important aspects of living are hospitality and revenge." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

"Afghanistan isn't a country, it's a pathology." -- BING WEST (in his excellent 2020 novel "The Last Platoon")

 

“Who needs Afghanistan anyway. Everybody loses it sooner or later.” – DAVID YATES (an old Agency pal of mine; in August 2021)

 

“Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for.” – DANIEL GREENFIELD (of FRONTPAGE magazine. In August, 2021)

 "We've been fighting these guys (Al Qaeda) for four years, and I've never captured one of these bastards." -- AHMAD SHAH MASSOUD      (the assassinated, charismatic leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance -- as reported by the CIA's Cofer Black)

Afghanistan (War in)

“You have watches. We have time.” -- TALIBAN SPOKESMAN (quoted by Michael Irwin  in the UK SPECTATOR, 30 May 2009. And boy did that turn out to be prophetic in August 2021....)

 

"Obama just said that 'Afghanistan is not America's war'. Now, paradoxically, that might not be a bad thing -- that means that we might actually have a chance of winning one, then..." --  ANDY McCARTHY (calling in to Rush Limbaugh's program)

 

“We cannot win this war (in Afghanistan) for an important cultural reason: ours is an increasingly feminized culture, so we cannot take the casualties. Every death is published, broadcast, made the occasion for an honor guard and a hometown page-one story. If the (masculine British and Soviet empires of the 19th and 20th centuries could not handle Afghanistan the, I don’t see how our feminized culture can do so now.” - TOM BETHELL

 

“Iraq and Afghanistan have become known as ‘the captains’ wars’ because officers of lower and lower rank have been put in the position of making decisions of higher and higher degrees of consequence and complexity.” – ROBERT GATES    (speaking at West Point in Feb 2011, in his final address before quitting as SecDef)                                                                

 

“We cannot win the hearts of Islamic tribes hurtling headlong into the ninth century; we can rent their tolerance by giving them money.” – BING WEST (author of  “The Wrong War”, being interviewed  in National Review Online in February 2011)

 

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.  Actually, it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you, I like brawling." – GEN. JAMES MATTIS

 

“Brutes, can't get a drink there, strictly BYO, bombs away, corruption, devastation, detonation. The horror, the horror. Murder and move, fold your tent and run; shivering in the desert, sudden movements with the troops, thump in the night, saddle up, lads, and here we go, move on to the next hole in the ground.” -- KYLE SMITH (through the lips of his British journalist character “Rollo”, in his novel “Monkey Love”)

 

«We came to kill al-Qaeda. We killed heaps of those scumbags. But somehow that mission morphed into making Afghanistan a place that didn’t suck. That’s crazy. It’s always sucked and it always will suck and its suckiness is not our problem.» – KURT SCHLICHTER (in Dec. 2019)

 

“It's like saying, ‘let's play hide and seek! I'll be hiding over there!’" - JANE JOLIS (On Obama’s decision to announce a date of withdrawal. Dumb as it was, it would be compounded by Biden.)

 

“Given that president Obama never had much interest in winning in Afghanistan, I see little reason to stay at this point. I think Michael Rubin is largely right that we lost the war the moment Obama declared a timeline for withdrawal. Supporters of the War on Terror were always right when we said the fight with these people was existential. They want us dead (or converted, which for many people of conscience is at best a meager distinction). What people don't appreciate is that it works the other way around. Their fight with us is existential as well. They see our way of life as a metaphysical threat to theirs. Losing a war has consequences. It's impossible to know them all now. But you can be sure few of them will be good. There's simply no way that jihadis around the world won't be emboldened or at least encouraged by the fact that America is in retreat.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"A nation responsible for almost half the planet's military spending goes into battle with the sentimental multiculti fantasist twaddle of Greg Mortensen's Three Cups Of Tea as its strategy manual -- and then wonders why it can't beat goatherds with fertilizer." -- MARK STEYN

 

"Those who remember the fall of Saigon will recall that a young Sen. Biden voted in 1975 to deny the last bit of aid sought by President Gerald Ford for the increasingly desperate government of South Vietnam, which found out the hard way the assurances they had been given meant nothing. Today Mr. Biden boasts to the world that 'America is back.' But to vulnerable Afghans facing down the Taliban, America is gone." -- WILLIAM McGURN (Journalist and ex-speechwriter for George W. Bush, writing in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 19 July 2021)

 

“The Biden Administration is about a year away from offering the Taliban pallets of cash in exchange for flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.” – EMERALD ROBINSON (on 14 August 2021, while the Biden regime sat on its ass watching as the Taliban closed in on Kabul)

 

"A lot of Afghans would have fought for it if we didn't magically take away their intel, logistical & above all air support." – JOHN SCHINDLER (on 16 Aug 2021, the Monday after the weekend that the Taliban took over Kabul. As I commented to him at the time, “Exactly. This is the "Watergate Congress" -- of which Biden was a part -- cutting off all aid to South Vietnam in Jan '75 -- all over again.)

 

“American troops did not leave because the Afghans were giving up; the Afghans gave up because the Americans were leaving.” – CHARLES MOORE (on 21 August 2021)

"Afghanistan was undermined by President Bush's naïve optimism.  It was destroyed by President Biden's naïve pessimism." -- RORY STEWART (the "wet" British politico who's been variously, Labour, Conservative and "Independent")

 "After the surviving members of (the CIA's) Team Alpha left Afghanistan, the US military took over and American forces became occupiers rather than insurgents. Conventional troops poured into the country, and fortified bases were established. The United States sought to impose democracy and a central government in Kabul. Rather than allowing warlord rivalries to play out in a deeply traditional society of ethnic and regional patchworks, the US excluded leaders it found unpalatable. Western standards of morality and fair play were applied, even retrospectively, as the US tried to create a nation in its own image. Early success became a long-drawn-out failure." -- TOBY HARNDEN      (the dual US/UK author of the terrific "First Casualty")

"The attempt to impose a western-style central government in Afghanistan helped reverse the US victory that (the CIA's) Team Alpha spearheaded after 9/11. That victory had been tactical rather than strategic, but it had nevertheless provided an opportunity since squandered." -- TOBY HARNDEN

"Surrender had always been a nebulous concept in Afghanistan when defeat seemed inevitable, troops would switch sides, or be allowed simply to go home, usually without being disarmed." -- TOBY HARNDEN

"We've been fighting these guys (Al Qaeda) for four years, and I've never captured one of these bastards." -- AHMAD SHAH MASSOUD      (the assassinated, charismatic leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance -- as reported by the CIA's Cofer Black)

“In reality the Biden Administration has pulled off a feat few of us thought possible. A military-political defeat that gets worse the more you look at it. Thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer, the Taliban now has more attack helicopters than the UK, and is better armed than almost every NATO country, apart from the US.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in Sept. 2021)

 

Africa

“Africa’s tragedy - or its latest tragedy - is that it’s advanced straight to late-period Western decadence transnationalist bureaucratic blather without the intervening stage of economic dynamism.” - MARK STEYN (He’s right — in Central Africa, I saw with my own eyes how the “vieux colons” got replaced – seemingly      overnight -- by UN Refugee Agency officials and NGOs…)

 

“I’ve tried ‘understanding’, and you have too, no doubt. I’ve followed the news, I’ve watched the documentaries, I’ve sifted many hectares of troubling newsprint, I’ve sat at the feet of our ‘Wild Life’ correspondent as he held forth at forg-horn volume about the calamities of his adopted land, and still I know nothing about Africa except this.  The phrase ‘What Africa needs…’ inspires instant deafness in all listeners.  Understanding has created what, so far? An aid-basket for the locals and a guilt-plantation for Europeans.  I suspect the solution to the problem is for white people to stop having solutions.” - LLOYD EVANS

 

“Spirits are always at work. Nothing happens by chance in Africa.” – JOYCE CARY (The author of a great novel of colonial Africa – “Mister Johnson”. Oh, and by the way, Joyce, like another Englishman who wrote terrifically about colonial Africa, Evelyn Waugh, was a bloke.)

 

“In Africa, setbacks rush in thick and fast.  They come not in threes, but in thirty-threes.  Some people wrongly believe that, if they shout at everybody, things will change.  Some seek solace in booze.  The best response, one discovers, is to say ‘Africa Wins Again’.  Say A-W-A, and you’ll pull through.  Embracing fatalism helps prevent a coronary attack.  But, meanwhile, life and the nation continue circling the plughole. Occasionally, an outrage occurs that rouses me from moral torpor.” - AIDAN HARTLEY (a white Kenyan rancher, in 2002.  And he’s right - in Africa, there are just two conditions: bad, and worse.  Believe me, I know.)

"Trillions of dollars in western aid don't buy hearts and minds in Africa, it turns out. Instead, Africans remember fondly the 36 million AK-47 assault rifles (sic) Moscow supplied for Africa's wars, plus the MiG jets, tanks and artillery. Africa's Cold War years were extremely hot, and by the time of the Soviet Union's collapse, millions were dead." -- AIDAN HARTLEY (in April 2022) 

“Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

"The African seems to belong to one of those childish races which, never rising to man's estate, fall like worn-out links from the great chain of animated nature." -- RICHARD BURTON (the great British explorer, in 1856)


"Marriage, which is an epoch among Christians, an event among the Moslems, is with these (African) people an incident of frequent occurrence. Polygamy is unlimited, and the chiefs pride themselves upon the number of their wives, varying from twelve to three hundred." -- RICHARD BURTON (The great British explorer, in 1856)

“Africa insinuates violence.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY (Well, that was one way of putting it....)

 "Africa makes her visitors very nervous, for it is only her visitors who do business, and business entails dangerous postures." -- PAUL THEROUX

"Then the tragedy occurred: the country became independent. Taxes were raised, soldiers suddenly popped up everywhere, the workers were frightened  and many resigned and went back to their villages where there were no soldiers and no taxes." -- PAUL THEROUX   (that was pretty much what I discovered when I first visited Central Africa, as an 18-year old college student, 4 years after independence from France)

"He felt boundless contempt for what he felt to be the Africans' true instinctive existence: a daily filthy slumber in the shade of the nearest tree, then a paid roll in the mud with their reeking women, their lives dominated by bananas which could be had by stretching out their long arms. It was a lifetime of spear-throwing and sleeping and sweaty small moments humping their women like hares until a white man came by, gave them new clothes to cover up the dirt, gave them police protection and power and jobs they did not deserve. The white man's most evil deed was clothing the African. The clothed African was dangerous: he had pockets." -- PAUL THEROUX    (in 1968, and in fairness, these words were spoken by a Chinese character in a novel)

"There is no vote, just their fat asses in big cars forever. Finish, that's all. Give me the British any day. At least they don't talk through their ass. Those British they say what they mean. If they think you bloody baboon they say straight out, 'I think you Africa chaps are bloody baboon.' British are too honest, you know.  That's why everyone likes them kabisa. But these politicians are bloody sheet." -- PAUL THEROUX     (Actually spoken by one of his African characters in his very funny 1968 novel "Fong And The Indians".  Oh, and "kabisa" is Swahili for "absolutely".)

“Now, let me remind the reader that we were in bloody Africa. There are many lovely things about Africa, and especially about South Africa. Still, continent-wide, the standard for a good day there is pretty set:      

* Do I own nothing?

* Is my flesh rotting?                                                                                                                                         

* Do I have to sleep near or on feces?                                                                                                               

If you can answer no to all three questions, you have had a good day in Africa!” - JOSHUA TREVINO (a speech-writer in the W Administration, and of The Claremont Institute)

 

“Africa’s harsh realities have ways of making the most ardent foreign philanthropists into hypocrites.” - AIDAN HARTLEY

 

“Africa is not an amusing part of the world.” – ERIK VON KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN

 

“You need a thick moral skin to do business in Africa. Quite apart from that there’s all the hard work, mosquitoes, soggy heat and bad food. Overall, getting rich from the mines of Africa loses its appeal when you look at how nasty, boring and dangerous it can be. Pity.” -- AIDAN HARTLEY

 

“In (north) Africa there are monsters, which forsooth are so dreadful of aspect that, instead of traveling further, you would cant to creep again into your mother’s lap.” – PARACELSUS (this intrepid chap was a 15th Century Swiss doctor, believe it or not, and I’m reliably informed  that his mother killed herself before he was in his teens.)

 

“If it were true that African culture had been wiped out be imperialism, Africans would simply be copying European art, building neo-classical houses, painting like Rembrandt and writing like Jane Austen. But Africans are not doing this. Despite the Africans who prefers to carry water in a plastic drum rather than an earthenware pot, Africa remains strongly itself.” - RICHARD DOWDEN

 

“Is there any art in Africa? Most African languages have no word for art. Most Africans would be puzzled at the thought of their pots and chairs and masks on display like this. Even now the Louvre has no art from Sub-Saharan Africa. Paris does not regard artifacts as art.” - RICHARD DOWDEN

 

“It would never have occurred to most of the Africans in their long history to think that they belonged to a larger human group defined by a shared relationship to the African continent. Africa is an invention of outsiders.” - KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH ( a Professor at Harvard, where I wonder how he’s received by the Department of, you should pardon the expression, Black Studies.)

"The history of Central Africa before the middle of the nineteenth century is like a crime to which there have been no eye-witnesses." -- SIR JOHN GRAY (Irish journalist and newspaper proprietor, 1815-1875)

“Like so many other African countries, Liberia has been destroyed by a kind of utopian kleptomania; for in Africa, liberation and embezzlement go hand in hand.” - ANTHONY DANIELS

 

“In Africa, with one or two minor exceptions, the winner takes all and the loser bites the dust. African societies are simply not made for the European nation-state. The tragedy for Africa has been that the European nation-state is both necessary and inescapable in the modern era.” - ANTHONY DANIELS

 

“The African state corresponds to no social reality, and is therefore a state of men and not of laws.” - ANTHONY DANIELS

 

“In hindsight, it appears that almost all African anti-colonial political leaders were engaged not so much upon a freedom struggle as on a power struggle.” – ANTHONY DANIELS

 

“Moreover, impoverishment in Africa by means of ‘land reform’ is not a harm but a benefit for African dictators and would-be dictators. It increases their control over the population as well as enriches themselves and their acolytes.” – ANTHONY DANIELS

"Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” --  HEGEL     (yes THE "Hegel" -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the famous early apologist for Leftism, said this at some point in the 1830s....)

“Africa wipes its mess with schedules.” – DENIS JOHNSON (in his novel on Africa, “The Laughing Monsters”)

 

“Sometimes you just get stuck. That's Africa. Then you're on your way again without any idea what happened, and that's Africa too.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

"West Africa is the land where God came to learn to wait. And then wait a little longer." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

"And here I am once again in Africa, waiting. Waiting for tomorrow. At which time something may or may not happen. I remember now how hateful is this place for an impatient man." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

"And then there's the petrol thing, there is always, in Africa, the petrol thing -- somebody knows about a gallon somewhere in a jug hid like moonshine." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

"One of those African things, the result of deliberations made without reference to logic or utility. When logic and utility fall from grace, the mystical authority of subtler concerns rises up like an intoxicating incense, and everything is done for reasons no one understands." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

“Africa is a terrible mess, and the inclination over the years has been to turn one’s head away from it, in part because of an accepted sense of futility in trying to do anything about it, in part because there is a suspicion, mostly unexpressed, that black countries simply don’t know how to maintain civil democratic order .” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. (he said this in 2003, but, with Africa, dates don’t really matter - any date in the 40-odd years before 2003, or 40-odd years after 2003, and this quote will be just as germane…)

"It's still Africa. You'll hear wailing women all day long. If you make a fuss every time someone dies, you won't last." -- MARCELLIN  AGNAGNA   (a Congolese {Brazza} biologist and govt. official, to his friend Redmond O'Hanlon, quoted in 1996)

"Where do you think you are, North America? Here, in Africa, there are no second chances. And very few first chances." --  MARCELLIN  AGNAGNA   

“They’ve said it’s going to be Africa for the Africans, and that’s exactly what they’re going to get: corruption, nepotism and tribalism.” - WILBUR SMITH (the South African-born, huge best-selling author, in 1995)

 

"Americans, bless them, never really understood the map of Africa." -- WILBUR SMITH

 

“The vast, dark vortex of death and danger, corruption and pain; that trackless, lawless, murderous, limitless sink of cruelty and rapacity, that waster of the hopes of so many generations.” - MATTHEW PARRIS (actually, he was referring specifically, here, of The Congo, but what the hell, “Africa”’ll do…)

 

“I don’t count the African readership and I don’t think one should. Africa is a land of bush… not a very literary land.” - V. S. NAIPAUL (that’s putting it mildly…)

 

“Other regions may have problems, even very severe problems, but only Africa’s are such that we can imagine everything south of the Sahara figuratively sliding off the edge of the world into a limbo of misery, mayhem, and disease.” - MICHAEL LEDEEN

"The West African slave trade, like the gold trade, demanded no European interference in the mysterious affairs of the interior. Africans needed no permission to enslave their fellows." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (The author of the colossal 1991 doorstopper, "The Scramble For Africa" -- and a big liberal, I should add.)


""In Central Africa the slave trade was the Fourth Horseman, riding behind War, Famine and The Plague. Philanthropy would never end the slave trade. It needed Livingstone's 'three Cs' together -- commerce, Christianity, civilization." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM

"Imperialism was the only antidote to the East African slave trade." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (a grudging admission from the liberal historian, in his 1991 tome "The Scramble For Africa")

"In Africa, when public opinion was not involved, matters could be arranged." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (I expect that this truism would apply to pretty much any damn where.)

“Situations in Africa are rarely, if ever, neat.” – MARK MASON (A very amusing English author... of, among other things, a book on Rwanda called “Land Of Second Chances”

 

“Africa is a hard place to help.” - MARK STEYN (heh.)

 

"The problem for Africa is recovery not from colonialism but from independence." – MARK STEYN

 

“Out of Africa always something new in armchair solutions, with the eternal certainty that none will work. Colonialism? Bad. Decolonisation? Disastrous. Neo-colonialism? Wicked. Bob Geldof? Er, no. So leave the place alone and it’s bonjour Mugabe, or worse.” - PATRICK MARNHAM    (English author, in Nov 2008)  

 

“Again and again in Africa, aid has enabled wars to continue.” - RICHARD DOWDEN (English author of “Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles”)

 

“I sat beside [then-Tanzanian president Julius] Nyerere in the presidential box. He looked cool and elegant in a light gray bush suit. I felt clumsy and uncomfortable in my blue pinstriped diplomat's uniform. The parade reflected some of the training the Tanzanian army had received in Communist East Germany. Its precision was somewhat handicapped, however. The army's instruction in goose-stepping had obviously taken place when the soldiers wore Prussian-syle boots. Now the marchers were shod in indigenous African sandals. The result was that periodically a shoe would come off and fly into the air, forcing the hapless soldier to continue unshod for the rest of the way." — HENRY KISSINGER (“Years of Renewal” -- 1999 –  p. 935.)

 

"All you need to start a war, an African rebel leader told a friend of mine, is $10,000 and a satellite phone. 'You use the dollars to recruit enough fighters to raid the local police station for their guns. The phone you use to call the world's press after the attack'." -- AIDAN HARTLEY (An expat farmer in Kenya, in January '13, and it's funny -- I don't see any mention of diamonds in here, "blood" or otherwise....)

 

“For Africa-born whites, the one thing worse than staying is leaving.” – AIDAN HARTLEY

 

“British leftists hate private enterprise in Africa, which for them is an ideological Lego set rather than a real place. Capitalism exploits poor Africans, they believe, so UK investors in Africa are surely corrupt buccaneers deserving criminal investigation. British aid happily funds agencies to attack British companies.” – AIDAN HARTLEY

 

"For the last 10 years I have been working and traveling -- and waiting for planes -- all over French Africa. It has been the happiest 30 years of my life." -- PETER BIDDLECOMBE (An Englishman, in his 1993 book "French Lessons In Africa")

 

“Why are there so many African novelists around and yet no African novel worth speaking of?” – J.M. COETZEE (an, er, African novelist – albeit a Souse African one.....)

"The Congo? Education. That's all that's needed round here. Good teaching. Not by off-the-wall Marxists and post-breakdown missionaries full of news from the Middle Ages. Sensible teaching, by people like me. A little engineering. That's all." -- LARRY SHAFFER    (professor of animal behavior at SUNY Plattsburgh)

“Niger is not Dubai. Niger is where the desert comes to town.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

“Once the experts leave, the projects collapse. Nobody runs in the Congo.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«Africa, we all know, is a disaster area in freefall. It is the Third World of the Third World.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«In Africa you need painkillers just to look inside a hospital. They are unhealthy – even for germs.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«The only growth area in Africa is producing reports on the fact that there is no growth in Africa.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«Apart from maybe the president’s office, the head of police, the head of the army, the chief of the radio and television and the minister of finance, government hardly exists in Africa.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«Africa? Come back here in twenty-five years’ time and I reckon it will be virtually the same – if it’s lucky.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«Come back in fifty years’ time and I’m convinced Africa will still be in the Stone Age; children will still be running around with bits of branches trying to round up a couple of scrawny goats.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

«Some countries are a mess. Without wishing to upset anybody, they are invariably in Africa and are run by military dictators. Nothing works; everything is falling apart.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

"Life in Africa is a series of colorful emergencies." -- HELEN OYEYEMI (Nigerian-born British novelist)

 

“I was suddenly sick of the endlessness of Africa, of vengeful violence that seems to be the one inexhaustible natural resource and looks likely to survive all foreign and indigenous tyranny and plunder.” -- SARAH RUDIN (a rather pompous, liberal lady authoress. One of her books is “The Face Of Water”)

 

“But the big problem with Africa, from a parent's perspective, is that it's so sodding dangerous. It was bad enough when I went there, but since then, what with al-Shabab in the east, al-Qaeda in the middle and Boko Haram in the west, the whole place has been turned into a virtual no-go zone.” -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“The problem here (Zimbabwe) is the nomadic roots of African culture. Nomadism eschews private property, and communal land ownership is still the norm in Africa. If Africa is to develop, then aid money should be directed at changing this. Until this cultural change occurs, the money spent by NGOs will not develop Africa.” -- JOHN HOLLOWAY (A white resident of Harare, Zimbabwe, in April 2017)

 

“It is staggering, 40 years after I first came to sub-Saharan Africa, to find there is still virtually no real manufacturing industry outside South Africa.” -- BORIS JOHNSON (as British Foreign Secretary, in May 2017)

 

“The continent (of Africa) may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” – BORIS JOHNSON

 

“The problem of Africa is not in America, but with the African man... and so is the solution.” -- DR. MENSA OTABIL (a Ghanaian theologian, philanthropist, motivational speaker, entrepreneur. He is the founder of International Central Gospel Church headquartered in Accra.)

 

“In all history in sub-Saharan Africa, no two-story building or waterproof boat was ever made.” -- RUSSELL WALKER     (GOP candidate for House District 48 in North Carolina, June 2018)                                                         

 

"Education is not as important as everyone thinks. Africans have survived thousands of years without it. It is not for Africans, it came with the whites.” –  ANGIE MOTSHEKGA (The, believe it or not, South African “Basic Education Minister”, as well as the head of the “Women’s Arm” of  the ruling ANC Party.)

 

“Thus far,  Africa has failed to get with the program.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in THE SPECCIE on 2 Feb. 2019, and admittedly, she was talking about population control... but it’s a self- contained sentence, and so useful as is.)

“Business never dies in Africa." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"When you get away from the chiefs and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa:  everyone is a villager." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"You can always get into those places (central African countries). What is hard is to get out." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"Africa, going back to its old ways with modern tools, was going to be a difficult place for some time." -- V. S. NAIPAUL     (heh -- "for some time"....)

"Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers washed the blood away." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"All African soldiers aim too high." -- WILLIAM BOYD (I believe he's right, here....)

 

“African riflemen were not noted for their marksmanship. Their guns were the music of war rather than weapons of offence.” – NIGEL BARLEY An English anthropologist, in his very funny novel “The Coast” – channeling William Boyd, here....)

 

“It was always a mystery that there could be so much bustle in Africa and so little achieved.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“Africans go in for heavy overstatement.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“War in Africa was seldom a glorious head-on confrontation of good and evil, with dashing sallies and heroic feats. It was a matter of skulking raids, catching people unawares and unarmed, killing women and children in preference to men who could fight back. Death came for most not in the heat of battle, but at night when sleeping, or in the chill of dawn while fetching water alone.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“Beauty in Africa was always from nature, never from Man’s activity.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“One’s essential privacy is the first casualty of African life.” – NIGEL BARLEY (who spent a lot of time in northern Cameroon)

 

“Europeans resident in Africa tend to be rather weird people. Madmen fare very well despite the havoc they leave behind them.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“Those who reproach Europeans with paternalism fail totally to perceive the relations that traditionally exist between rich and poor in much of Africa. A man who works for you is not just an employee: you are his patron. It is an open-ended relationship. If his wife is ill, that is as much your problem as his and you will be expected to do all in your power to heal her. If you decide to throw anything away, he must be given first refusal on it. To give it to someone else would be most improper. It is almost impossible to draw a line between what is your concern and what is his private life.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“People in Africa grovel and scrape, kneel and bow in a way that Westerners find hard to swallow; yet to refuse to accept such gestures is extremely impolite.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“Most of the absentees seemed to have fallen foul of the extremely virulent venereal diseases that haunt West Africa, social life being so dull that fornication is the chief distraction.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“It is never wise to be the witness to a crime in West Africa; police method consists largely of gathering witnesses, friends of the aggressed, etc. and beating them until one confesses. It is surprisingly effective.” – NIGEL BARLEY (I must say, I like his use of the singular, general term “method”)

 

«That unmistakable peppery, earthy, decomposing smell that says you have landed in tropical Africa and that for the foreseeable future things will be different.» – JEREMY CLARKE (in Nov. 2019, and… well, EXACTLY….)

 

“From the desert shores of the Mediterranean to the jungly banks of the Limpopo, from Somalia to Sierra Leone, the continent is a show-case of despair. Indeed, if it weren’t for Africa, it’s just conceivable that the whole concept of a Third World reality might collapse into disrepute.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in his essay “The Illusion Of The third World”)

 

“The African knows no peace. One day you may see peace and plenty, well-tilled fields, and children playing in the sun; on the next you may find the corpses of the men, the bodies of the children half burnt in the flames which consumed the village, while the women are captives of the victorious raiders.” – FREDERICK LUGARD (British colonial administrator, in 1890)

 

"Africa is no place for illusions." – JACK JOLIS

 

"Exposition is not for the fainthearted when dealing with central Africa." -- TIM BUTCHER (The English travel writer, author of the 2008 book on the Congo River,"Blood River")

 

"West Africa dulls any sense of time. Days begin with a cup of tea and each morning is the same as the one that opened the day before. Flowers bloom, fade, and bloom again without apparent regard for seasons. It's always July in West Africa. A hot July. A journal or diary could be filled with ditto marks." -- ROSS THOMAS (in his 1967 comic thriller "The Seersucker Whipsaw")

"Africa is poor because it isn't free." -- GEORGE AYITTEY (noted Ghanaian economist, 1945-2022 -- and while I'd say there are other reasons as well, this is certainly one of 'em....)

“African-American”(See Blacks, American)


Age, (old)

“You know you’re getting old if when you bend down to tie your shoelaces you wonder if there’s anything else you can do while you’re down there.” - SIR RICHARD BAKER    (British musicologist)                                                                                                                                                                                                           

 

“No matter how you look at it, it doesn’t make sense that old people should continue to be either rewarded or pitied for being old. They are lucky to be old. The alternative is being dead.” - TABITHA TROUGHTON (an English journalist and an admirably tough bimbo….)

 

“Almost everyone becomes more interesting as they grow older, those that become lesss so have a fortunate habit of fading into their own domestic obscurity - except at old boys’ dinners, where they seem to congregate en masse. All the others, the men who were once no more than unreliable beer-drinking companions in Oxford cellars and dim Fulham bars, your best pal in the lower sixth, the old girlfriend you should have married, the colleagues from your first job, the people encountered in Greek campsites or on Greyhound buses in 1973, the people you cannot remember at all but who claim to remember you, have grown up to be extraordinary people. They are colonels and queen’s Counsel, advisers to Bolivia and experts in the steel industry, film-makers, chefs, deckhands, organic farmers, prime-ministers-in-waiting, bad guitarists and suspected fraudsters. They have long CVs, forthright spouses and, in some cases, polite children.” - MARTIN VANDER WEYER

 

“I don't feel old. I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.” -- BOB HOPE

 

“We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.” -- WILL ROGERS

“The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for." -- WILL ROGERS

“Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.” -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere.” -- BILLY CRYSTAL

"Smart people believe what they read only up to the age of 50 or so." -- NEAL B. FREEMAN 

“Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter.” - SATCHEL PAIGE

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” — SATCHEL PAIGE

“They're bowling in our lane now.” – SIR MICHAEL CAINE (on the young 'uns taking over....)

 

"Whenever anything old survives it is dangerous." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

“A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.” – OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (Reminds me of the first time I was called “Mr. Jolis” by anyone other than a sarcastic cop. It took me a long time to stop turning around, wondering if my father was standing behind me....)

 

“Bodily decrepitude is a prison. You are shut in with a boring and vindictive jailer, who happens to be yourself.” – AL ALVAREZ     (although his name sounds like that of a baseball manager, he was, in fact, the famous 20th century English poet, novelist, essayist and critic )                           

 

“Possibly the only thing that lasts is old crushes.” – WLADYSLAW PLESZYSNSKI (the long-time publisher of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“Old age is a shipwreck.” – CHARLES DE GAULLE

"Fifty is a good age, because when a woman say's 'Yes’, you are flattered, and when she says 'No', you are relieved." -- DAVID LODGE

"Middle Age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else." -- OGDEN NASH

"82 -- that's like... tomorrow." -- JOSIE PENA-ALCANTARA (A French lady acquaintance of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler -- and she was 76 when she said this.)

"There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going." -- J.B. PRIESTLEY

 

“I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.” -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Basically, old age is not for sissies, and those who complain non-stop about it are silly and very boring.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"The only good thing about being old is that one never needs to invent stories." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Getting old means getting scared.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of body and disturbances of the mind very near to madness." -- SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“Ageing brings a certain dogged indifference to the opinions of others.” – M.G. SHERLOCK (an old fart from Colwyn Bay, North Wales, writing to THE SPECTATOR)

 

"The older I get, the older old gets." -- BECKY KEVOIAN (a conservative young lady from Indianapolis on the Twoot)

 

“Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things you weren't any good at when you were young.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“It is one of the features of age that one starts to blame the advancing years for defects one has experienced always.” – ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR (the veteran UK editor and journalist, here repeating Tom Sowell, above...)

 

“Old age ain't no place for sissies.” – BETTE DAVIS

 

“That is the greatest fallacy, the wisdom of old men.  They do not grow wise. They grow careful.” -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY (in “A Farewell to Arms”)

 

"The older I get, the better I was….." -- BRIAN J. CAMPBELL (Also attributed to the golfist LEE TREVINO, but I heard it first from my mate Campbell, who’s from Rhode’s Island and he’s my great pal and work colleague in Central Africa, Venezuela, Israel and Antwerp — so he gets the nod.)

 

"I've been twenty one -- you've never been seventy-eight." – LOU HOLTZ (iconic American football coach)

 

“Part of the hell of aging is learning just how few items there are on humanity's imaginative menu.” – KYLE SMITH

 

“As they have a lot of experience, they are sure about nothing, and under-do everything.” – ARISTOTLE

 

"The cultural divide narrows when you hit seventy." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"Before the age of 70, you fall. After it, you 'have a fall'.  A 50-year-old falling probably does it out of haste or carelessness. He/shen often has some choice in the matter. An 80-year-old, however, often has the unpleasant experience of somehow existing separate from his/her body. The spirit is willing, but the flesh goes its own stupid way." -- CHARLES MOORE (ex-editor of the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph, who was 60 when he wrote this)


"Old people, rather like little children, are likelier to tell the truth." -- CHARLES MOORE

"There are three ages of man:  youth, middle age, and 'you-haven't-changed-a-bit'." -- WASHINGTON IRVING       (1783-1859)

“The definition of aging: The scary moments had won.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

 

“At my age, you’re either alone or dead. Either way, you get used to it.” – MICK HERRON

 
“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young." — THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“Now, in old age, it remained only to generate a little business for the mortician, and an hour’s pleasant work for the local clergyman. Just as insurance salesmen had at last stopped approaching him, and the movie-makers had written him out of audience demographics, so the armies of natural law, needed all over the globe to detonate dynamite where it counted, had left him to wander in a twilight of inconsequence.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Old men can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"All we have in the end is our posture." -- JOHN UPDIKE (now there’s a fresh take....)

"A dementia patient is immune to embarrassment." -- PHILLIP MARK MCGOUGH     (writing about Pres. Biden in the Jan 2024 AMSPEC)

"Nobody ages like anyone else." -- GERMAINE GREER (I'm not sure how she knows, ... but she may well be right....)

“You won't believe it. I don't believe it myself - 96 today. How to live to 120? Live to 119 and then be very very careful.” – CHUCK YEAGER (In Feb. 2019, the Air Force fighter ace and then test pilot, the first man to fly supersonic – in the X-1.)

 

“Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.” – WILL ROGERS

 

“There is a proven link between the youthfulness of a society and its proclivity to go to war. By contrast, older populations tend to be more peaceful and the societies in which they predominate are less-crime-ridden.” – PAUL MORLAND in his book “The Human Tide)

 

"Age is not a comedy. Which is not to say it's a tragedy, either. Let's agree to call it cataclysmic and have done." -- HOWARD JACOBSON

 

“Old men give advice because they can no longer set a bad example.” – FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD


"Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul" – GEN. DOUGLAS MacARTHUR


“That deadly combination of age: eggshell frailty and brutal honesty.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH


“As we age, we all of us begin to notice where we most reliably get our applause, our gasps, our laughs, our audience, our brand recognition.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

"Old age is, in a word, diminishment. Diminishment in all things -- material, spiritual, aspirational, as well as physical." -- JACK JOLIS

"Have you ever watched an old person try to eat a taco. They'd have an easier time to land a DC-10." -- ROBERT PLUNKET    (who’d certainly agree with the old fart immediately below:)                                   

 

“Elderly people are useless eaters.” - HENRY KISSINGER (To which my pal SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER responded: "I was struck dumbfounded by the extreme  foolishness of this stupid comment, especially coming from this ancient moron, whose pretentiousness and pomposity know no bounds.")


“If you admit that someone younger than you can teach you, what consolation is there left to growing older?” – JAMES HAWES

"If we are not changing, age means just decay." -- JAMES HAWES


“Time did not now proceed in the way it had previously done. Once upon a time there was waking, which was slow and painful, and then quite a long period replete with chances and triumphs and defeats and risks, which sometimes, though not always, ended with lunch. Afternoon used to be as prolonged and arid as Arizona, and they were followed by things called evenings, which were entirely different and separate from nights. Now – you woke up with a sense of relief and surprise that you were still there, you got up, brushed your teeth, and before you knew it you were watching television. It was dark outside and well past your bed-time. You were also, probably, drunk, but how you got drunk was a mystery.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS


"What really interests me about youth is that it's always the time that you remember later. But I won't be able to remember my old age. So! I have to live it to the fullest." --- ANNIE ERNAUX (French winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)

"The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down." -- T.S. ELIOT

"Do you know the one thing dying people can't stand? It's not the fact they're going to die. It's other people, the undying, the so-called healthy people. Their loved ones. And after awhile, of course, their loved ones can't stand the sight of them, haven't a word to say to them, and they can't stand the sight of their loved ones." -- WALKER PERCY     (in his last novel, "The Thanatos Syndrome" of 1987)

"At age 20, we worry about what others think of us; at age 40, we don't care what they think of us; at age 60, we discover they haven't been thinking of us at all." -- ANN LANDERS

"Old age isn't kind to testosterone levels in the male body, and most of what's left seems dedicated to the industrial production of ear-hair and publc eyebrows." -- MARCUS BERKMANN (in his 2023 "Still a Bit of Snap in the Celery")

"Grandchildren don't make a man feel old, it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother that does." -- J. NORMAN COLLIE (A Scottish scientist, mountaineer and explorer)

"Once you pass a certain point you no longer have any choice about what to think about when you wake up in the middle of the night." -- MARTIN AMIS (born in 1949) 

"Your youth evaporates in your early forties, when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you're not going to die, and then you accept that you'll die. Then in your fifties everything is very thin. And then suddenly you've got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn't there before." -- MARTIN AMIS

"Whatever wretched biblical sage decided to plump for three score years and ten did none of us a favour. It is the most arbitrary watershed -- why not four score years? -- but once you pass it a fear is unleashed into your life like a ferret in a rabbit warren. It's like being out in a war-torn city after curfew. You are out of bounds and it's a good time to set your house in order, to pick through the fragments." -- WILLIAM BOYD

"There is a benign freemasonry of old folk -- we help each other." -- WILLIAM BOYD (the character who says this, in Boyd's 1987 novel "the New Confessions", is 73 years old)

“It was a lot cooler being 20 in the 70’s than being 70 in the 20’s” -- JOE WALSH        (one of my favorite American rockers...)

Aggression

“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.” – DOROTHY PARKER (What she knew about it I have no idea, but it’s a nifty-enough quote...)


“A lot of people talk as if aggression itself was a bad thing, which is absolute nonsense. It’s a good thing; If you’ve got a lot of wild young Turks who insist on smashing everything up, then being in the Army and driving tanks may be just right for them. Or, when that doesn’t exist, then other things may be needed like adventure course or things which challenge them. That’s necessary for men.” - ROBIN SKYNNER (an ex-RAF bomber pilot and author, a psychiatrist, believe it or not, and a good pal of John Cleese. Sounds like a jolly interesting bloke…)

"Aggression doesn't stop unless (it's) stopped." -- CLARE LOPEZ (seems self-evident.... and yet there are some, ahem, who somehow don't get it...)


Agreement

“Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.” ― THOMAS CARLYLE    (UK historian, 1795-1881)                                           

“Nothing that results in human progress is achieved with unanimous consent. Those that are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of the others.” -- CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

"If two people agree on everything, one of them isn't necessary." -- DR. BEN CARSON (Good man. Damn good man.)
      

Agriculture

“If you’ve ever worked on a farm, nothing else ever seems like work” - JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (Well I have, and, you know…. the old fart’s not wrong there, I can tellya….)

 

“About 3.2 million American are employed in agriculture. If Republicans are as interested in the soccer-mom demographic as they claim to be, they might start by asking why they are spending billions of dollars in soccer moms' taxes every year to make those soccer moms' grocery bills higher while ruining their Volvos' performance with ethanol.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Farm jobs are a trivial share of the modern US labor force. At most, 2% of all immigrants (legal and illegal) are farm laborers. Among illegal immigrants, Pew Research has estimated, it is just 5%. To be sure, immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, make up a large share of farm workers, but farm workers are a tiny share of workers overall and even of immigrant workers. The farm lobby may keep concerns about agricultural labor front and center in the immigrant debate, but in truth, farm workers are largely irrelevant to deliberations about immigration’s impact on American workers.” -- STEVEN CAMAROTA    (Director of the Center For Immigration Studies, in Sept. 2018)                                                


AI (“Artificial Intelligence”)

“The materialist-determinist fallacy is the belief that men and machines are ultimately interchangeable. The materialist superstition keeps the Google generation from understanding mind and creation. Consciousness depends on faith – the ability to act without full knowledge and thus the ability to be surprised and to surprise, by leaps of intuition and imagination. A machine by contrast is part of a determinist order. Lacking surprise or the ability to be surprised, it is self-contained and determined.” – GEORGE GILDER (This is big: The difference between humans and computers is “The ability to surprise, and to be surprised”.)

"Artificial intelligence is the fuure, not only of Russia, but of all mankind. Whoever becomes the leader of this sphere will become the leader of the world." -- VLADIMIR PUTIN


 “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil but data, and AI has the capability to unlock and leverage data and therefore transform our lives.” – CHRIS DUFFY (a pioneer on this stuff, and author of “Superhuman Innovation”)

" 'ChatGPT' (the AI application) is programmed to have a paranoid fear of anything resembling a right-wing opinion. This means that to send a letter or write an article without the suspicion it has been machine-generated, we'll need to fill it with xenophobic right-wing profanities." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (Me: fair enough.) 

"If you think human bureaucracy is bad, just wait until it's automated." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (speaking specifically about "artificial intelligence", in Nov. 2023)

"The real problem with ChatGPT (the AI application) is that it can never, ever, make a joke." -- NICHOLAS LEZARD    (an English journalist, author and literary critic)

"Chatbots (AI) may tell jokes, but they will never have a sense of humor; they may express sympathy, but they will never feel your pain." -- DAVID WOOTTON (A Brit historian, and a Prof. at the University of York)

"The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own." -- IAN WILLIAMS (the author of "The Fire of the Dragon: China's New Cold War")

"AI is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven't quite realized it yet because they speak very good English. I've always kind of ignored the existential threat before about it wiping out humanity, but now I think there's a significant chance of that." -- GEOFFREY HINTON (Called "the Godfather of AI", in May 2023)

"Algorithms have a dangerous double capability: they make our lives easier and more convenient, but they allow us to be surveilled 24/7. We need to have a certain awareness and stop that, otherwise we will end up like China. The capablities of AI are ideal for autocratic systems. AI works better the more controlled the environment is. I don't fear superintelligence coming -- that's for the movies -- but I fear people adapt too much and just lean back and let the companies behind the AI to change their lives." -- GERD GIGERENZER (a famous German psychologist)

“The part I'm worried about is if you make a little mistake with something that's much smarter than you, everyone dies rather than you get to go back and try again." -- ELIEZER YUDLOWSKY (Head of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, in July 2023)

"You ask it (AI) to produce as many paper clips as possible and pretty soon it has killed everyone and turned the whole world into paperclips." -- NICK BOSTROM (The Swedish-born philosopher and theorist)

" ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is just another technical tool -- a sort of glorified typewriter -- for the Left, for the reigning Cultural Marxists.” — JACK JOLIS

"I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." -- the late STEPHEN HAWKING (in 2014)

"The trouble with intelligence is that it is not naturally humane. It tends to be very bored by the slowness of others and rather self-admiring." --CHARLES MOORE

"It's overwhelmingly the jobs that require 'education' that are threatened by AI." -- MATTHEW PARRIS      (Good.)

A.I.D.S.

“In the past when one cast doubt on the risk of AIDS to heterosexuals, the AIDS propagandists would point sternly to the heterosexual pandemic in Africa. Now it seem that is all a myth too. African AIDS and HIV figures are completely unreliable, it seems, because diagnoses are frequently made without blood tests, which are too  expensive.” - MINETTE MARRIN (in the UK Sunday Telegraph, 28 March 1993)

 

“There was always one key flaw in our species. Which is that someone always shags a monkey. We humans are – perhaps always have been – as weak as our weakest members makes us. And if just one of us chooses of an evening to force themselves on one of our simian cousins, then before long people across the planet start dropping dead. I suppose the monkey-shagger rule will now have to be updated to take into account the fact that someone will always blend a bat.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in 21 April 2020)

 

“It came as no great surprise to me to learn that there are now more people making a living out of AIDS than there are dying from it. AIDS has replaced race relations and wheel clamping as the great growth industry of our age.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist of the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

"It was the KGB whose successful campaign of disinformation against the United States created the international calumny that America is a racist society, when in truth America is the world's least racist society. From the 1930s through the 1980s it was the KGB which tirelessly spread worldwide its campaign of 'dezinformatsia' about America's racism. This culminated in the KGB's 'Operation Infektion' which started in a KGB-owned Indian newspaper 'The Patriot' in 1983 (a newspaper established in 1962 by the KGB solely for the purposed of spreading 'dezinformatsia'). The KGB pushed the story that scientists working for the US Government invented the AIDS virus as part of a secret campaign to extinguish Africa's Black population! The campaign succeeded at least and the French movie star Marion Cotillard who I heard say that the Americans had indeed committed this crime. A host of Americans have bought into this lie as well: Bill Cosby (to my surprise), Spike Lee, John Singleton, Dick Gregory and, of course, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright." -- PAUL JOLIS (in his excellent 2022 memoir "Going Mobile") 

Airplanes

“With the single exception of Lincoln Cathedral, the Boeing 747-400 is the most beautiful thing ever conceived by the mind of man. Any chance to see one at close quarters is a delight.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (this is a very Paul Jolis-type thing to say. Squire Sutherland is the “technology” columnist for THE SPECTATOR)

 

“If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the aircraft the next day, it's an outstanding landing" – CHUCK YEAGER

"The instant when an airplane drops its flaps and you understand abruptly that gravity has been there all the while." -- LAURENCE SHAMES

"Flying was not like driving a motorcar, something that can be picked up and put down at will. Unless you were flying 2 or 3 times a week, your responses started to dull. When things go wrong in the air, they go wrong very quickly." -- WILBUR SMITH

 

Air Power

“The reliance on air power has all of the attraction of casual sex: It seems to offer gratification but with very little commitment." – MICHAEL HAYDEN     (Ex USAF general and ex-head of the CIA, in Sept. 2014)                                                                                                                                                   


Albania

“Albania became the Orwellian caricature of communism.” – JULIAN AMERY    (The Conservative English politician and “Lord”, and old SOE type, who fought in Albania in WWII)                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Albania was the only country I’d been in where all the road signs were hand-painted.” – PETER MOORE    (in 1999)

                      

“Crucially, Albania fails the McDonald’s test. If even McDonald’s sees no point in opening up in a place, you can be sure it’s in a sorry state.” – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW     (on 12 Dec. 2020)                                                                                                            

Algorithms

" 'Algorithm' is a word that means nothing but bad news." -- JACK JOLIS (at first I thought "algorithm" was just the dorky ex-Veep dancing, but it turns out to be something even more sinister)


Allegiance

“I know whom to flee, but not whom to follow.” – CICERO (about who to side with in the famous Caesar-Pompey kerfuffle....)

 

Alliances

“Never allow yourselves to be separated from the Americans,” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (his final advice to his cabinet, upon leaving office for the last time, in 1955)

 

“There is only one thing worse than fighting with Allies, and that is fighting without them" – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow." – LORD PALMERSTON (HENRY JOHN TEMPLE)

 

"I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us." --- LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

“ He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” — PRES. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (he said this in 1934 about our ally, the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and I believe it’s just about the only thing he ever said that I wholeheartedly approve of.)

Altruism

“Private vices lead to public benefits.” -- BERNARD MANDEVILLE (An Anglo-Dutch philosopher, 1670-1733)

 

“A misplaced faith in the virtues of altruism is the great humbug of our age, one that has conjured a welfare state of such colossally good intentions that, even as it devours the substance of the commonwealth, there is  no social force in sight capable of stopping it.” – DAVID STOVE (the Australian philosopher)

 

”The biggest creeps on earth are those who claim to love it.” -- GREG GUTFELD

   

Al Qaeda

“Al-Qaeda et al. view the West not as a competitor, but as a contagion.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Al-Qaeda has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran.” – MIKE POMPEO (the US SecState, just before he left office, in Jan. 2021)   

"We've been fighting these guys (Al Qaeda) for four years, and I've never captured one of these bastards." -- AHMAD SHAH MASSOUD      (the assassinated, charismatic leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance -- as reported by the CIA's Cofer Black)    

                                                                                                                         

"In our time, the Shia Iranian regime has even made common cause with Sunni al-Qaeda. Forget what you thought about a Sunni-Shia rivalry preventing cooperation." -- MIKE POMPEO

"I'll remind the world again the killers of three thousand Americans are no longer conducting the bulk of their external plotting against America from Afghan soil. They are in Iran." -- MIKE POMPEO

Alzheimer's Disease                                                                                                                          

“The nice thing about Alzheimer's is that every day you meet new friends.” – RONALD REAGAN

 

Ambiguity   

"Floating an idea when you're unfamiliar with the law is different from issuing an order that you know to be illegal," -- MIKE POMPEO


                                                                                                                                      

Ambition

“”It's only by reaching for the impossible that you discover what's possible.” – MAX WEBER

 

“There is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” – JAMES MADISON      (The fodder of the Constitution – and my goonies, how the left hates him….)                                                                                                          


“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.” – STEVEN WRIGHT


"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings." -- SALVADOR DALI


“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

“Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.” -- ELVIS PRESLEY 

"So we come down to a basic struggle in human nature — between envy and ambition. We’ll do well if we can stick with envy as the lesser motivator and let ambition triumph." -- BEN STEIN

America

“America is mankind’s noblest experiment.” - HANNA ARENDT

 

“America is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.” – JOHN GUNTHER (an American author of both fiction and non-fiction, hugely popular and successful from the 1930s through the end of the 1960s. He wrote “Death Be Not Proud” about the death of his son from a brain tumor while a student at Deerfield Academy.)

 

“At Grand Central (Station, in New York City), you come closer to a composite view of global humanity than anywhere else on earth, proof of my contention that people who are anti-American really hate the human race.” - PAUL JOHNSON (this would make Grand Central the actual epicenter of the World)

 

“Tomorrow has always been better in the USA, and yesterday was a damn good day. - ALAN BROMLEY (in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, 9 September ’04)

 

“The great merit of Americans, which they inherited from their English forbears, is that they balance their critical idealism with a practical skill in creating a new world which is better than the old.” - PAUL JOHNSON

 

“America is a fabulous country - the only fabulous country. The one where miracles not only happen, but they happen all the time.” - THOMAS WOLFE (the “You Can’t Go Home Again” fella…)

 

“American sport seems to be populated by people with no brakes, psychologically speaking, and cars indeed to match.” -- RUSSELL DAVIES (I don’t know what this pompous ass of a Brit “commentor” means by this, but it is indubitably scurrilous…)

 

“Americans don’t like to start fights and start wars.” - RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing." – GAMAL ABDEL NASSER     (“stupid moves” is a bit rich coming from this bozo….)                                                                                                               

 

“The American sense of humor? Only a people without a sense of humor would boast about it, and most Americans don’t really understand satire. We’re a serious people who make jokes.” -GEORGE S. KAUFFMAN

 

“The bikes were bigger in America. Everything was bigger and there was a sense of freedom. It’s a children’s culture - silly clothes, sweet drinks and junk food.” - MARTIN AMIS (who grew up in Princeton, NJ)

 

“Sentimentality is the chief defining characteristic of the American mass culture. American society may be unspeakably cruel in various ways, but it spends most of its time cooing at itself.” - AUBERON WAUGH (Evelyn’s son, and, needless to say, something of a famous anti-American. But I’m afraid I partly agree with him - no one’s a bigger American patriot than me --  but I agree with ol’ Auberon that we suffer from what can only be described as “National narcissism”.)

 

“Any writer who tries selling his wares on the American market will be aware of the constant pressure to cut out anything abrasive, anything controversial, anything which seems to deny a world governed by peace and love. Perhaps that is the only way they can face their smouldering underclass of blacks, Hispanics, drug addicts and speechless, unemployable white teenagers.” - AUBERON WAUGH

 

“Being the least objectionable candidate to the most people is usually how candidates win in America.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“America is large of spirit. Foreigners know this and will often tell you this. Abroadd, Americans stand out so much, they almost glow. What Texans and Californians are to other Americans, Americans are to much of the world.” – JONAH GODLBERG

 

“American may be more than just an idea, but man, what an idea. And that idea is that we don’t have to take guff from anybody, including the government, without good reason.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (by me, he could have left off the “without good reason”)

 

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“This is America, we all expect something, even the sociopaths have some sort of a good opinion of themselves.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 "Americans are a warlike people." -- ART BELL (the late late-night radio guy, who specialized in UFOs and such, and I disagree with him, here, but it does make a snappy quote.)

“America – the nation with the soul of a church.” – G.K. CHESTERTON

 

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” – GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

 

“The perpetual peace to which Europe aspires has its source not in Europe but in the United States. If America were to collapse tomorrow, Europe would fall like a house of cards; it would return to the tergiversation it showed in Munich in 1938 and be reduced to a deluxe sanatorium ready to allow itself to be torn apart, piece by piece, by all sorts of predators.” – PASCAL BRUCKNER (one of the Frogue “Nouveaux Philosophes”, in his “The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay On Western Masochism”)


"Why should I remain in a country that is on the eve of woman's suffrage and prohibition?" – AMBROSE BIERCE  (The great author and aphorist, Civil War veteran, who wrote, among much else, “The Devil's Dictionary”  and “Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge”. He spoke these words to his daughter in 1913 just as he was de-assing for Mexico, and he was never heard from again. “The Old Gringo” by Carlos Fuentes is reported to be  about him. He is responsible for many hundreds of quotable bon mots, but one of my favorites is: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.")

 

“Americans are a breed of sub dagos speaking no known language intelligently.” - JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (and fuck you too, you old socialist fart.)

 

“Everything from America is either degenerate or monstrous.” --  CORNELIUS DE PAUW (this “eminent Dutch scientist” said this sometime in the eighteenth century. Hey, and don’t let the door smack you on your fucking arse, mijneer, and let me, while we’re at it, introduce you to fucking John fucking Maynard fucking Keynes, here….)

 

“No one under the age of 20 shares the fashionable grown-up snobbery about America or Americans. They like everything about it.” - A.A. GILL (the late fashionable and snobby left-wing English “journalist”)

 

“America is Europe's greatest invention.” – A.A. GILL

“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” -RONALD REAGAN

 

“Other nations may have myths and rituals, but America is unique in also having doctrines.” - CHRISTOPHER LEVENICK (Of Alexandria, VA, in 2007)

 

“The reason Americans do so well in war, is war is chaos, and American practice chaos on a daily basis.” - ERWIN ROMMEL (ze famous Desert Fox” of WWII renown…)

 

“The difficulty in planning against American doctrine is that Americans neither see fit to follow their doctrine nor even read their manuals.” - KGB TRAININNG DOCUMENT (unearthed as part of the post-Cold War “Venona papers”)

 

“Americans always do the right thing after having exhausted all the other possibilities.” - WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“We can no longer do those things a young civilization can do – win wars, write memorable poems, expel intruders, live within our means, execute great feats of engineering. Once, in the first fine careless rapture of civilizational youth, we could do anything. Now we can do nothing. Once we civilized wild expanses and humbled great military empires. Now we insult our ancestors, wrestle with codes of tax and regulation three inches thick, and dicker ineffectually with barbarian chieftains.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (in June 2011)

 

“The United States is sometimes thought of as a nation that perhaps does not dwell enough on its own history. To that, I say: Good for us. Because too much focus on history can become a prison for nations.” -- CONDOLEEZA RICE

"American doctors, in his experience, would only visit you at home if you were actually dead." -- DAVID LODGE

"They came largely to get away -- that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been. 'Henceforth be masterless.'  Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom." -- D. H. LAWRENCE

“The majority of Americans have had any critical faculties educated out of them.” - MICHAEL VESTEY

 

“America leads the world but when Americans go abroad they can’t speak the lingo as well as the locals can speak English so they become prisoners of their own cultural dominance.” - LLOYD EVANS (True, but except that they don’t “lead the world”, you could say the same thing of the Brits, one of which is what Evans is.)

 

“American history is a tale of human nature set free.” - WALTER  A. McDOUGALL (Author of “Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era”, and Professor of History at U. of Penn.)

 

“America is attractive in a way no other nation has ever matched. America is what happens when humans take their chances, seize the moment, and go for it.” - JUSTIN WEBB (until 2009, the BBC’s man in Washington and America, for a couple of years. He’s the only Beeb reporter I ever heard who is not an anti-American leftist and is therefore, as such, a one-man endangered species)

 

‘There’s no place in the world where children like school so much as in the United States,’ -- DIMITRI NEGROPONTE (John's father)

 

“Only in Switzerland and America did the theory and practice of popular government survive into the modern world. But note: they survived because they were planted in an older, hybrid pre-Enlightenment roots.” - ANGELO CODEVILLA

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” -- D. H. LAWRENCE     (but there's always a first time....)

“As a general rule in America, the higher a person’s status, the more liberal their politics.” -- TOBY YOUNG

 

“The blue states are more affluent than the red states - and political correctness is more ubiquitous in New York and Los Angeles than it is in ‘the flyover states’. The reason the media is liberal is because it’s a high-status profession. The same goes for medicine and law. At the very top of American society, expressing a rightwing opinion is virtually a form of sedition. You can count the number of Republican celebrities on one hand.” -- TOBY YOUNG

"Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." -- WERNER HERZOG       (famous -- infamous, actually -- German film director)

“My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don’t.” - CRAIG FERGUSON (the Scottish-American honcho of the Late Late Show – now he’s got some other obscure show)

 

"To America, my new-found land: the man that hates you hates the human race." - BRENDAN BEHAN (The drunken Irish poet, novelist and playwright, author of ‘Borstal Boy”)

 

“You know America's gone to hell, when the best rapper out there is a white guy and the best golfer is a black guy.”  – CHARLES BARKLEY (the ex-basketballist, in 2000)

 

“Amusingly, the people most outraged by the notion that there is an American culture are often the people most eager to lecture their fellow Americans about the richness, delicacy; and permanence of nearly every other culture in the world.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“America is a country where just about anyone can grow up to become just about anything – and that's just the problem.” – GEORGE WILL

 

“Without Guns we'd still be part of Canada.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please. - P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“America is harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend.” --  BERNARD LEWIS


"America’s most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility. The social ideal was to look 23 and dress 13.” -- TOM WOLFE     (in his 2000 book "Hooking Up")                     

 

“You cannot gauge the intelligence of an American by talking with him, you must work with him.” – ERIC HOFFER

 

“America is the only country where the masses have impressed their tastes and values on the whole of the country.” – ERIC HOFFER

 

"The left just doesn't get America. I say this as a fellow-traveler of liberalism and as one who recognizes that many liberals fear the heartland. They see it as a dark place of primitive religions and too many guns. ... The left does not merely disagree with the right; it fears it."-- RICHARD COHEN (Cohen is Washington Post columnist, and more liberal than him you don't get. He wrote this on the WaPo website on Dec.6 2011. Anyway, I have two comments to his comment: 1/ "primitive religions"? Well, one of them is, that's for sure, wallahi billahi. And 2/ there is no "right" in America -- only an "anti-left".)

 

“America is not what’s wrong with the world.” –DONALD RUMSFELD

 

"The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced." – FRANK ZAPPA

 

“I never say liberals are unpatriotic, I say they are confused about patriotism.  For instance, Barack Obama has voiced his desire to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America,’ a locution, I think, that is hard to square with a love for America as it is. Don’t believe me?  Tell your wife or husband ‘Honey I love you, I just want to fundamentally transform you'.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“When we are young we are American, but when we grow up we become Frenchmen.” – EVELYN WAUGH

"Americans are a very decent and generous lot and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in 1948) 

“The only really sympathetic and original thing in America is the niggers, who are charming.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES  (nice, John. The old “Queen of Kings” – as he was known to his fellow poofters at Kings College, Cambridge University – wrote this in a letter to his boyfriend in 1917)

 

“The real mission for the next American president may be to persuade us that we can be Americans again. Not this easily-distracted, cynical, tuned-out, Balkanizing mob that hobbles along with an economy that hits 3 percent growth at the best of times, is growing acclimated to slogging along in a waste-deep bureaucratic morass, and endures a public discourse that alternates among the nasty, inane, and petty, punctuated by perpetual cycles of offensiveness and grievances of the offended. We deserve better than a government that falters and flails in the face of drug cartels and gang violence but that can come down like a ton of bricks on big sodas and incandescent light bulbs. The history of this nation was driven by those who overcame the siren call of acquiescence, the anti-rallying cry of, ‘What's the use?’ " – JIM GERAGHTY

 

“The American is the Englishman left to himself.” – ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE

 

“Americans are not a virtuous people, yet they are free.” – ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE

 

"Americans are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess." -- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

 

 “The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the ills and trials of life. He is restless and defiant in his outlook toward authority and appeals to its power only when he cannot do without it. At the same time, however, when some unforeseen misfortune strike a family, the purses of a thousand strangers open up without trouble; modest but very numerous gifts come to its assistance in its misery.” -- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

 

"(America's future is) an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Above stands an immense power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification, to keep them in perpetual childhood. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules; men are seldom forced by it to act, but are constantly restrained from acting -- a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." -- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (in 1831, and this is most definitely not your usual Tocquevillian Pollyannish homage to America....)

 

“Americans have never really caught on to the idea of eating sheep. I think they think it’s cissy.” – HUGH LAURIE (the English comic actor – and you can tell he’s English due to the “c” in “cissy”.)

 

“Americans respect patriotism; And they respect it in others.” – HUGH LAURIE

"The great majority of American do not identify their country with its government." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (very insightfuly -- a modern-day Toqueville...)

"America's prosperity becomes apparent the moment you leave her large cities." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

"American society is based on  the principle of 'benevolent inequality', an inequality that is passionate, creative, dynamic. Equality is static; it squelches all hope for a new and different life. In the Soviet Union you are doomed to the life of a state employee, and unless you turn thief, nothing in your life will change. After all, everyone is equal (except, of course, for those who are more equal). In America, the land of inequality, your chance -- the chance for your to change your life -- is waiting for you somewhere in  the chaos of economic freedom. You may never find it, but the fact that it  is there gives your life an entirely different perspective." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (in 1985)

“America was the one place where one could be a conservative and still be a champion of liberty.” – FRIEDRICH HAYEK (Whose book Margaret Thatcher slammed down on the podium in the House of Commons in 1976 and  declared “This is what we believe.”)

 

"This phrase I've grown rather tired of, the American people are 'war weary', which is immensely insulting to the troops. The troops are out there dealing with it. The American people aren't weary. They just got bored with it. The answer to losing wars expensively is to find ways to win them affordably, not to think you can retreat behind 'Fortress America'. The reality of 'Fortress America' is on display right now at the southern border. Who says you have to go overseas to lose?" – MARK STEYN

 

“Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.” – JEANE KIRKPATRICK

"The United States, for all its other virtues, exists in a permanent din. It is a noisy country. We are a noisy people. Our voices carry. You can sit in a crowded restaurant in America and follow every conversation in the room. If a guy fifty feet away has hemorrhoids, you're going to know about it. Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Check-in clerks bark 'Next inline!' Disembodied voices in big stores ceaselessly hector you to take up their special offers or fill the air with thinly coded messages that someone's having a heart attack in housewares." --BILL BRYSON

 

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." -- ANDY WARHOL (I must say, the more I've grown to hate Picasso, the more I've grown to like Andy Warhol -- or Andrej Varhola, Jr., as he was born. Both of them were, in my opinion, lousy artistes, at the same time that they were both supreme bullshit artists -- but at least Varhola was a mensch. By the way, I once met and shook hands with Andy Warhol. Very briefly. I was having lunch with our diamantaire buddy Ara Arslanian at some newly-trendy Jap resto in mid-town Manhattan in the 70s, and Warhol, a pal of Ara's -- natch!! -- suddenly came up to him out of nowhere and said hi. And I, being there, naturally said hi too. I remember thinking at the time that a semi-stiff wind would knock the fey little fellow over, and that he might do with a bit of sunlight.... But otherwise, he seemed a decent enough egg.)

 

“What I resent most of all about the Left is that they exploit American decency.” – DINESH D’SOUZA

 

“We, the American people, are not each others' enemies. The enemies are those people behind the jerking everybody's chains and trying to divide us by age, by race, by income.” – BEN CARSON

 

“No great power in history has behaved more unselfishly than the United States.” – ANDRE MALRAUX (The philosopher, author, and Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture – and not a chap otherwise known for his pro-Americanism.)

 

“America, which started as a salon des  réfusés feels today like a boss nation.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

 

“Americans do not believe that the meek will inherit the earth. They believe that Americans will inherit the world.” – JOE QUEENAN     (amusing author and contributor to, among many others, THE WALL ST. JOURNAL)                 

 

“You Americans invented freedom. You invented freedom. And you’re on your way to losing it, not because of newcomers unwilling to become Americans, but because of natives unwilling to teach them.” – PETER SCHRAMM (Who was brought to America by his family from their native   Hungary in '56 when he was 10. Like me, and about the same time that I was “hosting” Ishtvan Lehel in Paris and becoming a lifelong anti-communist and anti-leftist conservative at that young age. Schramm died in 2015)

“The idea of America is slipping away.” – BOBBY JINDAL (16 December 2015)

 

“Yes, what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.” – WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (19th century American novelist)

 

"You know who has far less poverty than the Swedes, Norwegians and Dutch? Swedes, Norwegians and Dutch in the United States." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

 

"I'm grateful to live in a country where the totalitarians are so hilariously inept." -- DAVE "Iowahawk" BURGE

 

“The United States has more to be proud of and less to be ashamed of than any other nation on the face of the globe.” – FORREST MACDONALD (the late famous American historian and long-time prof. At the Univ. of Alabama, who said this in 2004.)

"The most valuable thing the world has ever produced is America"  – DINESH D'SOUZA

"They have no ideology, mein Führer." -- JOSEPH GOEBBELS (Reporting to Hitler after capturing US POWs in fighting in North Africa, at the beginning of WWII)

“America owes its success to the fact, for a few hundred years, it became the natural homeland for the world's overconfident loudmouths, blowhards, wiseacres and minor assholes. It didn't get rich through agonizing about safe spaces and the gender assignment of bathrooms. It got rich because of people called Vinnie building things." – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"In the U.S. you can travel 1,000 miles in a straight line and find yourself in a town pretty much indistinguishable from the one you left." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"In the Mad Men era, when Americans were drunk after lunch, the economy grew at about 9 per cent annually." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” – ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO    (Jap WWII naval commander)                  

 

"America is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit o the power it can generate." -- EDWARD GREY (The longest-ever British Foreign Secretary, from 1905 to 1916 – the “lights are going out all over Europe” bloke)

 

“You never know how you'll end up with an American. They never do well in confined spaces, and you can never tell which way they'll bounce.” – JOHN GALSWORTHY (in the last of his interminable Forsyte Sagas...)

 

“'Socially liberal, economically conservative' in America is little different from saying 'a typical rich person'.” – MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

 

"No one in America seemed to know how to pronounce any foreign word." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

“Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact." – MARLENE DIETRICH

 

“I also believe in the United States. I think this is the greatest nation that ever existed, still is. It’s really the only really democratic country in the world. Find me one country, just one country in the entire world that would let a foreign people -- different culture, different language, and in many cases different color than the majority of the native stock -- take over politically an entire metropolitan area in less than one generation. I’m talking about the Cubans in Miami. I really love this country. I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it’s the simple principle of freedom. . . . Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged. Whatever we’re doing I think we’ve done it extremely, extremely, extremely well.... These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world.” – TOM WOLFE                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          “The United States is a nation that in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles.” – BERNIE SANDERS


"America... a sort of a nation." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

 

"These American women were very straightforward people, quick to disclose their madness. The men were a little slower." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

 

“America is the place where tomorrow happens.” – MICHAEL GOVE

 

"Americans have largely accepted a view of history in which conservation and limitation are unacceptable, if only because they are boring." -- GREG WEINER (visiting scholar at AEI, writing in NR, in Oct. 2019)

 

"Never criticize Americans. They have the best taste that money can buy." -- MILES KINGTON

 

"America, largely through the luck of an Indian heritage it has until recently disowned, is blessed with poetic place-names." -- MARK LAWSON

 

"America was a young country, but it had accumulated cultural and political history with dizzying speed." -- MARK LAWSON

 

“The best way to exploit American stupidity is to flatter American intelligence.” – ROSS DOUTHAT

 

"America lost every war in the last three generations because we were willing to die, but not to kill. The Europeans are neither willing to die nor kill. And so, the continent is being overrun by those who are." -- DANIEL GREENFIELD     (In FRONTPAGE Magazine, March 2020)      


“I prefer going to countries crawling with Americans. It makes it easier to do business. With the odd exception, Americans rush in, promise the earth then fail to deliver. Which makes things easier for the rest of us.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

"I'm sorry to say it, but sometimes you Americans are not serious people." ("Désolé  de le dire, mais parfois vous Américains ne sont pas des gens sérieux.") -- COUNT ALEXANDRE DE MARENCHES (the then-boss of French intel -- the DGSE -- in 1985, to my late dad)

“America is the Cadillac of nations — which is to say, we can look a little creaky next to an Audi.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"America is the greatest country, not just on earth now but in history. So much about other great countries would not exist without the US. It's ok to acknowledge that even if America has problems." -- KAROL MARKOWICZ (Despite the spelling of her first name, this is a lady -- and an excellent on at that: a columnist at the NY Post, the Spectator/US, FoxNews and the DC Examiner. She said this in July 2022) 

“What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?" – ADOLPH HITLER (in 1941, from “Hitler: A Global Biography”, by Brendan Simms)

 

"Americans are Protestant, not necessarily in the content of their religion but in their habits of mind and assumptions. All of them. The Catholics, the Buddhists, even the Jews. That's one of the basic characteristics that make Americans so strange the rest of the world." -- HAVIV RETTIG GUR     (of The Times Of Israel)                                

 

"People have lived in more freedom under the aegis of US Power than ever before in the History of Man." -- KEVIN O'NEILL (A fellow on the Twoot -- in fact, this is taken from his Twoot-profile)

 

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”-- NEIL POSTMAN (in his 1985 "Amusing Ourselves To Death")

 

"The U.S.A. was meant to be a collection of small governments kept from oppressing minorities and each other by one limited but overarching federal system of laws and courts. But people prefer to oppress each other, each one wants all the others regulated, and the Feds took a lesson from local politicians who used this basic desire to their advantage by promising to honor it in exchange for votes." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

"Americans, bless them, never really understood the map of Africa." -- WILBUR SMITH

“Americans are the most loving, god-fearing, fair and least discriminatory people on the planet, and if you’re thinking of harming American citizens… something really bad is going to happen to you and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress.” -- ALEX KARP       (CEO of Palantir-- AI)

"In America I can never make up my mind whether people are being friendly or hostile. Most of the time they seem to be both simultaneously." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"American society is a variety of contending views raised permanently to a shout." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"American tourists abroad could never be mistaken for a corps de ballet." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS 

"Trying always to be a bit happier is a uniquely American perversion/" -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“The American is a European with the manners of a negro and the soul of an Indian.” -- CARL JUNG (the 1930s sometime, and I think in the second case he’s referring to “feathered” Indians.)

 

"Another thing that struck me Americans was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood. The emotional way an American expresses himself, especially the way he laughs, is found in its primordial form in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro. American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro. The vivacity of the average American, which shows itself not only at baseball games but quite particularly in his extraordinary love of talking – the ceaseless gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this – is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe." -- CARL JUNG (expounding on his theme)

 

“In America you don’t actually meet any Americans any more. They’re all Irish-Americans, or Italian-Americans, or African-Americans, even if they’ve never been anywhere near Ireland, Italy or Africa in their lives or couldn’t point to them on a map.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

 

“American culture has conquered the world by the simple expedient of assuming that it has already done so. Americans do not feel the need to explain themselves and, in one sense, they do not require an explanation  This, of course, is the one thing about them which is quite impossible to explain. But I began to suspect that in America there might be another country – a frightening, nausea-inspiring monster that made nothing out of something and something out of nothing.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (The amusing English novelist adduced all this after joining his family on the ”Back To the Future” ride at Universal Studios in 1995)

 

“Landscape, for Americans, is still something you travel through to get somewhere else.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

 

“Americans are like other people, only more so.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

"Americans are incurably literal-minded and nearly always assume you mean what you say." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the English novelist, who's spent a lot of time in America)

"Americans will listen, but they do not care to read." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

 

“In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” --  OSCAR WILDE

"America is the beacon of freedom in the world and if America does not push for freedom, it’s over; Not just in the US, it’s over everywhere." -- DR SCOTT ATLAS (in the UK DAILY TELEGRAPH, 28 June 2023) 

“Americans are very lucky people. They’re surrounded on the North and South by weak people and on the East and West by fish.” - OTTO VON BISMARCK (though it doesn't do any good to be surrounded by weak people and fish when we're ruled by weak people and fish in Washington....)

"Instinctively non-ideological Americans are forever minimizing and underestimating the power of ideology... in our enemies -- (and always to our cost.)" -- JACK JOLIS

"America is the least racist country in the world. This is due partly to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants and partly to the fact that America is the world's most successful experiment with democracy. Not only did America produce the planet's first Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1821, but America ended slavery by a convulsive force of arms in 1865,something which no other nation has done." -- PAUL JOLIS (In his excellent 2022 memoir "Going Mobile")

"We are effectively run in this country (America, 2024) by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too." -- J. D. VANCE


America, Central

“No one would dare claim that in Central America poverty and injustice are gone. But the region no longer seethes with revolution. What happened? Injustice did not disappear. The Soviets did, and with them the sinews and romance of social revolution.” - CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (in  Jan. 1994)

"The Spanish Conquistadors behaved repulsively. With brutality and bigotry they cruelly eliminated civilisations. However, if civilisations had to be destroyed, those of the Central American Indians were surely the best candidates. The Toltec Empire was, if it is possible, even nastier and crueller than the other tribes, though there is no evidence that they enjoyed the Mayan pastime of pulling out fingernails or the Aztec habit of drowning small girls." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (the English author and civil servant, in 1995)

America, South

“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” -- WOODROW WILSON (Right. Typical Princeton fatuity. Actually, Woody was the First “NeoCon”…)

 

“As Latin American countries found to their cost, hell hath no fury like a thwarted lumpen intelligentsia (guerrilla movements in Latin America were the result of the expansion of universities, not peasant discontent). – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Hand-shaking in Latin American countries is always frequently and lightly done, with the loose grip that Anglo-Saxons believe shows lack of ‘moral fibre’.” – RONALD WRIGHT (from his 1984 “Cut Stones And Crossroads”)

"Petty empires whose greatest art form is the epaulet of the junta's shoulders. Revolutionary leaders whose last bath is celebrated as a national holiday second in importance only to the previous recorded moment they trimmed their trademark beards." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (in his 1990 "Statute Of Limitations")


"Son, off the record, the OAS (Organization Of American States) couldn't pour shit out of a boot if the instructions was printed on the heel." -- VICE PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON (In 1962, to a reporter on his return from an OAS meeting in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, that JFK had sent him to represent the US at.) 

"The Amazonas is not a kind place. You rot fast here." -- CHARLES BREWER-CARIAS (the legendary Venezuelan explorer, to his friend the English explorer-author Redmond O'Hanlon)

American Decline

"For modern America, acceptance of decline cannot have any sense of closure because the successor-state is totalitarian. Every precept of National Socialist China is entirely antithetical to American values. Britain’s successor-state shared her language, common law, liberal principles, free market, and outlook. The United States can take no such comfort when peering into her post-imperial future.

Is this decline inevitable? Not if the United States can grasp the leadership of the West once more instead of wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions with its own faults, real and imagined.

President Biden has already made it clear that he does not understand any of this. For now, Americans remain preoccupied with navel-gazing about Critical Race Theory and endlessly revisiting slavery 158 years after its abolition. Hopefully sometime before China takes Taiwan, Putin takes Ukraine, and Iran develops the Bomb, the United States will reject Acceptance of her eclipse and embrace her own supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor." -- ANDREW ROBERTS (the eminent historian, in December 2021)

“One day, you'll wake up and you will not recognize your country anymore.” — GLENN BECK (Nov. 22, 2022)

"It is possible, in strange times, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears." -- WALKER PERCY

"The Left took over academia, then the media, then one of the two major political parties. It pit people against one another by group — blacks against whites, women against men, parents against their unborn babies. It perverted reality itself, declaring that men can become women merely by mind over matter. At earlier points, conservatives could have stopped this, by appealing to normal people. But they let the madness spread believing common sense would prevail." -- LOU AGUILAR    (in January 2024, in the AMSPEC)

"The Obama and the Biden administrations finally seemed to have achieved their aims, in what the Obamas once boasted would be the “fundamental transformation” of America into something unrecognizable by its Founders. But what they gave us was nihilism—the destruction of norms, laws, and customs." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (25 Sept. 2023)

"We are nearing a French Revolution, reign-of-terror moment. The law seems to be what a cabal of hardcore leftists who control the Oval Office say it is." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON     (in Feb. 2024)


American Exceptionalism

“American exceptionalism annoys the world. Happiness is the source of the annoyance. Other countries are built upon battle, blood, nationality, culture, language, and territory. America is the exception. Our foundation is pursuit of happiness. It appears in the first sentence of the main body of America's IPO, the Declaration of Independence. Happiness is the one novel feature of the document.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“Whenever conservatives talk about American exceptionalism, liberals react as if we were speaking German in the 1930s.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“In other countries, parents often impose their tastes on their children, somehow the reverse happens in the U.S.” – VERONIQUE DE RUGY

 

“Archie Bunker is dead. Meathead got tenure. Forty years of cultural liberalism rewrote the concept of American exceptionalism to mean we're uniquely bad.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Anything that is a specifically American accomplishment somehow becomes a symbol of everyone, and everything that’s a universal human failing somehow becomes a uniquely American sin.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“American exceptionalism is a burden, not a vanity.” – SHELBY STEELE (the black American author, columnist, documentarist and professor; not exactly a conservative, but definitely no lefty. Perceptive chap.)

 

"Modern secular America is producing a generation of wingless chickens." -- FLANNERY O'CONNOR

 

"There's no point to American exceptionalism if it just means exceptionally suicidal." – MARK STEYN

 

“The Marxists who are so skillful in the detection and the isolation of heresies used to inveigh against one particular heresy that pleased me particularly. They called it American exceptionalism.” – JOHN DOS PASSOS (The colossally successful American novelist of the 20s, 30s and 40s until he became an anti-communist in the 50s, at which point, of course, he “mysteriously” lost all his talent and became a non-person)

 

"The world can have messy American military interventions, or the world can have massacres. Those are the options." -- JIM GERAGHTY

 

 “Since the Civil War, Americans have been a flag-oriented people. The Stars and Stripes has the status of a religious icon and is a more central symbol of national identity for Americans than their flags are for peoples of other nations.” -- SAMUEL HUNTINGTON

 

"Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy." – MARGARET THATCHER

 

“Americans are special – because they really think they’re special. Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.” – MARTIN AMIS

 

"America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony." -- PHILIP ROTH

 

“Some clever people today ask whether the United States has really been ‘exceptional’. You couldn't be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create a new fundamental self-governing document." – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave.” – CHARLIE KIRK (on 11 April 2021)

" 'American Exceptionalism' -- No other country in history has ever had its citizens who hate it, and threaten/promise to leave it... refuse to leave." -- JACK JOLIS

Anarchy

"It is not the absence of government, but the rejection of culture which leads to anarchy." -- DAVID MAMET

 

“He didn’t want to overthrow law and order because they wouldn’t have known what to do after they’d done it. A total collapse would have frightened them. They preferred a war of attrition, fought on safe ground, renewable every day.” – DAVID NOBBS (in his splendid comic novel “Second To Last In The Sack Race”)

 

“A nation without a national government is, in my view, an awful spectacle.” – ALEXANDER HAMILTON (near the end of  THE FEDERALIST)

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” – ALFRED HENRY LEWIS  (This American journalist and short-story writer wrote this in COSMOPOLITAN in 1906, and, while it sounds to me more like a threat than an observation, for all I know he may be right. And to which my good pal SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER has appended: “Three days to chaos and seven to cannibalism.”)


 

Anecdotes (anecdotal evidence)

“One anecdote’s an anecdote, two anecdotes are data.” - AARON WILDAVSKY (American political scientist)

 

Anger

“Anger is like picking burning coals out of a fire with your bare hands and throwing them wildly at your enemy. It hurts you far more than it hurts the object of your ire.” - CHARLES SPENCER (The British journalist was actually quoting a “lovely-reformed-alcoholic-turned-Buddhist” pal of his, but this’ll do…)

 

“The man who feels anger for the right reasons, against the right persons, in the right manner, at the right moment and for the right length of time, is due nothing but praise.” - ARISTOTLE (So that’s that, then….)

 

“It is important to get mad at the right people.” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR

"How trite rage is:  enraged people in life act exactly like enraged people in comic books: there are stars and comets and zaps over their heads." -- WALKER PERCY

"There is a great difference between being angry and knowing that you are angry." -- WALKER PERCY

“The open expression of contempt, anger and dislike is more often a part of our liberty than a threat to our liberty.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (the ex-Conservative Party M.P. And poof, become columnist of the UK SPECTATOR)

 

"He who will attend to the motions of his own mind will soon acknowledge that, for all the passions, righteous indignation is perhaps the most gratifying, the longest-lasting and the most easily transferable from one object to another, and so the hardest to abandon." -- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“It's important not to get angry. You can lose all hope if you can't laugh at yourself and at life.” – STEPHEN HAWKING (I never liked this bloke's lefty/Malthusian politics, but this is a cute quote, so I bunged it in...)

 

“Anger is nature's way of discouraging people from dicking us around.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." -- BUDDHA (THE)

 

"When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time." -- CHARLES DE GAULLE

 

“It was as embarrassing to see a friend under the influence of adrenalin when one had not lost one’s own temper as it was to see him under the influence of alcohol when he was sober.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

 

“Like so much else in life, anger was an art.  In order to become better at it, you had to keep practicing.” – ELIF SHAFAK (the young lady Turkish-British writer)

"Anger can be righteous. But anger confers no righteousness." --JONAH GOLDBERG

“Anglosphere, The”                                                                                                             

“What we call 'The West' is really just a polite way of referring to nations that have picked up those exceptional libertarian ideals that were developed initially in Britain and then spread through the New World and, eventually, across the globe.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE     (An English journalist paraphrasing an English parliamentarian, the conservative Daniel Hannan)                                                                

 

“What distinguished the English-speaking nations was not that they practiced slavery but that they crushed it.” – DANIEL HANNAN (the outstanding English MEP, and author of “Inventing Freedom: How The English-Speaking Peoples Made The Modern World”)

 

“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; an American thinks a hundred years is a long time” – DIANA GABALDON (in her book “Drums Of Autumn”)  

"The two great nation-states whose impact on the world has been, despite all vicissitudes, most evidently benign are the United States and Britain. The survival of Western civilization owes almost everything to the fact that these two peoples have upheld values and principles that other nations have either from time to time abandoned or never adhered to at all. To the former, this fact is a source of embarrassment and envy; to the latter, one of fear and hatred." – DANIEL JOHNSON (the editor of STANDPOINT, a London-based monthly magazine – and, incidentally, the son of the great     historian Paul Johnson – in March 2018)

 

“There is now a substantial lumpenintelligentsia of teachers, clergymen, and ‘knowledge workers’ whose first reaction to almost any international controversy is to ‘blame America (or England, or Australia, etc.) first.” – JOHN O’SULLIVAN

 

“The Brits are our sometimes annoying cousins.

While Canucks are our out-of-it, scolding aunt;

Kiwis are an eccentric uncle who live we're not sure where, but somewhere near the Aussies;

And the Aussies are our favorite kid brother.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“The most important fact of the twentieth century will be that Americans speak English.” – OTTO VON BISMARK (as quoted by the noted ex-NSA guy John Schindler)

"It is just worth considering the possibility that there may be something valuable behind the indefensible and inexplicable assumption of superiority by the Anglo-Saxon race." -- EVELYN WAUGH      (in 1930)


Animals

“Rodents like the same food as humans and each can easily consume its body weight in a week. They played a major role in destroying the Soviet Union by consuming over 40% of all food produced by a system which took months to get food from the producing to consuming areas - the greatest, perhaps the only, beneficiary of Marxism was a rat.” - PAUL JOHNSON

"I have always loved animals. they are different from us and their brains are not complex, but their hearts are pure and there is usually no fat on their bodies and they will never call the police on you or take you in front of a judge or run off and hide with your money... Animals don't hire lawyers." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

“It must be very dispiriting to be born into this world and find that you are an intensively reared hen.” - JEREMY CLARKE

 

“Torturing a dog or a cat for sport is not disgusting because animals have rights, it is repugnant because human beings have obligations.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Rats should be destroyed, not fought with." --ERICH MARIA REMARQUE       (the "All Quiet On The Western Front" fellow)

“What I really object to in the New Yorker, or in real life for that matter, is a witty animal.” – DOROTHY PARKER

 

"They (animals) snub us. We should be gods to them, but they lack our capacity to worship -- for foresight and the terrors and convoluted mental grovelling that  foresight brings with it, including the invention of an afterlife. Animals do not distinguish between us and the other beasts, or between us and the rocks and trees, each with its pungence and relevance to the struggle for existence." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL    

“Donkeys are half horse and half lead.” – AL MURRAY     (a radio “presenter” on the BBC's “Radio 5 Live”)                                                                                                                     

"An ESA ('Emotional Support Animal') is an example of a well-intentioned idea that has metastasized and developed into a world of nonsense." -- JEFFREY YOUNGGREN  (Gee, what a surprise. Anyway, Squire Younggren is a Psychiatry Prof at and husband of the President of the University of New Mexico.)

“There's a dead crow in the middle of the sidewalk. You see a dead crow, you think: another crow did it. No crow dies a natural death.» -- JAMES LILEKS

"A gecko has a wonderful life, except, of course, it has to eat flies. Oh yes. 'Cause God created it, like he did everything else in his almighty wisdom, and all the animals have to eat each other to keep the population down. And geckos got lumbered with flies. It's alright when it's born. Its mother fives it some flies, all mashed up, daintily garnished with a daisy on top of it, so it can't tell what it's eating. But as soon as it learns to speak, Dud, and communicate, it says to its mother, 'Excuse me, what's this I'm eating?' And she has to reply 'Flies, darling, and they're very good for you.' But that's why the gecko doesn't live very long, because he can't bear eating the stuff." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic, to his great mate Dudley Moore, in "The Dagenham Dialogues" of 1971) 

“A man who picks a cat up by the tail gains knowledge that he could not learn in any other way.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“Ants are Marxist, dogs are Burkean conservative, and cats are libertarian.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

''I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom to animals.” – BRIGITTE BARDOT

 

"The octopus, like many people, is better than either its name or its appearance." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

"A porpoise understands wave theory better than a physicist." -- MARK HELPRIN

"The problems were like crows, cowardly and unimportant when alone, but bold and terrible in their thousands." --MARK HELPRIN 

"Remarkably content to give all that milk and end up as roasts in the ovens; and that is by no means funny, for if you look into the eyes of a cow you see a gentle being, perplexed and confused, and although they are hardly full of grace and beauty they order pity in a human heart for their very thickness and incapacity." -- MARK HELPRIN

"I distrust camels, and anyone else who can go a week without a drink." -- JOE E. LEWIS

 

"The unagitated, slow-moving, strife-free cows, each a fifteen-hundred-pound industry of its own gratification." -- PHILIP ROTH

 

“I’ve always thought the word ‘cow’ was funny. And cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.” -- GARY LARSON (the cartoonist of "The Far Side")

 

"Of all animals, the only two species which can watch television without extensive training are humans and dolphins. If you show a chimp a TV picture, they are completely bemused, and it requires some effort to get them to learn that images are depictions of reality. The vastly more intelligent dolphin grasps the concept immediately: 'Ooh, that's interesting -- what's he doing with that fish?'" -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"The rhinoceros is an animal with a hide two feet thick, and no apparent interest in politics.  What a waste." -- JAMES C. WRIGHT, JR. (Democrat from Texas, and the long-time Speaker of the House of Representatives)

“Ninety percent of giraffes are gay.” – DAWN BUTLER (The UK Labour Party “Shadow Secretary For Women And Equalities”, in November 2019 – and I’m pretty sure she was serious about this.)

“I was taught at school that animals can only ever pass on things through their genes, but we humans can pass things on by example and by teaching – in short, by culture.” – SIMON BARNES

"Tigers are the biggest cats. Cats are the smallest tigers." -- ROBIN WHITE (in his thriller "Siberian Light")

 

“If a lion could talk we wouldn’t be able to understand him.” – LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN


Animal “Rights”

“Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“It is admirable to treat animals well, to conserve habitats and to protect the powerless. But that’s not the same as treating animal life as equal to human life.” – WILLIAM MOORE (English columnist, in Sept. 2021)

(see also Rights)

 

Annoyance

“Liberalism is the political philosophy that became drunk and disorderly in public. Beyond public indulgence, however, it did maintain one sacred purpose, that being to disturb one's neighbor.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

“When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.” – H. L. MENCKEN


Anonymity

"You have to be noticed to be ignored." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

Answers

“There are simple answers. There are just no easy ones.” – RONALD REAGAN

 

Antarctica

"In Antarctica everything is yearning to be alive:, and everything alive is striving for a higher place. The rocks dream that they are clouds. the clouds believe they are animals. They animals act like they are people. And the people think constantly of God." -- SEAN THOMAS (the British travel writer)

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success." -- ERNEST SHACKLETON (this was the ad Sir Ernest put in the London papers when he was recruiting for his Antarctica expedition in 1914)

"There's no place to hide in Antarctica." -- ERLIN KAGGE (the famous Norwegian explorer)


Anthropology

“It is often said that an anthropologist is someone who respects the distinctive values of every culture but his own.” – ROGER KIMBALL

 

“Anthropology is the most pathetic college major that doesn’t end in the word ‘studies’.” – ERIC OWENS (of THE DAILY CALLER)

 

“Anthropologists have been very lucky in their public image. They have sat at the feet of Hindu saints, they have viewed strange gods and filthy rites, they have boldly gone where no man has gone before. The reek of sanctity and divine irrelevance hangs about them.” – NIGEL BARLEY (There are only 2 anthropologists in the whole world – that I’ve heard of, anyway – that I have any time for. In fact, like an enormous lot. One was the late American enfant terrible from the University of Colorado, Prof. John Greenway, and the other is this English bloke, Barley.)

"Anthropology is almost as big a racket as 'Sociology' is." -- JACK JOLIS

Anti-Americanism

“Passionate criticism of America has degenerated into hatred of the American people, which is the ultimate form of racism - hatred of humanity - for the American nation is the nearest we have to an emblematic microcosm of the human race.” - PAUL JOHNSON (referring here in March 2003 to his “friend”, the - surprise! -- Nobel-prize winning English playwright  Harold Pinter, who is driven literally incoherent by his  anti-Americanism apoplexy.)

 

“Anti-Americanism is more like Tourette’s syndrome than rational criticism.” - ANDREW ROBERTS (the great Brit historian)

“The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange and uncouth phrases and pronounciation, the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment. Americans suffer from a universal deficiency in good manners and graceful demeanour." -- FRANCES TROLLOPE     (1779-1863. in her "Domestic Manners In America" 1832)

"The Americans represent a real danger for France, different from the one posed by Germany or the one with which the Russians may - in time - threaten us. The Americans may have preserved a cult of Liberty but they do not feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitude which their capitalism has created. " - HUBERT BEUVE-MERY (the founder of the pompously, unreadably, anti-American LE MONDE, in May 1944! - just weeks before dozens of thousands of Yank GIs died to liberate his stinking carcasse…..)

 

“The seething raging Third World masses are united in one thing: the desire for a (an American) Green Card.” - V.S. NAIPAUL

 

“Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5 percent of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion - it was because nobody liked them.” - VENETIA THOMPSON (a snarky Brit-ette writing in Dec. ’08)

 

“If you take away anti-Americanism there is nothing left of French political thought.” – JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL (my late dad’s admirable old pal)

 

“It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism -- a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization -- became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent -- not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself -- became the highest virtue.” --  JONAH GOLDBERG


"To say that the mistakes define us more than the accomplishments is suicidally stupid. And if you subscribe to those planks I mentioned above, I’d like to suggest that telling people they’re bigots for taking pride in the civilization that brought them forth better than any other is like taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you’re standing on." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“America is not what’s wrong with the world.” –DONALD RUMSFELD

 

“All right. Yes. I would rather end my days in the Gulag than in — than in California.” – GRAHAM GREENE

 

“If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.” – GRAHAM GREENE (he said this to the London SUNDAY TIMES in September 1967)

 

“Apart from maybe those in Gaza, our (American) elite universities are probably the most anti-American in the world.” – MARK KRIKORIAN

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

“As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.” – ION MIHAI PACEPA

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.” – JEANE KIRKPATRICK

 "For most of the Left, their anti-Americanism -- their most precious heirloom from the Vietnam War -- had to be preserved at all costs." -- RON RADOSH        (the ex-radical communist agitator, in his excellent 2001 memoir "Commies")

"I think of America-haters as very shallow people. No depth. Not worldly. Intellectually weak. Privileged.The guy in the Che shirt in college carrying around a Zinn book. The rich girl stomping her foot that she only has one weekend house and all of her friends have two. When people bash America, this is what I think of. You lucky doofuses. Learn." -- KAROL MARKOWICZ (Despite the spelling of her first name, this is a lady -- and an excellent on at that: a columnist at the NY Post, the Spectator/US, FoxNews and the DC Examiner. She said this in July 2022) 

“They'll miss us when we're gone.” – JOHN BOLTON

 

“Progressivism's brand of national pride is: America is noble in theory, nightmarish in reality; cool around the edges, but rotten to the core.” – RYAN L. COLE      (a writer guy in Indiana)

 

“Anti-Americanism is the Left's all-defining formula: relativism-dissociation-legitimacy-power. Anti-Americanism is essentially a relativism – a false equivalency – that says America, despite her greatness, is no better an example to the world than many other countries. And in this self-effacement there is a perfect dissociation from the American past, and thus a new moral legitimacy – and so, finally, an entitlement to power.” – SHELBY STEELE

 

“Americans used to have a saying: ‘My country, right or wrong.’ Now it’s ‘My country, wrong'.” – BERNARD LEWIS

 

"Liberals hate America; they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9-11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now." -- ANN COULTER

 

"Oh and one more thing: you're not going to like what comes after America." -- LEONARD COHEN

“People in Manhattan tell me passionately how America is so bad. So I asked them, ‘what is so bad about America that you hate so much?’ ‘We have inequality.’ The enemy is poverty, not inequality.” – YEONMI PARK (the North Korean defector young lady)

"We would be in trouble without the United States." --SANNA MARIN (Finnish Prime Minister, in December 2022) 

“Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States." – ILICH RAMIREZ SANCHEZ (The infamous Venezuelan-born international terrorist AKA “Carlos the Jackal”)

 

“He had felt it so often, the anti-American pulse pumping through most of the spies, terrorists and extremists he'd met. The Americans didn't always help themselves, of course, but it was a common enough theme for him to wonder what their haters would do without them.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“I also believe in the United States. I think this is the greatest nation that ever existed, still is. It’s really the only really democratic country in the world. Find me one country, just one country in the entire world that would let a foreign people -- different culture, different language, and in many cases different color than the majority of the native stock -- take over politically an entire metropolitan area in less than one generation. I’m talking about the Cubans in Miami. I really love this country. I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it’s the simple principle of freedom. . . . Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged. Whatever we’re doing I think we’ve done it extremely, extremely, extremely well.... These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world.”– TOM WOLFE

 

"You know that you live in a great country when even the people who absolutely detest it refuse to leave." – CANDACE OWENS (the cute conservative but unfortunately anti-semitic black young lady)

 

“Condemning America for slavery is like condemning the first country which allowed women to vote, for oppressing women.” – NICOLAS CLAMORGAN (an American “defense industry analyst”, on the Twoot.)

 

“The Democrats are an assorted throng of rainbow candidates and hectoring scolds who unite in disliking the United States, its history, and the institutions that made it the freest, most secure, and most prosperous country in the world.” – ROGER KIMBALL

"What Senator Sanders stands for is the continuation of a very old and very dumb kind of politics: adolescent anti-Americanism." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Anti-Americanism has this in common with the hated US dollar: They're both global currencies.” – JACK JOLIS

"Anti-Americanism is the glue that unites the evil and decadent worldwide. And anti-American rallies will always attract big crowds -- but not nearly as big as the crowds of people who'd like a US Green Card." -- JACK JOLIS

" 'American Exceptionalism' -- No other country in history has ever had its citizens who hate it, and threaten/promise to leave it... refuse to leave." -- JACK JOLIS

"Anti-Americanism is a pathology, like anti-Semitism." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“If you’re voting for Republicans in New York, you’re basically anti-American." -- KATHY HOCHUL (the Governor of Noo Yawk, in Nov. ‘24 — and a worse, more insane bit of political thuggery you will search long and hard to find)

"The Left has always hated America, though they never had the numbers within their ranks to outwardly express their disdain. Now, with the progressive Left culturally ascendant and the ‘woke’ masses graduating colleges and taking their left-wing cancer into the workplaces of their respective careers, they have a motivated, passionate, and absolutely insane mob that’s begun a campaign against this nation’s history." -- MATT VESPA     (The editor of TOWN-HALL)                                       

“If you begin the day by acknowledging that your country, your society and people of your ancestry are particularly egregious, this is a sure route to societal self-doubt, impotence and failure.” – JEFF FYNN-PAUL    (A history prof at Leiden University, in Holland, in Sept. 2020)                              

“Some Americans will never appreciate America, until after they have helped destroy it, and have then begun to suffer the consequences.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"The hatred on social media is, sometimes, exhausting. Some people, I'm afraid, have been driven almost literally mad by the events of the past couple of years, deranged by disappointment, unhinged by fear. In person, luckily, almost everybody is pleasant. We are not Americans yet." -- ANDREW MARR (A Brit sort of Jake Tapper, in January 2021 -- and his last crack is why this is also under "anti-Americanism")

“America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave.” – CHARLIE KIRK (on 11 April 2021)

“No country can survive being ruled by people who hate it.” – TUCKER CARLSON

"I hate all gringos, their easygoing voices, insolent struts, confident leers and obscene smiles." -- CHE GUEVARA (quoted by the Russian emigré writer Vassily Aksyonov)

"Even now, after living in America for more than five years, I keep wondering  what provokes so many people in Latin America, russia and Europe to anti-American sentiment of such intensity that it can only be called hatred. There is something oddly hysterical about it all, as if America were not a country but a woman who has hurt a  man's pride by cheating on him." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

"Let me call a spade a spade: the anti-Americans of this world -- Gabriel Garcia Marques included -- are enmies of freedom and friens of a global concentration camp. The paradox  of it all is that to remain what it is America must defend even its own anti-Americans." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

“The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.” -- GEORGE SOROS (in 2006)

“Americans are the most loving, god-fearing, fair and least discriminatory people on the planet, and if you’re thinking of harming American citizens… something really bad is going to happen to you and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress.” -- ALEX KARP       (CEO of Palantir-- AI)


"White supremacy is weaved into our founding documents and principles." - LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD (anti-American Biden's anti-American American Ambassador to the UN)

"Who would stay and fight for a country that you have been told is rotten from the start, has no legitimate heroes and is riddled through, even in the present day, by 'white supremacy' and 'institutional racism'? Putin, the Chinese Communist party and others think we are awful and irredeemable, and they are delighted if large swathes of our populations and political and cultural figures agree with them." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in April 2022)

"Americans prefer strong and wrong over weak and right." -- BILL CLINTON     (a PROFOUNDLY anti-American observation, when you think of it for even half a second....)

Anti-Communism                                                                                                                 

"We don't have a policy of scorched earth. We have a policy of scorched communists." – GENERAL EFRAIN RIOS MONTT      (President of Guatemala, 1982-1983)                              

 

“An anti-Communist is a dog.  I don’t change my views on this.  I never shall.” - JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (One of this moral cretin’s more lucid pronouncements.)

"Anticommunism is the moral equivalent of rape." -- TOM HAYDEN    (Jane Fonda's one-time husband and prominent anti-Vietnam-nik, writing in 1965)

"Communism brought nothing but murder, political oppression, cultural starvation and economic misery to the countries forced to suffer under its rule. No people have ever freely decided to live under communism or ever will if given a choice. On all these points we were not only opposed, but were sneered at, ridiculed and defamed." -- NORMAN PODHORETZ (as quoted by Bernard Levin, in his 1995 collection"I Should Say So") 

“Antifa”

“It is interesting that, in our time, the self-proclaimed partisans of diversity and inclusion are those who practice the most ruthless politics of conformism and exclusion, in much the same way that the cretins in Portland who claim to be worried about “fascism” feel compelled to dress up in black uniforms and boots and roam the streets committing acts of violence against members of political minorities and, occasionally, members of racial minorities. Because we are in the thick of it, it is sometimes difficult to remember that hatred and pettiness will only carry these miscreants and grifters so far, because going farther requires something more than hatred and pettiness — and they don’t have it.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (on 9 June 2020)

 

"These mobs are not enlightened. These not mobs are not edgy, they’re not hip. They’re fraud. They’re dimwitted, phony drama addicts. Failed by an education system, and addled by a social media culture that taught them to be victims instead of citizens. A privileged self-absorbed, crime syndicate with participation trophy graduate degrees, trying to find meaning in empty lives by destroying things that other Americans have spent honest, productive lives building. It’s long past time to expose the shiftless idiocy of the anti-American, anti-science, anti-establishment, anti-Constitution mob, and remove their snouts from the federal trough." -- SEN MIKE LEE      (of Utah, on 2 July 2020)

 

"Antifa is an idea and an organization, and it’s devoted to destroying our country." -- SEN. TOM COTTON

 

“Regular rioting by the far-left group ‘Antifa’. In the name of pursuing nonexistent fascists these activists laid waste to their city, dragged passing motorists from their cars, hospitalized journalists whose reporting was disobliging and otherwise turned the city into a first-world slum.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

 

“For now we wait for one local PTA member to refuse to change the name of his Lincoln school, or a crusading prosecutor who issues 40 federal racketeering indictments the next time Antifa drives in to town to take over a house, torch a courthouse, or reclaim a street, or a judge who sentences a violent arsonist to a 20-year sentence pour encourager les autres, or an exasperated college dean who will say no to segregating dorms or no-go zones by race, or one honest journalist who finally presses Joe Biden to answer what have Hunter and his family done." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"Antifa have almost never encountered people who are capable of defending themselves. Antifa have the fantasy they have the mandate to beat, rob or kill anyone, even at their own home." -- ANDY NGO (the incredibly brave, poofter journalist, son of Vietnamese “boat people”, on 21 Feb.2022)


Antiquity

“The ancient world was one in which there were laws, but no concept of human rights or of the sanctity of life.” – PETER JONES (the in-house “clacissist” at THE SPECTATOR)


Anti-Semitism

“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.” - HASSAN NASRALLAH (The “Sheik” of Hezbollah, noted Middle Eastern civic association, in 2006)

 

“How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” – ADOLF HITLER (Asking his fellow party members of “The National Socialist German Workers Party”,  in 1920.  And yet, most non-Israeli Jews are socialists….)

 

“Since we are socialists, we must necessarily also be antisemites because we want to fight against the very opposite: materialism and mammonism… How can you not be an antisemite, being a socialist?” — ADOLF HITLER

 

“What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.” – SIMON WIESENTHAL

 

“The Left is anti-Semitic — I mean, not the whole Left, but the radical Left, just as the Communists are anti-Semitic.” – ED KOCH

"Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I'll tell you what you are guilty of." -- VASILY GROSSMAN (the author of "Life And Fate")

"Jews in tanks is not allowed." – MICHAEL GOVE

"Anti-Americanism is a pathology, like anti-Semitism." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“Scratch a person who is anti-Israel, and you won't have to dig very far until you reach the anti-Semite within.” – PAUL JOHNSON

 

“Europe is lost. For 50 years, the anti-semitism was held at bay by post-Holocaust guilt. Not anymore.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

 

“For leftists born into a Jewish family, anti-Semitism is not about people who hate Jews. It’s about people that the Jewish leftists hate.” – ARNOLD STEINBERG (In THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, Feb. '17)

 

"An anti-Zionist is just an anti-Semite with a thesaurus." -- SEAN DAVIS     (a co-founder of The Federalist)                                                                                         

 

“Any people that has been persecuted for 2,000 years must be doing something wrong.” – HENRY KISSINGER (Fairly disgusting, coming from a Jew)

"If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are behind it." -- IMAD HAMATO (the esteemed and hilariously-named Herr Professor Doktor Hamato is some kind of "Palestinian professor", and he unburdened himself of this insight in 2016)

“A anti-Semite is someone who hates Jews more than absolutely necessary.” – ISAIAH BERLIN (Also – fairly disgusting, coming from a Jew)

"If the Jews are God's chosen people -- that's all one needs to know about God." -- PATRICIA HIGHSMITH    (the celebrated American novelist and, incidentally, raving anti-Semite)     

"The descendants of those who crucified Christ have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands." -- HUGO CHAVEZ   (in 2006)

"Jews were hated because they were capitalists except when they were hated for being communists." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (well, they were -- and remain -- prominent in both areas)

“Jews must be taken by hedgehog-skin gauntlets (sic) sent to fight on front lines and should never be allowed on any administrative positions.” – V. I. LENIN (in 1919)

"I could be wrong, but Hitler had Jewish blood. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews." -- SERGEI LAVROV (Putin's Charles Addams'like Foreign Minister -- and frequent pal of Hillary Clinton and Jean-François Kerry -- about how Ukraine could be "Nazi" when its president was Jewish, in May of 2022)

"The new antisemitism is anti-Zionism, which is a lot like the old antisemitism except that these Jews are despised on political rather than ethnic grounds — progress!" -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Twenty years ago, I was shocked by how open antisemitism in progressive politics was treated as utterly normal. I suppose it is utterly normal."-- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON     (In August 2024)

"Anti-semitism is now marbled into the Democratic Party." -- VAN JONES        (the self-admitted "communist" on  CNN, 7 Aug.'24)


“Anti-War” Movement

“Let me make this perfectly clear, Those of us who inspired and then led the anti-war movement did not want just to stop the killing as so many veterans of those domestic battles now claim. We wanted the Communists to win.” – DAVID HOROWITZ

" 'Bring The Troops Home' may have been the slogan of the so-called anti-war movement, but it was never its only goal. The slogan was designed by its authors to bring about a 'liberated' Vietnam. Within three months of the cut off of military aid by the Democrat "Watergate Congress", the anti-communist regimes in Saigon and Phnom-Penh fell, and the genocide began." -- DAVID HOROWITZ (one of those very "authors", and he said this in 1999) 

"It was the antiwar movement that galvanized us and gave our lives meaning. We wanted unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam rather than negotiations. Our intentions were never so much to end the war as to use antiwar sentiment to create a new revolutionary socialist movement at home." -- RON RADOSH      (the ex-radical communist agitator, in his excellent 2001 memoir "Commies")

“Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.” – ALlAN MASSIE (Scottish journalist and novelist)

"You can't be against war in principle if you don't know it in principle, and you can't know it in principle. And if you can't know war in principle you can only pretend to, and if you can only pretend to know it, you can only pretend to be against it. Many people just like to show that they're thinking the right thoughts." -- MARK HELPRIN 

"I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement. The radicals of that era were successful in giving the communists power to bring forth the killing fields and slaughter 2.5 million people in Cambodia and South Vietnam." -- JON VOIGHT


“As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.” – ION MIHAI PACEPA

“I come to bring not peace but a peace demonstration.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in “A Month Of Sundays”, of 1974)

"Those who opposed the war forged a movement that eventually led to the withdrawal of American troops Vietnam." -- ROBERT TIMBERG   (the USNA-graduate, Marine platoon-leader author of the 1996 "The Nightingale's Song")

"The Ford administration begged the newly installed Watergate Congress for a $700 million supplemental appropriation to mobilize fresh South Vietnamese units but the legislators balked." -- ROBERT TIMBERG   (I'll say they "balked" -- they stone refused, loudly and spitefully.)

"Any real hope South Vietnam had for sustaining itself was about to end as the newly elected congressional class of 1974, dominated by antiwar Democrats, readied itself to severely scale back American aid. A few months later, as North Vietnamese forces poured across the DMZ, the United States had ceased to be a reliable ally." -- ROBERT TIMBERG   (the USNA-graduate, Marine platoon-leader author of the 1996 "The Nightingale's Song") 

"There's a wall ten miles high and fifty miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn't, and that wall is never going to come down." -- MILT COPULOS   (Wounded Vietnam veteran)

"These guys weren't in black pajamas. It was a conventional invasion of the South while our Congress cut the aid and cut and cut again." -- JOHN McCAIN   (on the end of the Vietnam War, 1974-75)

"Dr. Spock, Dave Dellinger, every wacko that has ever come down the pike and hated the country was on gook radio telling you how bad the United States was and how great Communism was. We (POWs) would talk about the fact that there was no punishment that would adequately deal with these kinds of scuzz that are eating your country, taking all the benefits, and then tearing it apart from the inside." -- BUD DAY   (USAF pilot, POW in Hanoi and cellmate with John McCain)

“They’re not anti-war, they’re on the other side.” -- GLENN REYNOLDS   (a.k.a. the “Instapundit”, referring to the American "anti-war" demonstrators in general. And he's right.)

"We don't want peace in Korea; we want the North Koreans to win." --ROBERT COHEN     (a far-left Education Prof at NYU and historian of his far-left colleagues, quoted by Ron Radosh in "Commies")

"America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win." -- (NVA COL.) BUI TIN      (in a 1995 interview with the WSJ)

Apathy

«Apathy is the grease that makes slippery slopes so treacherous.» – JONAH GOLDBERG

"He prowled around stirring up apathy." -- CHISTOPHER HOWSE (the Assistant Editor of the UK Daily Telegraph, commenting on Conservative Party pol Michael Gove)


Apology

“We are sorry that so many people were murdered by the Soviet regime.” – TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES (The President of Estonia in May 2007 on suggestions from Moscow that his country should apologize for relocating a “Soviet-era war memorial”.  And THIS, my friends, is an apology!... Bravo, President Ilves….)

 

“Public apologies are more than just capitulation. They concede that the enemy's interpretation is accurate.” – GAVIN McINNES (a Twooter from NYC, in May ’14)

 

“I fear we have become too apologetic in our apologetics. In trying to please everyone we end up destroying the truth.” – A.W . TOZER    (American Protestant preacher and missionary in the first half of the 20th century.)               

 

«It would appear that modern life is just the down time between apologies.» -- DENNIS MILLER

 

“You can always tell when a public figure has said something with a ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or so later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology.” -- ROD LIDDLE

 

"The modern apology is meaningless and counter-productive, usually something enforced by employers or party bosses, people in charge. A desperate attempt to save one's skin which always, always does the reverse. It is usually accompanied by a painful explanation like this: 'I deeply apologize for any offense I may have caused. In my tweet last night I had meant to say that Chinese people were 'lovely'. Inexplicably I typed the word 'ghastly' instead. Anybody who knows me will attest to my total commitment to anti-racism. I have been under great stress recently and am currently wrestling with my demons (will this do, ed?'" -- ROD LIDDLE


“To publicly apologize to your enemy is to not sufficiently grasp the meaning of the word 'enemy'." -- JACK JOLIS

 

"An apology is a confession. And what do prosecutors do with confessions? They use it to prosecute the person who gave it to them." -- VOX DAY (the name – I assume it's a pseudonym – of an author of a couple of books on “Social Justice Warriors” --”SJWs”)

 

“Apologies in the early 21st century have become almost entirely self-interested affairs. It is not asked whether the apology was honest, but whether it worked. That no one really takes them seriously is almost beside the point: This is a ritual -- a kind of game.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

Appearances

“It is often said that one shouldn’t judge by appearances, but it is rather difficult to see by what else one might judge, at least in the first instance.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." -- FORREST TUCKER (the American actor -- "F Troop")


 “Always remember that it is better to appear smart than to be smart.” – AMMON SHEA

"If a man is clean shaved and has a well-fitting collar and tie, he can get away with a multitude of suspicious circumstances." -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (Well, that's certainly been my experience... so far....)

"His nose looked like a cockroach's double-garage." -- A. A. GILL

"First impressions are the best, as we all find out when it is too late." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

"Too many people spend money they don't have on things they don't want to impress people they don't like." -- WILL ROGERS

“Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.” – JIM MORRISON (of the Doors, of course, and, these days, of Pere Lachaise cemetery....)

 

“I'm ashamed to say that the whiter someone's teeth are the less I trust him.” – MARK PALMER (a regular contributor to the SPECCIE, in April 2016, and I welcome his words which gives some of us hope)

 

“What's the point of a cover if not to judge a book by?” – ALLAN MALLINSON

 

“The thing that matters is not what you bear but how you bear it.” – SENECA

 

"He decided, for future reference, that a man could wear glasses or grow a moustache, but not both. The human face wasn't large enough to carry so much furniture." -- GUY BELLAMY

"The mistake most men make is to match their tie with their shirt. In fact, the tie should match the eyes." -- CARY GRANT

“The great art of public presentation is that people should never know what to make of you.” – EVELYN WAUGH

 

"I don’t like anybody unless they’re really good looking but usually after talking to them I don’t like them either." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

 

“When political priorities are decided by cuteness, uglier problems are easily ignored.” – WILLIAM MOORE (A columnist for the UK Evening Standard and the UK Spectator. I cannot determine whether or not he is the son of Charles Moore, but I suspect he might be.)

 

“She liked people looking at her, but she could not bear to be looked at.” – JOSEPH CONNOLLY

"The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich are always under a strain." -- DENIS DIDEROT     (Froggie philosopher, 1713-1784)

“In this sad life you always have to dress up to do the things that you enjoy least... and vice versa.” – PETER USTINOV

"There's a lot to be said for losing one's looks -- one's morality improves immeasurably." -- JULIE BURCHILL

"Looks are not like other things. The world is full of two kinds of things: looks and everything else." -- WALKER PERCY

"Not caring if you make a good impression often helps you make one." -- TRACY KIDDER

"We all only look human." -- SHIVA NAIPAUL     (yikes....)

"There's an unsettling feeling when you see someone in their off-duty jeans, like bumping into your teacher at the weekend." -- WILLIAM MOORE     (in the UK Speccie,16 April 2024)


"I don’t trust anybody who marries someone ugly." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"The hands always give you away." -- KYLE SMITH     (interesting... and in my experience, true....)


"I dunno.... Shaving your eyebrows off and painting them back on seems like a lot of effort just to look insance." -- HEATHER CHAMPION (a lady on the Twoot, and to be fair, she was quoting someone anonymous, here, but I couldn't resist including it.)

"Pretty men feel differently about their beauty from pretty women, are less proud of it and protective toward it and prepared to display it. Their attitude toward their looks is rather like the attitude of the old rich toward their money: they're pleased to have it but consider mentioning it vulgar, even in their thoughts." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

Appeasement

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL    (so well-known I almost didn't include it in this compendium, but I include it because it has wrongly been attributed to others.)        

 

 “The appeaser is always beloved because he promises peace, but the deterrent leader is hated by his own people.” -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"Compromise is wonderful, when the parties doing the compromising are basically decent. Compromising with objectively evil parties isn’t laudatory, it’s appeasement." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Appeasement never works; every day we look the other way, the price will rise.” – MIGUEL LOUREIRO (a guy on the Twoot, 5 April 2001)

 

“Appeasement works fine right until, one day, it suddenly doesn't anymore, and you're in a shooting war with an aggressor whom you might have deterred successfully by showing a bit more backbone, earlier.” – JOHN SCHINDLER

 

“Appeasement works just fine. But only for awhile.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

"You can never comply your way out of tyranny." -- ROBERT J. O'NEILL (the SEAL who got Bin Laden. On 30 Sept. 2021)

 

"Appeasement is escalation." -- MARK LEVIN       (in April 2024)

 “No man escapes when freedom fails.

The best men rot in filthy jails,

And those who cried ‘Appease, Appease’

Are hanged by those they tried to please.” – GEORGE HIRAM MANN (Mr. Mann was a prominent American lawyer in the early 20th century, as well as being something of a pote.)

"Appeasement is like too much alcohol. A little bit might not have an immediate impact, but the addiction risk is real. And in larger quantities, it may feel good in the short term, but you'll feel terminal in the morning. In foreign policy, nothing is more counterproductive to peace and security than appeasement. It's the flip side of deterrence." -- MIKE POMPEO


“Appropriate”

"The word 'inappropriate' is increasingly used inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from good manners and other social norms, such as wearing white after Labor Day and using the salad fork with the entree. But the adjective has become a splatter of verbal fudge, a weasel word falsely suggesting measured seriousness. Its misty imprecision does not disguise but advertises the user’s moral obtuseness." -- GEORGE WILL

 

Approval

“You have delighted us long enough” – JANE AUSTEN     (In “Pride and Prejudice”)                                                                                                                       


Arabs (and “Arabia”)

“Cowardly, lying, effeminate brutes, these Arabs and Sudanese! I wish they had one neck and someone would squeeze it! Oh! I am sick of these people.  They are a hopeless, hopeless, hopeless lot indeed.” - GEN. CHARLES “CHINESE” GORDON (yes, the very one - Charlton Heston’s “Hordoon-Pasha” of “Khartoum” fame…)

 

“There are some who think that Arabs are born for dictatorship, that they can never know the freedoms that people elsewhere enjoy. This is known as the pro-Arab view.” – BERNARD LEWIS

 

“Democracy is essentially a process of compromise between conflicting interests according to mutually agreed rules. This arises from an understanding that the alternative is a test of strength in which the strong will send the weak to the wall with no justice.  Democracy means Us and Them.  Yet nothing in the history ofr the culture of Arabs and Muslims allows them to put this into any forms of political practice.  From long ago they have inherited a cast-iron absolute system, in which the ruler does as he pleases, and the rest have no redress, indeed going to the wall.” - DAVID PRYCE-JONES (Author of, among other seminal works, “The Closed Circle”)

 

“Arabs have too much respect for the truth to ever actually use it.” – ALFRED (“FREDDIE”) OELBAUM (the legendary Bangui boss of Diamond Distributors Inc., during the 1960-70s, and to whom P. N. Gwynne dedicated his seminal Africa novel “Firmly By The Tail”)

 

“The discovery of oil gave the Arabs a priceless opportunity to create a fair, just and wealthy society in their part of the world. Instead they allowed their criticism of the Jews and of the Israeli state to occupy their entire intellectual and moral horizon to the exclusion of any creative activity. “ - PAUL JOHNSON

 

“Tell them (the Egyptians) that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.” -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in 1951.)

 

“The battleground in the Arab world today is not in Palestine or Lebanon but in the classrooms and newsrooms.” - MAMOUN FANDY

 

“When you find that the large majority of people oppose freedom and find joy in slavery - do not be too distressed, you are in an Arab country. When fear constantly lives in the eyes of the people - you can be certain you are in an Arab country.” - WAJEHA AL-HUWAIDER (the Saudi author of the poem “When”. I presume he’s the “exiled” Saudi author…)

 

“The Arab people are unable to accept facts with the speed and flexibility required by serious situations.” - RAPHAEL PATAI (a Hungarian anthropologist, in his “The Arab Mind” in 1973)

 

"The more I see of Arabs the less I think of them. By having studied them a good deal I have found out the trouble. They are the mixture of all the bad races on earth, and they get worse from west to east." - GEN GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

 

“Since the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 1790s, the Arabs never have won any wars in the field: Nor have they lost any at the peace conferences, either.” – ROGER KAPLAN (in the AMSPEC, Nov 2011)

 

“It was Henry Ford who created the oil wealth of Arabia.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

 

“The Arab world will never, ever progress until the fever breaks — until the culture of the lie, the culture of nutty paranoia, dies or weakens. More than poverty or anything else, it’s lunacy and lies that hold the Arab world back. Many Arabs will tell you this, when they think it’s safe to do so.” – JAY NORDLINGER

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

“It also doesn't help that to the English ear, Arabic, like German, is a language which makes people in authority 80 percent scarier. (I suspect that if you could force all parties to negotiate in Portuguese or Italian, the whole Middle East problem could be sorted out in a month.) – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“The foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia. However friendly and informal the treatment of yourself may be, remember always that your foundations are very sandy ones.” -- T. E. LAWRENCE

 

“So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel.” – T. E. LAWRENCE (this is rather famous, having been spoken by Peter O’Toole in The Movie, but it still goes in....)

"With a tradition of at least two thousand years of slaving behind them, none of the (African) east coast dealers had as yet dreamed of giving up the trade. Slaving was in the Arab blood; no Arab regarded the trade as any more evil or abnormal than, presumably, a horse-dealer regards as evil or abnormal the buying and selling of horses today." -- ALAN MOOREHEAD (The author of the “White” and “Blue” Niles, speaking of the Arabs of East Africa in the 1850s)

“Arabs bugger little boys and practice some stupid religion that they’re trying to get all Negroes to believe in.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (In a 1976 NATIONAL LAMPOON piece called “Foreigners Around The World”)

"No sound made by mankind is quite so painful as the voices of two Arab women at variance." -- EVELYN WAUGH     (in 1930)

“Never shake hands with natives, however well educated they think themselves. Arabs are quite different, many of them very like gentlemen… no worse than a great many Italians, really.” — EVELYN WAUGH (in 1935)

“Arabs can unite only in goading one another to ambush Christians and Jews.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (in 1977. He’d be astonished to see the post-Trump situation with Arabs and Jews....)

 

Arab-Israeli Conflict (see also: Middle East (The)

“We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon - no alternative.” - GOLDA MEIR

 

"Whose side should you be on, Israel or the Arabs? I would certainly say Israel because it's an advanced technological civilized country and meets a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because they are bringing industry and modern technology into their stagnation." – AYN RAND    (who was born “Alisa Zinoviyevna Rosenbaum”)

“Negotiate? About what?” – A.E. JOLIS (my eminently sensible dad)

“The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all. I do not see where there is a middle ground.” – DAVID MAMET

“It also doesn't help that to the English ear, Arabic, like German, is a language which makes people in authority 80 percent scarier. (I suspect that if you could force all parties to negotiate in Portuguese or Italian, the whole Middle East problem could be sorted out in a month.) – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Many people who have lived among the bedu (the Bedouins) end up wanting with all their hearts to be as unlike them as possible." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

"If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13, with 26 abstentions." -- ABBA EBAN (Israel's urbane and Robert Morley-like British-born Ambassador to the UN and then Foreign Minister during the 70s)

 

"Jewish Americans who advocate a two-state solution are far worse than those who policed their fellow Jews in Nazi concentration camps." -- DAVID FRIEDMAN (Trump's Ambassador to Israel)

 

“If the Arabs had no guns, there would be no war. If the Jews had no guns, there would be no Israel.” – MICHAEL GRAHAM

"If you're old enough to kill a Jew, you're old enough to be killed by a Jew." -- ALAN DERSHOWITZ (in Nov. 2023)

"Tehran has pursued policies largeely in line with Russia's interests, whether in Syria, the Caucasus, central Asia, or Afghanistan, but especially when it comes to Israel." -- JONATHAN SPYER (in October 2023, and this fellow is the British-Israeli editor of The Middle Eastern Quarterly Review)

"Muslims came from Arabia in the 7th century to invade, conquer, and colonize virtually the whole Middle East. Today, as a result, there are 55 Muslim nations and 21 Arab countries — not one of which the left seeks to decolonize. As for historic Palestine, 77% of the territory has been a Muslim Arab country devoid of Jews — (Trans)Jordan — since 1921. Israel is the one modest sliver of land ruled by its indigenous people, the Jews, who had been living there for centuries before the Muslim Arabs showed up. The left doesn't care about "decolonizing" Palestine or anywhere else in the Middle East. If it did, it would be marching in the streets and demonstrating on campuses to restore Kurdistan to the Kurds, Morocco & Algeria to the Berbers, and Egypt to the Copts. No — the only left-wing priority in the region is to strip Jewish sovereignty from the only bit of territory where Jews have ever been sovereign. Jew-hatred always finds a larger cause to latch onto. In medieval times, antisemites used Christianity as a pretext. In the 20th century, they dressed up their bigotry as racial hygiene. Today their hatred of Jews masquerades as decolonization. In the end it always comes to the same thing: Jews cannot live on the same terms as other people. There is only one Jewish country on earth, but for the likes of Malcolm Harris and his left-wing friends, that is one Jewish country too many." -- JEFF JACOBY    (conservative columnist -- often for the BOSTON GLOBE, of all places -- in Jan. 2024)

“The belief is more or less general among Arabs that Jews have never been their equal and do not deserve a state of their own. Accordingly, the elimination of Israel is in their minds solely an issue of power and timing.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

"Peace for us means the destruction of Israel." -- YASIR ARAFAT (and There, as we used to sayin You-know-where-nam, It Is.)

“Arab Spring, The”                                                                                                             

“The 'Arab Spring' was a media coinage  if ever there was one, the product of ignorance and wishful thinking. Islamism, if mentioned at all, was dismissed as irrelevant.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

“The Arab Spring may be the bleak dawn of the post-Western Middle East, and the Coptic Christians are fleeing in terror, and the al-Qaeda flag’s flying in Benghazi, and the new guys all seem to have Iran on speed dial, and the only viable alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood is the Even More Muslim Brotherhood.” – MARK STEYN


Architecture

“If midtown Manhattan ceases to be a milieu in which people can exist in reasonable contentment instead of as prisoners perpetually plotting to escape a concentration camp, it will be unprofitable to discuss architectural achievements.” - LEWIS MUMFORD

 

“I declare this thing open - whatever it is.” - PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH (referred to once, memorably on Swaziland state TV as “The Duck of Edin-berg”. Here opening what was, in fact, a new annex to Vancouver’s City Hall.)

 

“Not all acts of philistine barbarism are committed by Americans.” - FRANZ METZGER (this good burgher is the editor of something in Nuremberg called “G-Geschichte mit Pfiff”, which, I hope, is some sort of architectural publication. Anyway, thanks for the largesse, architectural or otherwise, Franzie old pal….)

 

"On the whole, modernist architects earn vast fortunes from destroying the settlements of others, and spend the result on some dream home on a mountain top, from which they descend from time to time like wolves in search of the next thing to  devour." --  ROGER SCRUTON

 

“No man is so rich that some architect cannot bankrupt him.” – SIMON JENKINS (the veteran Brit journalist and author)

 

“You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.” – CHARLES WINDSOR, THE PRINCE OF WALES (Ol' Prince Big Ears, later to become King Chuck III, of course, is nutso on some things and fatuous on most – and on Islam he's positively dangerous. But architecture is the one subject upon which he's sound.)

 

"If you ever meet an architect, hit him smack in the face." -- AUBERON WAUGH (Evelyn's late son, and an author and columnist in his own right. He said this some years ago, but I can't say I disagree with him, now more than ever. And any architect will do -- just look around you. For further elucidation, I refer you to Tom Wolfe's excellent 1981 "From Bauhaus To Our House")

 

“There's no 'artistic' profession more concerned with impressing other members of the guild -- and not the public -- than architecture.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"The height of all buildings should be reduced to the width of the streets on which they stand." -- EDWIN LUTYENS     (the famous English creator of monuments said this before his death in 1944)

"In architecture, as in art, the more you reduce the more exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the greater the pressure on, the import of, what remains." -- WILLIAM BOYD (No doubt true -- but also true about just about every other activity or creation....)

 

“One of the prime purposes of architecture is to heighten the drama of living.” -- EDMUND N. BACON    (an architect who inflicted his attentions on Philadelphia, and I would have thought that a purpose of architecture would be to lessen the drama of living, rather than heightening it.)                   

 

“He is a renowned designer of skyscrapers who resides in a beautiful antique mansion. So, like the rest of his profession, he's a modern (i.e. talentless) architect who lives in a home built by a real (i.e. Dead) one.” -- LLOYD EVANS

 

“People don't remember the money. They remember the architect.” -- HUGH PEARMAN (a famous English architect – and when he says “money”, he means the developer.)

 

"Don't worry about the architects. They'll always be prosperous because they'll never run out of bad taste." -- MARK HELPRIN

“The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.” — ANTONI GAUDI

“Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

 

“Of all relationships, except that between a firing squad and its target, the architect-client example is the one most predictably headed for calamity.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

"We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL     (in 1924, speaking to The Architectural Association)

“From the turn of the last century until the 1929 stock market crash, most of the apartment buildings (in New York) were designed in the beaux-arts style. They look even more beautiful when compared with the glass horrors of today. The beaux-arts and art-deco styles continued up to the (Second World) War, but then came the Bauhaus and the end of beauty and grace.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"The American baseball stadium is one of the greatest of all American building types, as much as the town square, the street, the park, and the plaza, the baseball park is a key part of the American public space." -- PAUL GOLDBERGER (the American architectural critic)

Argentina

"You can make a lot of money if you buy Argentines at what they're worth and sell them at what Argentines think they're worth." -- ROY CAMERON

Argument

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” - HARRY S. TRUMAN

 

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." – THOMAS PAINE

 

“It is impossible to argue somebody out of a position that nobody ever argued him into.” - JONATHAN SWIFT (I LOVE this one….)

 

“Is there anything more amusing than watching an unarmed man engage in intellectual combat?” - HERBERT SEBRANEK (in 2006, NFI except that he’s along-time reader of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“The liberals’ argument is that there is no argument.” - THOMAS SOWELL

 

"People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong." – THOMAS SOWELL

“I’m at the stage in life where I stay out of arguments. Even if you say 1+1=5, you’re right. Have fun." -- KEANU REEVES     (and I tend to agree with the laid-back Squire Reeves, here....)

“It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.” – PIERRE BEAUMARCHAIS

 

“If you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.” – RONALD REAGAN

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . .” – JOHN STUART MILL

                                                                                                                                                                                                                "I made a game effort to argue but two things were against me: the umpires and the rules." – LEO DUROCHER

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Newton’s Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement.” – HUGH LAURIE     (The English comic actor –  Bertie Wooster in “Fry and Laurie”, “Dr. House”)                

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Everybody's right and everybody's unhappy, as they say in Russia.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“The left doesn't want to win the argument, it wants to cancel the argument.” – MARK STEYN

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Mutual incomprehension rarely qualities as a clash.” – JOSEPH BOTTUM

"Anyone who cites his own education to support an argument usually turns out to be an idiot or a moron." -- DAN BONGINO

“I'd been enjoying our argument.  But tears meant the argument was over. One can't argue with blub.” – JON CANTER

 

“There is often a last word after the last word. It is usually spoken by the wife.” – JON CANTER

 

“I was actually, unsure of my facts.  But sometimes one can win an argument without them. It's a matter of confidence.” – JON CANTER

 

“Never argue over anything factual. Argue over taste or opinion – but not about something that can be looked up.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. (and he said this in the pre-Google era, too....)

 

“It's hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.” – BILL MURRAY (yeah, that Bill Murray)

 

“Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool. -- ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN (poet, novelist, and playwright?1799-1837)

 

"You lose the argument or you win the argument, you don't ban the argument." -- MARK STEYN

 

"When people want to ban simplistic moral judgments, it’s usually because simple morality is not on their side." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Trying to  change people's mind through refutation only entrenches their beliefs. Humour might just work.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"It  is not in my nature.......to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately" -- MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888, British Poet, “Cultural Critic” and Inspector of Schools)

 

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking  about." – MARSHALL McLUHAN

"I didn't stick around long enough to get the hang of either side of the argument.  One should always stay at least that long." -- TRACY KIDDER

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” – MARCUS AURELIUS

 

Aristocracy

"The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." – G.K. CHESTERTON (in 1918)

 

“My own view is that titles are much to be preferred to wealth as a mark of distinction, since they give glamour without power. They promote the idea of a purely immaterial reward, and represent eminence as something to live up to, not a power to be used.” -- ROGER SCRUTON

 
"I won't knight buggers." -- KING GEORGE V (of England, 1865-1936)

Arizona

“I don’t see how people in Arizona can have any secrets, because anywhere you go you leave this giant clue of dust in the air for hours.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1990)

Armenia

"Armenians are a race of rare competence and the most delicate sensibility. They seem to me the only genuine 'men of the world'." -- EVELYN  WAUGH       (in 1930, and he was referring to the Armenians he encountered in Africa... and I wouldn't disagree with him)

Arms (Arms Control)

“It's easy to see why Democrats vote for these treaties; they hate weapons. If the United States came up with a weapon that would destroy everyone else's weapons and shower the  planet with daisy petals and gummi bears, they'd oppose it.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

Arms Race

“When we build they build. When we stop building they build.” – HAROLD BROWN     (Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Defense, speaking of the Guess-Whoskis)  

 

Army, The

“The army consists of the First Infantry Division and eight million replacements.” – SEBASTIAN JUNGER

 

"Its humor is dry, rueful or soldier's black and doubtless a shade unsophisticated for metropolitan tastes, but the army is still a world apart, and its way of speaking (when intelligible at all, which it too frequently isn't) is that of a more straightforward world." -- ALLAN MALLINSON (A British author and ex-Army officer; and I disagree on army humor being unsophisticated -- I  found it to be far more rich, thought-through and devilishly clever than its civilian counterpart.)

 

"In the army, there is often no obvious task for an officer's hands." -- ALAN JUDD

"The one thing above all others that distinguished army from civilian life was that in the army you lived outside." -- MARK HELPRIN

“We were as fair a mix as you are likely to find in any conscript army. There were the hard-ass Hell’s Angels and Texans and truck drivers, the fuck-up law school dropouts and Mo-Town and Harlem brothers – walking that walk – John Waynes and Boone County Courthouse loafers and one-eyed Khe Sanh marines – who had read the JOIN posters and believed them – the Chicanos and clerks and dumb-ass lifers, the village idiots and backwoods farmers, the housecats and walking wounded, and young buck sergeants like me. The winners, the losers, the also-rans and every notch between. Altogether a hundred and fifty dudes.” – LARRY HEINEMANN

 

Arrogance

“In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. Conservatism is nothing but a collection of irritable mental gestures”- LIONEL TRILLING (the lefty American “intellectual” and Columbia University Grand Poobah, in 1950)

 

“Don't be so humble, you are not that great.” – GOLDA MEIR (to a visiting Diplomat)

 

"I really don’t think that it’s appropriate to attack comedians. We’re on the right side of things. We’re important people." -- JOY BEHAR  (A particularly egregious panelist on a daytime TV program by women, for women, called "The View" -- and I fear she hasn't quite grasped the essence  of this exotic thing, "comedy". Also, she has a hell of a cheek including herself among “comedians”.)  

 

Art

“These people treated art like religion. The difference was that you could get away with joking about religion.” – TOM WOLFE

 

“There is no such thing as art. There are only artists.” -- SIR ERNST GOMBRICH (Austrian-born Brit. Art historian.)

               

“The essential thing an artist does is to tell you something you did not know before.” - PAUL JOHNSON

 

“Although more students are studying art, fewer are learning to draw.” - PAUL JOHNSON (in 2003)

 

“The art world is an enclosed order every bit as narrow and purblind and obsessive and exclusive as budgie world or caravan world.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY (the British “design and culture critic” in THE SPECTATOR, October 2014)

 

“Kitsch is the corpse that's left when anger leaves art.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- VINCENT VAN GOGH

“Art should never be dull or patronizing. Nor should it ignite sniggers or groans or winces. It should be something that when you see it, you want more of it.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

 

“Art is, or ought to be, the most important concept to human beings after consciousness itself - or, in moral terms, conscience. It is essential to human happiness  because it embodies the virtue of order, and society cannot function without order. Art came not only before writing but before speech (as opposed to voice-noises). - PAUL JOHNSON (“The virtue of order”? Has he looked at, say, The Tate Modern, lately?)

 

“Why is it that art attracts so many wide, overweight women, and odoriferous, armpitty men?” - PAUL JOHNSON    (moved to utter this sentiment upon a visit to the Frick Gallery, in New York, in 1999)

 

“The profession of painting, as it is generally practiced, is frivolous, little useful to society, and unworthy of a man who has talents for more serious pursuits.” - JOHN TRUMBULL (the painter of George Washington, particularly the famous one at the Battle of Trenton)

 

“Why should we use ‘disturbing’ as a term of praise? I find what we need from a work of art is reassurance.” - J.B. PRIESTLEY

"No art can progress unless failure is sometimes risked." -- ANTHONY BURGESS


 “Any art requiring an explanatory plaque does not deserve one.” - JOE BENNETT (I believe this was said by the Brazilian-born comic artist, but I wouldn’t swear to it.)

 

“The best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” – TOBIAS MEYER (of Sotheby's, in 2006... and although I searched and double-read, I couldn't find any trace of irony, or of what the kids call “snark” in this statement.)

 

“All my life I have suffered for my art. Now it's your turn.” – NEIL INNES (The English writer of comic songs, with “The Rutles”, Monty Python, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, amongst others)

 

"It's not art for art's sake. It's crap for crap's sake." -- LLOYD EVANS     (the UK SPECTATOR's theater critic)

 

“I'm a dogged follower of the Kingsley Amis Principle of Aesthetic Preference: nice things are nicer than nasty ones. But there is a coda to it: good pictures of nasty things are better than bad pictures of nice things.” – HARRY MOUNT (the English author and  journalist.)

 

“The real abilities of artists are widely misunderstood. They are often credited with intelligence and, since the Romantic era, originality, but these are not their attributes. Most artists have no intelligence (and whether they have it or not is irrelevant) and none have originality. Their great merit is getting the job done. They work hard and they hit their marks. When some geezer, looking at art he dislikes, says, My three-year-old could do that, he is exactly wrong. Neither his three-year-old nor his 30-year-old could do that. Art is done by artists.They need the guidance of patrons and traditions, though, or their art, however competent, will be meretricious:  impulsive, lowest-common-denominator. Ride them with a whip and artists will give you Mary Magdalene or the Three Graces. Let them go and you'll get sluts in clubs.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER              

 

“I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.” – BRIAN SEWELL

"I worshiped Art in a way that a practicing artist could not possibly understand. To a practicing artist, it was something one did. To me, Art was a miracle, the only man-made miracle on earth." -- STEVE TESICH

"Painting was invented because we didn't have cameras; now we have cameras, so why paint?" -- JAMES WEBB   (the Marine, author & ex Senator)

“I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” – W.E.B. DUBOIS

 

“Art is what you can get away with.” -  ANDY WARHOL (Andrej Varhola, Jr.)

 

“Making money is art.” – ANDY WARHOL

"One fact that emerges clearly from the history of art: that whenever men have had the means to be vulgar, they have generally succumbed to the temptation and made use of them." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY (he already wrote this in 1934)

"That so much creative endeavor should succeed or fail at a glance made me terribly glad I wasn't a painter. What a precarious way to make a living." -- JEREMY CLARKE

"That nearly everyone today pays lip service to art is merely another evidence of the practical disdain for it." -- MICHAEL KNOX BERAN (an American lawyer and contributing editor to CITY JOURNAL, in 2014)

 

“Art is like baby shoes. when you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

«Art flourishes best where bankruptcy looms.» – ROBERT GORE-LANGTON (a book reviewer in THE SPECCIE in Sept/ '14)

 

« Artists are people who possess rare powers which they trade with the world in exchange for its tolerance of their quirky behavior. » – HOWARD BECKER (American sociologist)

 

 "The only difference between art and therapy is an audience." - MICHAEL DELP (my daughter Annie's writing teacher at Interlochen Academy for the Arts and Advanced Macramé, in Traverse City, Michigan, and a splendid quote, if not sentiment.)

 

"There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late twenties or thirties. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children." -- BRIAN SEWELL (the late English poofter art critic who fellow columnist and art critic Sarah Vine called a "misogynist queer")

 

«There's art in everything if you do it well.» – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

«First of all, art that's a comment on something, or meant to start a conversation, is usually your first clue that the artist can't draw.» – JAMES LILEKS

 

«Art is an instrument of war.» – PABLO PICASSO

 

"The aim of art is to prepare a person for death." -- ANDREI TARKOVSKY (celebrated Russian/Soviet film-market)

 

"Art is not for the artist!" -- EVGENIA PERETZ     (the screenwriter of the not-bad "Juliet, Naked" -- spoken by the actor CHRIS O’DOWD)

                                                                                                                                    

“What I first require of a work of art is that its agenda – is that the word I want? – not include me.” – DENIS JOHNSON (in his novella “The Name Of The World”)

 

“The real problem with painting is not so much the doing of it, as to know what to paint.” – PRINCE PHILIP (the Duke of Edinburgh)

 

“Artists cannot be trained. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.” – JAMES P. CARSE (in his book “Finite And Infinite Games”)

 

"Even bad art is made out of elemental cries for help." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

 

“Art is nothing but a livelihood.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

“Art is memory made public." -- DAVID MITCHELL      (in his 2020 novel "Utopia Avenue")

“It takes bad art to teach us how good art gets done.” – CLIVE JAMES

 

“Artists can get away with murder if only they are good enough.” – BENVENUTO CELLINI (the Florentine sculptor, 1500-1571)

 

"Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." – OSCAR WILDE

 

“All art is quite useless.” – OSCAR WILDE (this is so stupid and puerile, I only include it to show what an ass Wilde could often be.)

 

“Art is swindle.” – JOSEF ALBERS (The German “Bauhaus” artist, 1888-1976, and apparently he used to say this frequently – pronouncing it “Art is svindle.”)

Art, “Abstract”

“Abstract art, like astrology, is predicated on the bizarre human desire to find meaning in meaningless objects.” - LLOYD EVANS

 

Art, African

“African art is hideous, futile and valueless” -- P. G. WODEHOUSE

 

Art appreciation

"The greater the enervation of the observer, the greater the appreciation for a work of art." -- JEREMY CLARKE

 

Art, “Conceptual”

“Conceptual art is a stained mirror that reflects back the glib prejudices of the mutts who gawp at it.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“It's really important to me for art students to think I'm cool.” – DAMIEN HIRST (The English “conceptual” bullshittist, sorry, artiste, and contrary to what you might expect to come out of the mouth of a “conceptual” artiste, no, he was not being ironic or post-modern or anything here other than absolutely straight and sincere. And all I can say about the absurd Master Hirst is that the only bozos in the world bigger than him are those who have enriched him to the reported tune of some 300 million devalued buck$)

 

Art, “Modern”

“From the moment that art ceases to be the nourishment of the best brains, the artist can use all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. The refined people, the rich ones and the professional layabouts, only want what is sensational or scandalous in modern art. And since the days of Cubism I have fed these boys what they wanted and pacified the critics with all the idiotic ideas that went through my head. While I amused myself with all these pranks, I became famous and very rich. I am just a public clown, a fair-ground barker. It is painful for me to confess this, but in the end it pays to be honest.” - PABLO PICASSO     (In my opinion, more charlatan than “artist” – and a commie dupe to boot, but at least, in the end, an honest dude….)

 

“Much of what is regarded as art today occupies a place in human experience that is not merely indifferent but downright antithetical to beauty: it is ugly, yes, and also perverse, disgusting, banal, tendentious, blasphemous, silly and vapid. The real novelty of contemporary art - the part of it that counts as ‘avant-garde’, anyway - is that it manages to be so many of these things at the same time: ugly and vapid, pervers and banal. In a way, it is quite an achievement - though not, of course, an artistic achievement.” - ROGER KIMBALL

 

“On entering, I noticed a large space to the left of the walkway that ascends to the galleries in which there was a pile of what appeared to be rubbish. One never knows these days: a pile of rubbish could also be a priceless exhibit.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE (upon entering the “Musée du Quai Branly”, in Paris. And, yes, it turned out to be a pile of rubbish.)

 

“Everything changes but the avant-garde.” - PAUL VALERY

 

“The remnant of painting we call ‘modern art’: two renunciations - of technique and of meaning - created art in its current phase of inscrutable frivolity.” - LLOYD EVANS

"Basquiat is a sulky, self-destructive pea-brain, incapable of original thought or creative inspiration, (and) looking at his canvases is as much fun as inspecting a demolished ironworks." -- LLOYD EVANS  

“You've got to wonder. If the purpose of the artist is to shock, then why does he or his apologists complain when people are shocked?” – JAMES BOWMAN

 

“Modern art is the one theology whose tenets cannot be questioned.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“After Picasso painted a woman with two ears on one side of her head, anything went, including Carl André's idiotic bricks and Tracey Emin's dirty bed. I am a hereditary anti-Cubist; my late father, Jack Hillier, himself an accomplished artist, once wrote: 'Id like to chuck a brick at Braque'.” – BEVIS HILLIER (the English author and art historian and, yes, Bevis is a chap's name. Well, THIS chap's name, anyway....)

 

“Look at modern art – the thousand of products of Duchamp's famous urinal. Here are the monuments to a world from which beauty has been banished, all telling the same story that there is no meaning in the world, but only fun, and fun is a bore.” – ROGER SCRUTON  

 

“Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” – TOM STOPPARD

 

“Modern artists always want to explore connections, although the connection between a lack of a marketable talent and a reliance on arts grants is not high on the list of conversations they'd like to have.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“Modern art is a conspiracy between shysters and the rich to make poor people feel stupid.” -- KURT VONNEGUT

 

«The connoisseurs of modern art in the early 20th century claimed to find merit in conceptual hokum even though the naked eye could see nothing but worthless and insolent scrap. Vacuity is taken for complexity, irrationality for sublimity and talentlessness for mastery. It’s a secret game in which the artist, the critic and the professor conspire to dupe the public (who supply their incomes) into believing that garbage is greatness. What for? A love of intellectual mischief and a deep contempt for mainstream opinion, I’d say.» -- LLOYD EVANS

 

«Modern art is modern money laundering.» – JACK POSOBIEC (Of OANN on 6 Dec. 2019, on the occassion of a banana being taped to a wall, a work of «art» by Maurizio Catalan, being sold for $120,000 at ArtBasel in Miami Beach)

             

  

Art, “Performace”

“Most performance art is muddle exhibitionism constrained by nothing but the budget.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

Art, Public

“Has public art ever achieved any level of popular approval or intellectual respect? It's rarely deifying. It is that ludicrous, annoying excrescence, reluctantly paid for by a guilty property developer or worried into existence by ambitious arts administrators with unemployed 'sculptors' or aesthetically inclined welders on their books. Public are is crapola foisted on the incurious by the cynical and credulous.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

 

Art, “subsidized”

“Real art is whatever needs to be expressed. Bogus art is whatever needs funding to be expressed.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

"The key difference between subsidized and commercial art: Bad commercial art gets ignored and forgotten. Bad subsidized enjoys enjoys a life-support system support system, also subsidized, that can lure the innocent into its toxic embrace." -- LLOYD EVANS

 

“Our subsidized theatre has become an expensive irrelevance, a gilded junk shop full of high-cost, low-value trinkets, reserved for a privileged elite.” – LLOYD EVANS

"Subsidy supports the third-rate. Killing one will get rid of the other." -- LLOYD EVANS (on Feb 2022)

"Artists are the antennae of the race." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

Art, Surreal

"...the Dali Museum, which is kind of like if you made a building out of a melted bad dream." – TIMOTHY JOLIS

 

"Belgium was Northern Ireland run by the Swiss." -- MARK LAWSON

 

Artists

"The artist was not exempted from the toil of the fields in order to improve society, but to amuse it." -- DAVID MAMET (in January 2022)

"Every child is an Artist until he's told he's not" -- JOHN LENNON (Way too fey for my taste, and I doubt very much it's true, to boot -- but, what the hell... I'm feeling magnanimous....)

"Artists are false prophets. People believe in them more than they matter." -- DAVID BOWIE

“Arts, The”

"If separation of church & state is good for religion (which it is), why won’t separation of arts & state be good for the arts?" -- DENNIS PRAGER

 

"Almost the entire artistic world -- every field, from abstract sculpture to film to stand-up comedy, has started to mimic the hectoring voice and social goals of progressive politics." -- MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY     (in NR, May 2018)                                         

 

"Composers can think about God and the ineffable. We (writers) have to imagine the buttons on a coat." -- THOMAS MANN

"Should you be white, married with children and properly educated, forget about ever receiving public recognition in the arts." -- ROGER LEWIS

Asceticism

"I have no expensive buildings, vases, or clothes, (and) no costly slaves. If I have anything to use, I use it; if not, I do without. What one does not need, however cheap, costs too much." -- CATO (THE ELDER) (hah, "vases". Anyway, this admirable chap was the godfather of "stoicism", and, incidentally, a hero to my ascetic older brother Paul, the ex-Green Beret. He lived 234-149 BC -- Cato the Elder, that is, not my brother the ex-Green Beret....)


Asia

“If you had no company in Asia, it was because you were being neglected or unloved. In the furiously social East no one could want to be alone – ever. Alone a man was as lost and pointless as a single ant.” -- NIGEL BARLEY (An English anthropologist, and the author of the very funny novel “The Coast”)

 

“Western liberals, stricken with guilt about their real or imagined ‘racism’, are unwilling to see that Asian people also dislike each other because of appearance or skin colour.” – RICHARD WEST

"And what's the bottom line? There isn't any bottom line in Asia. There's always one more paragraph, two more choices. The problem is, none of the choices are for good." -- JAMES WEBB (Ex-senator, decorated USMC Vietnam War platoon-leader, and author of the great "Fields Of Fire")

“By ‘gook’ I mean precisely an uncivilized Asiatic Communist. I see no reason for anyone who doesn’t fit this definition to object to the way I use it.” -- ADMIRAL DANIEL V. GALLERY (1901-1977 – notable for having captured a German U-boat intact during WWII – the first time that an enemy ship was captured intact by the US Navy since 1815)

"In the east the messenger with bad news fares badly." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (The English historian -- who is actually "The 8th Earl Of Longford" -- was specifically referring to the Ottoman Empire, at the time, but this will do as a handy Asian epigram)

"I cannot think why the Mongoloid (Asian) peoples are described as 'yellow':  their colour ranges from white, through tan, to red, some of the girls, seemingly the prettiest and best dressed, are of a very pale cream, like new ivory." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")


    

          

Aspiration

“Aspiration is a close relative of humility.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

 

Assimilation

"What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate. When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood that had immigrant Jews, immigrant Italians (mainly from Sicily), and immigrant blacks—that is, they had come up from the South recently. It was incidentally one of the things that made me a lifelong skeptic about integration because far from understanding each other and getting to know each other, all we did was fight."-- NORMAN PODHORETZ

 

Assumption

“Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.” – HUGH OSMOND (This is so banal it’s on a par with “when you assume you make an ass out of you and me”, but Squire Osmond is a big pub tycoon in England, so on that ground I give him a pass. Just barely.)

"Civilians assume, detectives deduce." -- NELSON DEMILLE 

"Never assume the other guy will never do something you would never do." -- WILLIE MAYS 

 

Astrology

“Astrology has become yet another non-falsifiable means by which liberal Democrats reassure one another of the infallibility of their prior beliefs. The ‘party of science’, a.k.a. the party of panic about GMO foods, nuclear power and climate change, is increasingly the party of moonbats.” – KYLE SMITH (in Nov. 2019)

 

Astronomy

“I have never had the slightest interest in the heavens.  I am one of those solipsists who, strolling out on to a nocturnal terrace and gazing up at the blackness's billion punctuation points, suddenly has borne in upon him how insignificant they are. I have never recognized any of them from their phototgraphs. I have, of course, long know that there is a collection which looks like a saucepan, but on the nights when; for some reason, it hasn't seemed to be there, it has never bothered me in the slightest.” – ALAN COREN

 

“The undevout astronomer is mad.” – JOHANES KEPLER (German astronomer and mathematician, 1571-1630)

 

"Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night." -- MILES KINGTON

 

“The farther we look, the more ancient is what we see.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 "Astronomy is observing unexpected things and then scrabbling around for possible explanations." -- STEVEN POOLE      (an English author and a "specialist on the abuse of language".  And while what he says here is undoubtedly true, you could say that about pretty much any scientific discipline.)

“Astronomers hate manned space flight, since it’s a very expensive way of finding out very little.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Asylum”

“Asylum has been subverted into economic migration from disagreeable countries, meaning most countries.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in the SPECTATOR on 10 November 2018)

"Nearly all who want to enter the United States by invoking asylum do so under false pretenses, gaining entry without so much as a colorable claim of meeting the legal standard of asylum" -- MIKE POMPEO       (in 2023)

Atlanta

“People in Atlanta drive like it's a competition. Blinkers just reveal your plan!” – RAY BROWER (A resident of Atlanta, on the Twoot)

 

Atheism

“We are all atheists about most of the gods societies have ever believed in - some of us just go one god further.” - RICHARD DAWKINS (clever dick….)

 

“Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants and thoughts, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.” - JOHN LOCKE (in his 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration”, if you must know…)

 

“If ever belief in God disappears, and the image of God is eradicated from human minds, we will become nothing more than incredibly clever apes - and the ultimate fate of humanity will be too horrible to contemplate.” - KARL RAHNER (A Jesuit theologian)

 

“I can perfectly well understand why someone should be an agnostic. But to be an atheist - to deny flatly and without qualification the existence of God - is to me wholly unsympathetic. The depth of folly, indeed, and not without malice to us all. It makes little sense in reason. For if it is difficult, even strictly speaking impossible, to ‘prove’ the existence of God, in the sense in which we prove a theorem in geometry, it is much more difficult to prove that he does not exist.” - PAUL JOHNSON

 

“That they deny God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the bests, by his body; and, if he be not kin to God, by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.” - FRANCIS BACON

 

“You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct” - PETER HITCHENS

 

“I have dabbled in atheism, but always had doubts.” - DOUGLAS MURRAY (Heh. Murray is a Scottish writer and the Director for the Centre for Social Cohesion.)

 

“It’s not so much that I’m an atheist - it’s more that I hate Him, really.” - KINGSLEY AMIS

 

“Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.” - PETER DEVRIES

 

“If a man proclaims himself an atheist, he’s most unlikely to be one.” - DAVID WATKINS (a Welsh rugby player in the 80s, believe it or not….)

 

“Atheism and Judaism are not contradictory.” – MAXIM SHROGIN    (a prominent California Jew, in Sept. ’11)                                                                                                

 

“Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don't believe in him?” --  SIDNEY MORGENBESSER (an old philosophy prof at Columbia. He died in 2004)

 

"An angry atheist with a lawyer is one of the most boring persons in America" – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"Atheism is religion for people in a hurry." -- NICHOLAS FRANKOVICH (In NR in Dec '13)

 

"'Wonder more', the Sunday Assembly urges, and adherents of monotheistic religions echo the advice back to them. No, following wonder to its logical conclusions does not by itself make an atheist suddenly Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It only means he's not an atheist. Someone should tell him." -- NICHOLAS FRANKOVICH

 

"You can't talk about nothing without treating it as something." -- NICHOLAS FRANKOVICH

 

“There are 2 strains of atheism. one strain just doesn't believe in God. The other strain are assholes seeking attention.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning." – C.S. LEWIS

 

“Atheists are more aggressive evangelists than Jehovah's Witnesses.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"There's no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A god-less world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think." – JOHN GRAY (the author of "Seven Types Of Atheism")

 

“Of all the possible theologies, atheism is the least plausible.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

 

"There's no such thing as atheism -- the only question is what you worship." -- MICHAEL WALSH

 

“Unbelief clearly existed in practice, before it existed in theory.” – ALEC RYRIE (in his book “Unbelievers”)

"At the first sip from the glass of the natural sciences you become an atheist -- then at the bottom of the glass, God will be waiting for you." -- SARAH PERRY     (a character in her 2024 novel "Enlightenment")

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (same-same me...)

 "It's not that I don't believe in God -- I do. It's just that I don't believe that any god that wants and expects to be worshiped and prayed to... DESERVES to be worshiped and prayed to." -- JACK JOLIS

Athletes

“The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories.” – WILLIAM GOLDMAN  (The famous American screenwriter)

 

Attention

"Seismic events happen when you are helping yourself to another piece of cake." -- GRIFF RHYS JONES (the extremely funny Welsh comic)

 

“Attention Deficit Disorder (“ADD”)

“Winning the Nobel Peace Prize for not doing anything seems to have persuaded President Obama that not doing anything brings peace as well as prizes. Yet the results don't support his intstincts.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

«Like a teenager with attention deficit disorder, we’re becoming a people that care about so many things that we don’t do anything well. Our failure to focus is a cultural tic that is potentially calamitous.»  – MICHAEL GOODWIN (In the NY POST, 2014)

 

Attraction

"It is a well-known fact that women only start to get interested in you when other women are forming an orderly queue to get into your pants." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist) 

"The first thing I look for in a woman is good calves." -- MICHEY MANTLE     (as quoted by Tom Wolfe, and I must confess I can find no trace of this quote anywhere else, so... caveat emptor...)


Austerity

“The conflict between growth and austerity is artificial and framed to favor bigger government. Growth comes from economic freedom within a framework of sound money, property rights, and a rule of law that restrains government overreach. Businesses won’t invest or hire as much in an environment where governments dominate the economy. Thus, government austerity is absolutely necessary for economic growth in both the short and long run.” -- DAVID MALPASS

 

Australia

“And they were Australians; they didn’t know the meaning of embarrassment.” - LUCY VICKERY (an English lady who, in Jan 2001, wrote an essay called “Among The Blokes”.)

 

“Australians are so serious about and good at sport because of the climate, the diet, the outdoor life, and the total lack of any intellectual distraction.” - BARRY HUMPHRIES (The Australian better known as “Dame Edna”)

 

“Australia is an old bitch gone in the teeth. It is a botched civilization.” - EZRA POUND

 

“All Australians are an uneducated and unruly mob.” – DOUGLAS JARDINE (the upper-class, “toff”, English cricketer)

 

“Australia was a moment in history when some English people were able to throw a double-six and start again. If any long-term view of history tells us that Utopia means nowhere, it is nonetheless impossible not to envy Australia the opportunity to try to locate it. Australia still blazes with optimism, Australia stands for something we (Brits) have lost. No wonder we love them; no wonder we hate the bastards.” -- SIMON BARNES

 

“Australia represents an alternative biography for every English visitor. Australia is something new, at least compared to our own place. Australia lets us wake up from the nightmare of history. It's a time thing: England represents Time Past, Australia Time Future.” – SIMON BARNES

 

"I did my share of traveling...and was always glad to find myself on a bar-stool next to an Australian" -- MARK STEYN

 

“At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.” – PAUL THEROUX

 

"Australia struck me as a sensible America, with 5 percent of the US population in a nearly equal acreage -- and these include considerably fewer psychopaths and neurotics." -- MARK LAWSON (a lefty Brit travel writer, in 1993)

 

“Why Jesus wasn’t an Australian – Because they couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin there.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“As I listened to Australia-in-exile talk about itself, there emerged a portrait of a society given over to a reflexive philistinism that could border on barbarism.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in 1985)

 

"Australia is a piece of chewing gum stuck on the sole of China's shoes. Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off." -- HU XIJIN (the Red Chinese editor of the Communist Party organ “Global Times”, in April 2020)

“Australian troops are splendid fighters, but they tend to give trouble when they are not fighting.” – PETER EDWARDS (Australian historian, specifically commenting on Aussie troops in Malaya in 1950)

“Strangely for such an otherwise convivial country, but... nobody's Left is quite as rancid as Australia's Left.” — JACK JOLIS

“The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts but that so many are descended from prison officers.” – CLIVE JAMES

 

Australian Aborigines

“In our day the Aboriginal has been costumed in the haute couture of prevailing intellectual fashion. He has been hailed as an ecological saint, obdurate freedom fighter, mystical dandy. Clothed in the garments of modish fantasy, he has emerged from the mists of forgetfulness.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in “Why Australia?”)

 

“Nowadays in Australia, it pays to be ‘Aboriginal’.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in his essay “Flight Into Blackness”)

"If we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims we are effectively removing their agency. And then we're giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives. That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being." -- JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE (an Australian Member of Parliament, from the New Territories, of the "Country Liberal Party", and an Aborigine herself. Good show.)

Austria

“The Average modern Austrian only thinks about his schnitzel and his annual holiday and longs to be called Herr Professor.” – SIR ANTHONY RUMBOLD    (the British Ambassador there, in 1970)

 

“Authenticity”

“'Authenticity', apparently, meant only poverty and hate.” – JON CANTER (The famous English television comedy writer)

 

"Modeling for life-drawing classes at the Art Student League, armed already with her thicket of important hair, big-featured and voluptuous, a theatrical -looking high priestess in folkloric jewelry, the biblical high priestess from before the time of the synagogue..." -- PHILIP ROTH

 

Authoritarianism

“Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.” – LIONEL TRILLING

"Authoritarian purists don't want to convince. They want to shame you and ostracize you and break your will to believe in what you believe. It's not so much conversion as the attempt to brainwash us. The weak-willed go along." -- ROY CAMERON

Authority

“All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force. The very term, government, implies that it is carried on against the consent of the governed. Fathers do not derive their authority, as heads of families, from the consent of wife and children, nor do they govern their families by their consent. They never take the vote of the family as to the labors to be performed, the moneys to be expended, as  to anything else. Masters dare not take the vote of slaves as to their government. If they did, constant holidays, dissipation, and extravagance would be the result. Captains of ships are not appointed by the consent of the crew, and never take their vote, even in ‘doubling Cape Horn’. If they did, the crew would generally vote to get drunk, and the ship would never weather the cape. Not even in the most democratic countries are soldiers governed by their consent, nor is their vote taken on the eve of battle. They have some how lost (or never had) the ‘inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, and, whether Americans or Russians, are forced into battle without and often against their consent.” - GEORGE FITZHUGH (1806-1881, a Virginia lawyer and, not surprisingly, a supporter of slavery.)

 

“Authorization is a concept. Not always concrete.” – DENIS JOHNSON

"The briefer the authority the greater the vigour (sic) with which it is employed." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)

"Emancipating children from the authority of adults leaves them to the tyranny of bullies." -- ROBERT ADES    (Mr. Adès is a psychology teacher in London)

Autism

 "If autism were renamed 'geek syndrome', far more people would understand it. Geeks are socially awkward people with obsessive interests, a perfect description of autism. One reason autism is so common among computer programmers is that being a perfectionist is a bonus: one misplaced punctuation mark will ruin a line of code. 'Geek' was originally a term for people at funfairs who could tell you, for example, which day Christmas was in 1705. Some 10 per cent of autistic people have what are called savant abilities." -- EDMUND WEST     (Mr. West, who is autistic himself, is a teacher and journalist in England. And I predict that as we move into our increasingly hi-tech, AI future, autism will become prized... rather than reviled and marginalized.)


Automobiles

“Just as the whole environmental debate is fueled by something more than rational scientific concern, so automotive enmity is fueled by hatred and loathing. Not of the car itself - the haters all use it - but of choice, status, conspicuous consumption and the permanent possibility of anarchic self-assertion.  The energy that drives anti-car sentiment is at bottom the urge to control; the hand-wringers calling for repentance over the car and the environment would, in the 17century, have formed Puritan sects urging repentance because Judgment and the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand. Either way, the message is: we’re all guilty and you must do what we say.” - ALAN JUDD (At the time he wrote this, he was the “motoring” columnist for the UK SPECTATOR. He’s also one of the best spy novelists alive and, incidentally, the author of one of the best novels ever about Africa, in this case, South Africa, “Short of Glory”.)

 

“Held together by 16 bolts, what the then-head of Citroen called ‘a deckchair under an umbrella’ features a corrugated bonnet, single headlamp, wiper and indicator, cloth seats suspended from the roof, a stick fuel gauge (!), a speedo and an ammeter.” - ALAN JUDD (referring to the beloved 2-CV, one of only 3 species of  2-wheel-drive vehicles I’ve ever known that can negotiate the terrain in the African boondoos: the others being Peogeot 404 pickups, and any kind of Mercedes sedan.)

 

“To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they--unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted--are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.” – GEORGE WILL

 

“Most couples row in the front seats of their cars and copulate in the back, which may be why sports cars are all driven by divorcees and bachelors.” - A.A. GILL

 

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in an image by a whole population.” - ROLAND BARTHES (actually, before you smirk, you should know that he wrote this in 1957, when cars really were works of art; Not like the half-used bars of soap they look like these days….)

 

“For some reason automobiles attract good people, the kind of people with whom you’d gladly go on road trips.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“THE END OF THE AMERICAN CAR

The feminists grabbed our women,

The liberals banned our guns,

The health cops snuffed our cigarettes,

The bailout has our funds.

The laws of Breathalyzing

Put an end to our roadside bars,

Circle the Fords and Chevys, boys,

THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE OUR CARS”

-- P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“There was no premarital sex in America until the invention of the internal combustion engine.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Even more important than being drunk, however, is having the right car. You have to get a car that handles really well. This is extremely important, and there’s a lot of debate on this subject - about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and you can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it’s an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods - you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always take it back, but that’s not your problem, is it?” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“When are carmakers going to quit with the cup holders and start installing urinals?” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.”  -- WOODROW WILSON (In 1906 – when he was still President of Princeton. And wot a pratt, eh?)  

“Every life is destined to have a certain amount of difficulty in it. One can get that all out of the way at once by simply buying a French car.” – DANIEL PINKWATER     (apparently Mr. Pinkwater is an American author of children's books...)                                                                                                                    

“Conceived before seat belts, clamps, speed limits, global warming, crash protection, Asian competition and consumerist Puritanism, the gorgeous Jaguar E-Type (XK-E) was what Tom Wolfe described as 'freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour, everything'. And all of this two years before the Beatles' first LP.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY      (“Speed limits?? – hey, this was 1961 that Mr. Bayley, and English journalist writing in the SPECTATOR in May 2013, is referring to, here....)          

“Today, very few people see the car as a pleasurable instrument of liberation. Instead it is an oppressive and expensive encumbrance whose potential always threatens to criminalize the owner.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

“Cars represent the one thing progressives can't stand: people doing things without their permission.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Show me somebody who wants to run the world, and I'll show you somebody who can't drive stick.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Pope Francis is on summer vacation right now and apparently he's been spotted driving around in a Ford Focus. So I guess he takes that vow of celibacy very seriously.” – JIMMY FALLON

 

“If there is anything that looks bad, it is a car with missing hubcaps, I think. Better you lose your manhood than your hubcaps.” – J. F. POWERS (the excellent but neglected 20th century American novelist)                                                                                                                                                                            

 

“Audi is derived from the Latin verb audire, meaning 'to drive annoyingly close to the car in front'.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"The emotional high point of every flight I have taken was the moment I finally got back (to the airport) and finally climbed into my own car. There is probably a word for this in German -- the rapid dissipation of tension and anxiety you experience when you leave any public space and escape into your own vehicle. This is the automotive equivalent of getting home late to find your spouse has unexpectedly prepared a chicken Madras -- while naked." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Kids in the backseat may cause accidents. Accidents in the backseat may cause kids. No backseat, no kids. Drive a truck. Merica.” -- CLOYD RIVERS (Some happy idiot on the Twoot)

 

"We are the party of the muscle car, they are the party of light rail." -- LARRY O'CONNOR (the jolly metrosexual conservative talker of WMAL, Washington D.C. and Breitbart)

 

“The Camaro is just incomplete without the New Jersey license plate.” – KYLE SMITH

"You should never have more children than you have car windows." -- ERMA BOMBECK 

“The car is the greatest invention of mankind. The car is what makes all of the difference in life. Before the car, man was pretty much just an insect. He burrowed and crept along the ground. He moved very slowly. He was subject to the cold and the heat and the rain and the snow and the sleet. He was pitiful. Even once he had the horse, he was still outside. With the car, man was transformed from a worm to a god. With a car, man has superhuman strength.” – BEN STEIN

 

« Everybody in French Africa loves a Peugeot ; Peugeots can take the most punishing roads, often at fairly high speeds and – this will come as a surprise to devotees of the Land Rover – with the airconditioning working beautifully. Gone are the days when you saw British cars all over French Africa. An old Range Rover abandoned in the center of Lomé, stayed there for three years before it was finally taken away by the authorities. In all that time, nobody touched it ; nobody took the wheels, or anything out of the engine. Nobody wants British cars. They are not built for the roads, not even Land Rovers, never mind Range Rovers. They are uncomfortable as hell and the air-conditioning never works.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE (in his excellent 1991 «French Lessons in Africa»)

 

«Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.» – FLANNERY O'CONNOR

 

“Parking is for the poor.” – TOBY VIEIRA (An English novelist, in his “Marlow's Landing” – not nearly as good as, but nevertheless only the second novel I've ever encountered about the rough diamond business, after P. N. Gwynne’s excellent “Firmly   By The Tail”)

 

"The automobile has been a bastion of liberty, freeing up almost everybody from the tyranny of other people's schedules. It sits there waiting, as might a Labrador or a loyal slipper." -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE

 

“How fast does it go? Better yet, how quickly does it go fast? When I step down on the accelerator, I want the faces on the money in my wallet to ripple with g-forces. The time I spend getting up to the speed limit is time that could have been spent exceeding the speed limit.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

"I told him that I was not looking for anything with 'eco' in the name. I want a car that leaps forward like a caged circus animal with a grievance, not one that lumbers into the intersetion like a polar bear trying to step off an ice floe. And you know why he's trying to leave the floe? Because it's melting, thanks to my car. What do you have in that line? Never trust the people who pathologize joy. Life's short. turn up the radio, rev up the engine. Floor it." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"'You can have the car in white, shell, gray, taupe, mauve, and black,’ the salesman says. Those are the colors I would turn if I were dying." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"Long ago I told my daughter that if she ever came across a picture of people in a car with the top down, blasting down the highway for parts unknown, smoking cigarettes, radio loud, no belts -- well, those were the freest people who'd ever lived." -- JAMES LILEKS

"Those 4 guys in the late 60s who attacked a jewel merchant on New York's West 47th St., on the sidewalk, so they could steal his jewel-filled station wagon, which they abandoned two blocks later because none of them could drive a stick shift. Where would I be without such people?" -- DONALD WESTLAKE

“A gray Lincoln Continental faced me, with Chinese eyes and a grille that laughed in evil anticipation.” – DONALD WESTLAKE (The Great Westlake, in 1965)

 

“There’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.” – HUGH LAURIE (the comic English actor, in his novel “The Gun Seller)

 

"All women look better sitting in the driver's seat of a car." – JACK JOLIS (on this, Squire Laurie – see above – and I would appear to be on the same page.)

"There is something pleasantly pneumatic about women and cars." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (and what was I just saying, see above...)

"I know what it was about. It was about cars, women, girls, youth, the past, the old U.S.A., about remembering what it was like to be sitting in a car with a girl swiveled around to face you, her bare knee cocked up on the vinyl, with four wheels under you, free to go anywhere, to the Gulf Coast, to Wyoming." -- WALKER PERCY     (in 1987)

"Pinkos seem to love mass transit and hate cars." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (August, 2023)

"But I'm a sophisticated guy. I've owned a Cadillac. In fact, I've owned two Cadillacs." -- ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM      (the great, and wrongly-maligned Uzbek warlord and our ally in Afghanistan -- to J. R. Seaman, of the CIA's "Team Alpha" in 2001.  And it reminds me of my old pal Jean-Bedel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic, who in the early 1970s was given 2 Cadillacs as a gift by the US State Department -- which he promptly traded-in for one Mercedes 600.)

"The convertible is the best kind of car because it doesn't detach you from the world. But people rarely buy them, preferring instead the petit bourgeois instrument of war and isolation: the SUV. The reason for this is probably air pollution and in that is a wild -- and funny -- kind of justice." -- TANYA GOLD (in 2022)

Automobiles (Driverless)

"Is your date really going to be seduced by a an electric driverless vehicle? When the last petrol car is taxed off the road, I'll return to the horse." -- ALEXANDER PELLING-BRUCE (in the SPECCIE 16 May 2020)

 

“One thing the nerds of Silicon Valley often miss is that outside Palo Alto, people love driving things. Research into human happiness has shown that humans are often at their most content when driving. It is a kind of flow state, where we feel a sort of effortless mastery. This isn’t confined to cars. Diggerland is an inspired business where people pay to operate hydraulic equipment. So this is my great issue with driverless cars. It’s a bit like developing a giant sex robot to make love to your spouse – ultimately using technology to perform a job you’d rather be doing yourself.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (in November 2021)

 

Automobiles (Electric)

"Until we get a zero-carbon grid (and no one is saying when), electric cars merely shift the source of pollution to power stations and Chinese-owned lithium mines." -- STEPHEN BAYLEY

“EVs — they should really be called ‘coal-powered cars’.” — CHRIS PLANTE (on WMAL, 19 July ‘22)

"EVs -- these are hobby cars -- they're not suitable for everyday use." -- CHRIS KROK (the talk radio guy from WBAP, on 25 July 2022)

"Electric cars have benefits, but they also have massive unseen costs. You might feel virtuous skipping the gas station, but the juice has to come from somewhere. If you live somewhere where electricity comes from coal, your Tesla is a coal-powered car, once removed. You may think that oil production is an ugly crime against nature. Fine. But lithium isn’t fairy dust. Mining it is an ugly, nature-wrecking, carbon-intensive process. Conventional cars are mostly made from plentiful materials with large, economically efficient supply chains. Electric vehicles, not so much." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"If ever there was a real-world demonstration of the old proverb 'you can lead a horse to water...' it is electric cars." -- ROSS CLARK      (in the Spectator, May 2024)

Autonomy

“The following November I traveled from Montana back to the Chicago area, mainly for one reason: So that I could more safely attempt to murder a scientist, businessman, or the like. I would also like to kill a communist. I emphasize that my motivation is personal revenge on those who deprive or threaten to deprive my own autonomy. I don’t pretend to have any kind of philosophical or moralistic justification.” -- TED KACZYNSKI

 


Awareness (& “Raising” it)

“I wish people would stop trying to raise my awareness. I can't so much as surf the web or stroll a high street these days without being accosted by one of the aware, who is always hellbent on making me as aware as he is. These awareness-raisers seem to be aware of everything except how annoying they are.” – BRENDAN O'NEILL (in the UK SPECTATOR, March 2014)

 

“'Raising awareness' always ends in lunacy.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“I don’t think that I am miraculously well-informed, I think it is rather that the rest of my generation is so badly informed.” – FAY WELDON

 

Azerbaijan

“Between the three-way war civil war going on between Azeris, Armenians and the Russian Army, in addition to majfia battles over the drug trade, Baku was a combination of Miami and Beirut.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH (already in August, 1991)

 

Aztecs, The

“It is fashionable to play down the violence of the Aztecs, and even to cast doubt on the mass human sacrifices that took place in the capital, Tenochtitlan, the modern Mexico City. It is as if the devious and violent behaviour of the Spanish conqueror Hernàn Cortés must mean that the Aztecs were peace-loving folk who liked nothing better than sitting by the fire chewing corn on the cob and drinking spicy hot chocolate, while telling funny stories about kindly gods who for their part, drank human blood.” – DAVID ABULAFIA (Cambridge University history prof.)

"The Aztec gods and goddesses are, as far as we have known anything about them, an unlovely and unlovable lot. In their myths there is no grace or charm, no poetry. Only this perpetual grudge, grudge, grudging, one god grudging another, the gods grudging men their existence, and men grudging the animals. The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitution, a dirt-eater, a horror, without a touch of tenderness." -- D. H. LAWRENCE