B

 

Babies

“I held a baby once. It felt like a bag of hot snakes.” – ELSA LANCHESTER

"Two arms, two legs, one head, white -- just a baby. Of course one can't tell for some time if it's sane or not. I believe the first sign is that it can't take hold of things with its hands." -- EVELYN WAUGH

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

“A baby was as good a cover as any spy could wish to have.” – NEVIL SHUTE (in his 1945 novel “Most Secret)

 

“Baby-Boomers”

“The great fault of my generation is not ingratitude but incomprehension.” – DAVID MAMET

 

"Well, I’m not a Boomer. I’m a Gen-X’er --- a label I was never entirely thrilled with, hoping for something snazzier, like The Latest Generation --- on account of my inability to show up on time…. While most Boomers spent the ‘60s through the ‘80s doing whatever they felt like doing, then celebrating themselves for it, they’ve morphed into a new strain of liberalism. Nowadays, they take much more pleasure in telling others what they can’t do (smoking, eating trans fats, burning fossil fuels) rather than partaking in what they once loved to do themselves (having promiscuous sex and smoking lots of weed). To many of them, prudish sanctimony is the new hedonism. Any idiot can make their own fun. But real fun is ruining somebody else’s.  Boomers are still the same solipsistic, self-entitled, vainglorious, reap-all-the-benefits-while-making-few-of-the-sacrifices, over-spending, materialistic, nostalgizing, sentimentalizing, collagenized, botoxed, forever-young-because-they-refuse-to-act-their-age centers of the universe as they’ve always been. So go easier on your generation. " – MATT LABASH

 

“The tip-off is the blather, the jabber, the prattle, the natter, the gab, gas, yak, yab, baloney, blarney, bunkum, the jaw-slinging, tongue-wagging, gum-beating, chin music that is the Baby Boomer gift to the world. Even our T-shirts can't shut up.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“History is full of generations that had too many problems. We are the first generation to have too many answers.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

 

“‘They talked themselves into it’ is the motto of the Baby Boom. Or maybe ‘They talked themselves out of it.’ But we’re saving that for our epitaph.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

 "Our generation also, inevitably, became divorced from both nature and the muscularity of the physical, desperate ordeal of surviving. The result was a vicarious romance about the wild and an ignorance of and disdain for those who must fight the wild to produce our food, wood, steel, concrete, and fuel. The result, again, is a vicarious life. Silicon Valley grandees pontificate about open borders, ‘undocumented migrants’, and ‘sanctuary cities’, but beneath their noses are streets lined with tightly parked Winnebagoes in which thousands of poor Mexican nationals sleep, live, eat, and prep for another day servicing the masters of the universe. To suggest that the geography of the Bay Area is still vast and its open spaces ripe for affordable housing is the heresy of ‘how dare you even suggest getting near my Portola Valley estate’?

Our culture and financial elite are primarily a coastal tribe, cut off from both the poor and the material conditions that face the poor. They find penance and exemption for their privilege in loud but empty virtue-signaling and in easy contempt for the supposedly grasping middle class. But what we wanted from them was excellence, competence, and leadership; yet they had neither the education nor character for any of that." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"They had not been the first generation to sell out, but they were the first generation to sell out and then insist that they hadn't. That is what makes the Baby Boomers different: They're stupefyingly self-centered, unbelievably rude, obnoxious beyond belief, and they're everywhere. Until the rise of Baby boomers, America only had to deal with a few thousand geographically spaced people who acted like pigs. Now it has millions of them. That is the downside of prosperity." -- JOE QUEENAN

Bach, Johan Sebastian

“(Bach was) the greatest genius who ever lived.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR;

 

“That’s what so wonderful about Bach. He didn’t know how great he was. He was just trying to support his seventeen children with an honest day’s work.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“The older I get, the more Bach seems to me to be the voice of humanity.” – REBECCA FRONT (the English actress, on a BBC program called “Inheritance Tracks)

 

Bachelors (Bachelorhood)

“A bachelor is an eligible mass of obstinacy entirely surrounded by suspicion.” – ANNA GOLDBERG

 

"The proper bachelor budget: 25% rent, 25% pizza, 50% car payments, 25% beer, 50% entertainment, 40% credit card payment, 25% savings." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE (A candidate for being the successor to the late P.J. O'Rourke.)

 

“There’s nothing more pathetic than a single man’s bag of shopping, or that of one who’s become single. You can see his whole crummy bachelor life, in one fell swoop, it’s like still life almost. The gas ring. The microwave, stained with gravy. The burned saucepan. The tins and the packets in the waste bins. The wringing-wet tea cloth, from wiping up the same dinner plate over and over again rather than let the crockery pile up in the sink like it does in the cartoons.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE

 

“Every man is a bachelor east of Gibraltar” – ADMIRAL HORATIO NELSON

"He remembered, heartbreakingly, to his bachelor days -- when the fridge had cultures growing in it and the bathroom looked as if a horse had been the last to use it -- with his present married state which, alarminly, seems to entail a fridge full of yoghurt made from kiwi fruit and a bath with children in it." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy)


 

Balkans, The

“You can never helpfully interfere in the Balkans. It causes more trouble than it relieves.” – MARY KENNY (British/Irish Catholic columnist, in 1999)

 

“The Balkans produce far more history than they can consume.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“The Slav temperament is built to respond to melodrama.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (the great spy novelist)

 

Ballet

“I know that ballet can expose all connected with it to Hogarthian satire.” – FRANK JOHNSON     (an unlikely and reluctant fan, but a fan nevertheless. Ex-Deputy Editor of the UK SPECTATOR)

"If people knew what I endure on stage, only those who enjoy bullfights would be applauding." -- (DAME) MARGOT FONTEYN

"Ballet is woman." -- GEORGE BALANCHINE (well, if anyone knew about this, it was he....)

 

“I go to the ballet which, whatever the production, makes me marvel at the intricate footwork, the superb sense of balance and the amazingly precise timing needed to get from your seat to the bar and back again before the curtain comes up for the second half.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

Baltimore

“In Baltimore (pronounced 'Ballmer'), an eagle is an 'iggle', a tiger is a 'tagger', water is 'wooder', a power mower is a 'paramour', a store is a 'stewer', clothes are 'clays', orange juice is 'arnjoos', a bureau is a 'beero', and the Orals (Orioles) are the local baseball team. Whole glossaries have been composed to help outsiders interpret these and the many hundreds of other terms that in Baltimore pass for English.” – BILL BRYSON

 

"In Baltimore you've got a black mayor, a black police chief, and black city councilors, all Democrats -- so much diversity.."– CHRIS CUOMO (Fredo did NOT mean this ironically)

 

“Philadelphia is nothing but Baltimore with electricity.” – SHERROD SMALL    (a comedian)

                                                

"Whenever I’m trying to describe conditions in some poverty-stricken, violence-ridden Third World country like Haiti, my habit is to say it’s so bad, it’s worse than Baltimore, which is about as bad as it gets in America. Nothing good ever happens in Baltimore, a city crammed full of bad people." -- ROBERT STACY McCAIN

"Baltimore is a slum with a nice baseball stadium and a large aquarium." -- JOE QUEENAN

Bangladesh

“Bangladesh is one of the top 150 countries in the world.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

“Although God knows how you have an address in a place like Dhaka.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

Bankruptcy

"I lost interest in business as soon as I went out of business." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic)

"How do you get into a position from which you can lose five thousand million dollars? Is there an exam an aspirant loser has to take? Or do you just have to be the managing director's nephew? Or do you listen to the experts?" -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London, in 1993.)



Banks (-ing)

“…an infinity of successive felonious larcenies.” – THOMAS JEFFERSON (I agree, although it makes him sound a bit like W.C. Fields.  In fact, I agree because he sounds like W.C. Fields…)

 

“My Ferguson’s Law of the Banking Cycle: disaster happens when the last man who can remember what happened last time has retired.” – NIALL FERGUSON

 

“Bankers are no more responsible for the debt crisis than barmen are for (society’s) oft-lamented drink problem.” -- FRASER NELSON (the Deputy Editor of the UK SPECTATOR, in 2009)

 

“Calling bankers greedy for taking advantage of profit opportunities created by unsound government policies is like calling rich people greedy for allowing Medicare to reimburse their medical bills.” – RICHARD A. POSNER (the  author, judge, and famous American polymath...)

 

“Banking is not really about lending money at all, but about getting paid back.” – PETER SCHIFF (author of “The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets”)

"The problem with bankers is not that they are Jewish, but that they are bankers." -- KERRY BOLTON (an amusing quote by the somewhat wifty author of "Stalin: The Enduring Legacy")
 

"Does the banker deserve his bonus? Of course he doesn't, but the problem is that the wrong sort of people point it out." -- JONATHAN RUFFER (Squire Ruffer is a prominent British gazillionaire and philanthropist, and I must say, I echo his   sentiment exactly. One of the many things that I hold against those deranged commie hobbledehoys of the Occupy/Antifa rabble is that they practically force one to defend a lot of the otherwise indefensible. Reminds me of the saying by the Austrian Willi Schlamm that William Fabuckley used to like to throw around: "The problem with socialism is socialism; the problem with capitalism is capitalists.")

 

“The odd thing about this (a JP Morgan 2$ billion trading loss) is that it now considered somehow scandalous when a business loses money. It’s a scandal when banks make profits, and it’s a scandal when they make losses. The only thing financial firms do that Democrats do not object to is write checks to Barack Obama.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Bankers are like lawyers and congressmen: Nobody likes them in general, but everybody likes his own guy okay, and likes him a great deal at those moments when he proves useful.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Unlike banks, airlines make the pilot sit at the front.” – RORY SUTHERLAND     (the SPECTATOR's “Wiki Man” columnist)                                                     

“It's a safe piece of advice for a new chairman of a large international bank that at any given moment somebody, somewhere in your group, will be doing something utterly disastrous.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER    (the SPECTATOR's economics columnist)                                                                                      

"The Federal Reserve is neither 'federal' nor a 'reserve'. It is not owned by the federal government, and it does not hold real assets in reserve. In reality, it is a giant debt factory backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government, or taxpayers." -- ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS (author and financial adviser)

“It’s what banks do. They lend you money when you don’t want it, and ask for it back when you haven’t got it.” – GUY BELLAMY

“It turns out bankers are not colorless, punctilious caretakers of our money but big spenders, wild and crazy lenders in gold-trimmed cowboy boots, the wastrels of the Eighties, rolling up billions in bankruptcy without so much as an ‘I’m sorry’.” – JOHN UPDIKE      (in 1992)            

“The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year s so is J. P. Morgan. I'd make a bet that we last longer. (I can't say that in China. They are probably listening anyway.)" – JAMIE DIMON     (the Greek-American boss of Chase, at Boston College in November 2021)                       

“Although isn’t that what life is? Being in trouble with the bank.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS    (in his 1992 novel, “They Came From W19”)               

Barbarity (-ism; -ians)

“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on those faces there is no smile.” – HILAIRE BELLOC

 

"Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians." -- THOMAS SOWELL

                                                                                                                                                                                    

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” -- THOMAS SOWELL

Barbecues

"The only bad symptom of this beautiful time of year is the barbecue. The mischief lies in the definite article. A barbecue, simply meaning something cooked al fresco, can be lovely. But 'the barbecue' -- as when weather forecasters say, 'time to get out the barbecue' -- means a contraption smelling of lighter fuel for which a part of the garden has been specially despoiled. Near its smoke you must stand, wearing shorts, and eat meat which is half-black and half-raw, covered with sauces out of bottles. All your drinks must come from tins, and if you are a man you have to talk about sport. It is the grimmest form of social interaction yet devised."-- CHARLES MOORE (The ex-Editor of, in the UK, The Daily Telegraph and THE SPECTATOR, and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher.)

 

“Baroque”

“The ridiculous taken to excess.” – DENIS DIDEROT (in 1758. And you could say the same about pretty much any other fashion style.)

 

Barriers (Limitations)

“First come inspiration and the exaltation of breaking false barriers: at the end comes the mere flabbiness of having no barriers left to break and no talent except for breaking them.” – GILBERT MURRAY     (This is from the classicist Gilbert Murray, writing in 1940 about ancient sophistic Athens. I suspect he knew he was also describing his own century – and now ours)                          

 

Baseball

“No other game has inspired so much fiction of such high quality.” – ROBERT STEWART (a Brit journalist. And by the way, his quote includes P.N. Gwynne’s great thriller “The Bronx Bombing”))

"Baseball -- the deepest of sports." -- BILL KRISTOL

 

“Anyone who wants to know the soul of America had better understand baseball.” – JACQUES BARZUN

 

“Baseball is the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America." – BRUCE CATTON    (The Civil War maven…)                       

“For some reason, baseball players are stranger, funnier and more capable of telling stories than other athletes.” – LEE SMITH     (a senior editor of the then-THE WEEKLY STANDARD)             

“It's supposed to be fun, you know.” – BILL VEECK     (the long-time owner of the Chicago White Sox, whose autobiography was called “Veeck—as in Wreck”)                                                                                          

“I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.” – BILL VEECK

“Baseball is a sport in which there is no momentum. The pitcher changes constantly. Every day is square one.” – MICHAEL WALSH   (the conservative thriller-writer)            

“Baseball is like sex. The people who write the most about it have never participated.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“I think of baseball as a metaphor. A metaphor for paying $200 to take an outdoor nap interrupted by organ music.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"In the olden days, the umpire didn't have to take any courses in mind reading. The pitcher told you he was going to throw at you." – LEO DUROCHER

"Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand." -- LEO DUROCHER

 

"Baseball is the perfect game for the mystic mind. Baseball is so open to infinity. No clocks. No one pressing the buttons on stopwatches. The foul lines stretch to infinity. In theory, a game of baseball can go on indefinitely." -- GEORGE PLIMPTON (in his utterly delightful only novel, the 1987 "The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch”)                                                                                                                                                                             

“Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a communist.” - ALVIN DARK   (The ex-manager of the San Francisco Giants)

“Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.” – PHILIP ROTH

“They throw you a round ball and give you a round bat and tell you to hit it squarely." — TED WILLIAMS

“There ain't much to being a ballplayer, if you're a ballplayer.” — HONUS WAGNER (the great early 20th Century Pittsburgh Pirates 2nd baseman)

 

“Think? How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?” — YOGI BERRA

 

“Baseball ain't like football. You can't make up no trick plays.” — YOGI BERRA

 

“The majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees.” — JAMES THURBER

 

“A hot dog at the ball game beats roast beef at the Ritz. — HUMPHREY BOGART

"Only words you gotta know in this league are 'hamburger', 'I got it', 'pussy', and 'no comprendo'." -- PAUL HEMPHILL (in his excellent 1979 novel about southern minor-league baseball in 1956, "Long Gone")

“The way to make coaches think you're in shape in the spring is to get a tan.” — WHITEY FORD

 

“You don't realize how easy this game is until you get up in that broadcasting booth.” — MICKEY MANTLE

 

“The best thing about baseball is that you can do something about yesterday tomorrow.” – MANNY TRILLO (The Venezuelan 2nd baseman for the Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Athletics, Indians, Expos and Giants)

 

“Bob Gibson is the Luckiest Pitcher in Baseball. He is always pitching when the other team does not score any runs.” – TIM McCARVER

“We've got a problem here. Luis Tiant wants to use the bathroom, and it says no foreign objects in the toilets.” — GRAIG NETTLES (great Yankee 3rd baseman) 

“All pitchers are liars.” – BILLY MARTIN

 

"It (baseball) breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart." – BART GIAMATTI (the ex-baseball commish, the ex-President of Yale U., and, incidentally, the papa of the actor Paul  Giamatti)

 

“People say Americans are a simplistically optimistic people. Yet baseball is the national pastime.” – BILL KRISTOL

 

“Baseball lets you sing along to the music.” – BARTON JACKA (a guy on the Twoot)

“Baseball is America’s balm. It calms, it soothes, it moves along at a relaxing pace.” -- CARL GOTTLIEB (a retired TV journalist, and a good Twoot-pal) 

"All the fat guys watch me and say to their wives, 'See, there's a fat guy doing okay. Bring me another beer'." -- MICKEY LOLICH (a roly-poly Detroit Tigers pitcher)

 

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

 

"My theory about why, of all the major sports, baseball has the best literature -- is because baseball players are more quirky and amusing than players of other sports. And the reason for that is that most major league baseball players haven't been ruined by college." – JACK JOLIS

 

“Baseball is like life: placidity punctuated by stress.” – BEN SHAPIRO

 

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring." - ROGERS HORNSBY

 

“Just for the record, I called umpires some pretty horrible things (in afternoon games). But they tended to laugh it off because they were onto my just trying to get ejected in the game’s first at-bat because it was really hot out and I had partied too much the night before.” – LENNY DYKSTRA (once a NY Met)

 

“A key difference between baseball and democracy is that in baseball the winners don’t get to rewrite the rules. And it never occurs to the losers to blame the rules for their losses. Our deepest norms of order can still be seen in operation on the diamond when they’ve been adulterated everywhere else. Baseball is our Utopia – not in assuring us of the victories we dream of, but in guaranteeing ideal conditions even of defeat.” – JOE SOBRAN

 

"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)                                                                                        

"A bunch of droopy-assed, beer-bellied candidates for middle age waving cudgels at a ball, then trying to circle a diamond in their long johns, and occasionally throwing sand at a man with a cage over his face." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (a Russian writer who emigrated to Washington D.C.  where he became a big Redskins fan)

“They're taking the beauty out of the game. These stat-driven workouts are all eyewash. It’s a bunch of bullshit.. It’s like the Democrats are running baseball," -- RICH "GOOSE" GOSSAGE      (the former Yankee Hall of Fame relief pitcher, in Feb. 2020)                                            

“Baseball, with its team interdependence and intimidation factor and latent violence, its razzing and chatter and slides in the dirt, still presents a pattern of the life most of us live.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Pitching is 60% of the game." -- TOM WOLFE (the late Tom Wolfe knew everything. Including baseball -- he was a pitcher in college and actually was invited to try out for the then-NY Giants)

“The best thing about baseball is there’s no homework.” – DAN QUISENBERRY    (the ex-great relief pitcher for the Kansas City Royals)                                          

"Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing." -- WARREN SPAHN (The great Milwaukee Braves left-hander, who earlier won a battlefield commission at the Battle Of The Bulge.)

                                  

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pennsylvania.” – VIN SCULLY

 

Basketball

“Basketball is the most ludicrous of all sports. In fact, basketball is the only known sport which is improved as a spectacle when played by paraplegics.” – ROD LIDDLE (of the UK SPECTATOR)

 

"Basketball, whenever I've seen it, just looks like a meeting that's gone wrong." -- CHARLIE BROOKER (the English "humorist and raconteur" and the creator of the TV show "The Black Mirror")

 

"I’ve never followed a minute of basketball in my life. In fact, each time I’ve accidentally glimpsed a basketball game, the phrase ‘assholes and elbows’ has sprung to mind. Now it turns out that the NBA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Red China. Better and better.” – JACK JOLIS (7 October 2019)

 

BBC, The

“It's not all bad in North Korea. You can at least expel the BBC, as happened this week, when you conisder that it is 'speaking very ill of the system'. No such luck here.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“Extracts from the essential BBC phrasebook: politicians always 'embrace' the left, 'talk to' the centre, but 'lurch' to the right.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

"We are going to use this organisation (the BBC) to change the way the rest of the country thinks. We want them to see stuff they don't like. We don't really care if they contain." -- SIR HUGH CARLETON GREENE (The Director-General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969 -- and I must say, this sinister bozo sounds like an old Terry-Thomas character...)

“The BBC's politics only ever go in one direction.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“The cosy left-liberal consensus that the BBC thrusts down our throat at every opportunity is starting to look as oppressive and intolerant as any totalitarian tyranny, only with TV bakery competitions instead of bread queues.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"My plan to cut the BBC out of my life entirely is working well. I find that not watching or listening to anything the BBC does is making me calmer, happier and better informed." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“The provisional wing of the Deluded Liberal Army, the BBC, has a regular fact-check thing and is able to prove every week that Brexit is a disaster and there is no genocide against white farmers in South Africa”.. – ROD LIDDLE (Rod, who used to be a producer for the BBC’s “Today” program, on BBC Radio 4, said this in August 2018)

 

“The distance the BBC travels each day from the values of its core audience will soon be measurable only in astronomical units.” – ROD LIDDLE (in August 2020)

 

“I’ve seen wars more amusing than BBC comedy.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in Feb. 2020)

 

"The BBC is something half-way between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum." -- GEORGE ORWELL

 
"The BBC continues to reflect the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties." -- NORMAN TEBBIT (Tebbit was my absolute favorite of Maggie Thatcher’s cabinet ministers – he was even better than Nicholas Ridley)

"The BBC doesn't inform, educate and entertain. It propagandises, nannies and bores. It unites us only in our resistance." -- DOT WORDSWORTH (actually, her husband said this to her, but he is forever nameless)

Beatles, The

“They’re (The Beatles) simple north-country lads; they’re terribly uptight about all that.” – MICK JAGGER     (in 1969)                                               

 

“People want to know what the inner meaning of Mr. Kite was. There wasn’t any. I just did it. I shoved a lot of words together and I shoved some noise on. But nobody will believe it. People think The Beatles know what’s going on. We don’t.” – JOHN LENNON

"I disliked the Beatles, who survived the scorn of the Daily Mail to become a world myth, but, in the spate of trash that has succeeded them, I am inclined now to find there a sort of twilight merit -- shaped melodic lines and a modicum of literacy before analphabetic recitative took over." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (in 1990) 

“Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s.” – BRYAN MAGEE (a Brit “philosopher”, in a publication called “The Listener”, in 1967)

 

“I do believe the music of the Beatles taught the young people of the Soviet Union that there is another life.” – MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (Old splotch-head said this to Paul McCartney, and it’s nice to know that the Beatles helped to    win the “Cold” War)

 

“The Beatles are, apparently, part of some kind of malicious, bi-lateral entertainment trade agreement. The British have to sit through dozens of dreadful American television programs. In return, we get the Beatles.... Nothing we have exported in recent years quite justifies imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony." – LAWRENCE LAURENT       (the Washington Post's first TV critic, who died at the age of 95. He wrote this following the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964.)                                                            

 

"I vaguely remember my schooldays -- they were what were going on in the background while I was trying to listen to the Beatles." -- DOUGLAS ADAMS (the author of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" and, incidentally, a huge fan of Procol Harum)

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission for artists is to make people appreciate being alive. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'the Beatles did'." -- KURT VONNEGUT


Beauty/(Ugliness)

“Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“If I was two-faced, would I be using this one?” – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

"Beauty wasn't a positive thing. It was an absence of negatives." -- KYLE SMITH     (I'm not sure this is, in fact, the case -- but it certainly SOUNDS insightful.) 

"Nietzsche's Zarathustra was wrong: Not God, but beauty, is dead." -- MICHAEL KNOX BERAN (in 2014)

 

“The central axis of human truth around which art and the surrounding world turns is, and always will be, female beauty.” – DAVID GELERNTER

 

"Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it." -- SIGMUND FREUD (Crikey.)

"In the end, perhaps nothing is as beautiful as a song, perhaps because nothing can be as sad." -- MARK HELPRIN


 "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid " - HEDY LAMAR

 

“The problem with beauty is that it is like being born rich and getting poorer.” – JOAN COLLINS

 

“While beauty basks lazily and uselessly in its own perfection, ugliness spurs us into action.” –  IGOR TORONYI-LALIC (British journalist, author, biographer of “Benjamin Britten”)

 

"I must confess that I find virtually everybody in ancient photographs so unattractive that I marvel that the human race managed to reproduce itself at all." -- JACK JOLIS

 

"Put beauty first and what you get will be used forever." -- the late ROGER SCRUTON

 

“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.” – ROGER SCRUTON

"Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty." -- JUN'ICHIRO TANIZAKI    (an apparently big-deal Japanese writer)

 

“Beauty will save the world.” - FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY (the jury’s still out on this one....)

 

Beer

"Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy." – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (I include this as is because it’s so widely believed to be accurate — but in fact, Ben actually said, in a 1779 letter to his friend Andre Morellet, “Wine is a constant proof that god loves us, and loves to see us happy”.)

 

“He was a wise man who invented beer.” – PLATO

“Beer proves the existence of God.” – RUDYARD KIPLING (Don’t tell me my hero Rudyard was a plagiarizer!)

 

“Avoid all beers with a monk on the label. I learned this several years ago when I invested $5.75 in a Belgian indignity called. St. Sixtus. The label had a fat, laughing monk; evidently, the beer was being marketed toward that highly coveted market of celibate, devout, easily amused beer drinkers. It was the vilest thing I ever tasted. If you stuffed yeast in your rain gutters, left it there for six months and then used the mixture to strain roofing tar, you’d have St. Sixtus. A unique, chewy beer. That was the last time I spent a lot of money for beer.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

"I was a tiny child a decade and a half below legal drinking age when I discovered the most important thing about beer: It is mostly about fads and hype, not what the stuff actually tastes like." -- CHARLOTTE ALLEN (authoress of, among much else, "The Human Christ")

 

“Beer was the miracle multivitamin of Baby Boom male adolescence. The necessary requirements for our generational growth were provided in large doses. Beer gave us the confidence to deal with our salient trait of self-consciousness. Beer quelled our reserve about divulging the secrets of our signal emotion: the crush. Beer made us brave, cheerful, and sick all over the kitchen floor. The effects of beer were extraordinary. What else could have made a teenage boy mop the kitchen?” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Beer has been good to the Baby Boom. Our greatest achievement has been in the field of communications. We were just then developing our first form of new media – the instant, high-speed dissemination of our ideas and opinions for which the Baby Boom is famous. And mooning people never would have occurred to us if it hadn’t been for beer. One of our ideas and opinions is that inhibitions are unhealthy. Inhibitions are almost as unhealthy as guilt. Beer  is health food. We wished we could get the girls to partake more. We wished we could come up with a special beer for girls. It’s a problem. What is beer for Baby Boom girls?” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” – FRANK ZAPPA

"Beer isn't worth drinking unless you can taste the rust." -- JAMES WEBB (Ex-senator, decorated USMC Vietnam War platoon-leader, and author of the great "Fields Of Fire" -- and as an ΑΔΦ1967, Vietnam War 1969 and Laos War 1970 I can certainly taste that remark) 

“Beer: Helping ugly people have sex since 3000 B.C.” – W. C. FIELDS

 

“To some it's a six-pack. To me it's a Support Group.” – LEO DUROCHER (legendary baseball manager – the old Dodgers and Giants)

 

"Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza."-- DAVE BARRY

 

“Sometimes, after playing golf, I reflect on all the beer I drink, I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. I think, 'It is better to drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver'."-- BABE RUTH

 

“24 hours in a day. 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not.” – H. L. MENCKEN

 

“Now that he'd come to where the humidity was awful and the beer cheap and infinite, he really understood beer's meaning and its purpose.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

“Beer, like reading is one of those things that many of us become attached to in childhood.” – MATTHEW WALTHER (The associate editor of The Wahsington Free Beacon)

 

“There is — or was, when I was growing up there — one brand of legal beer in Iran, and it was, of course, non-alcoholic. I just realized it tasted exactly like Carlsberg.” – SOHRAB AHMARI (my pal, then the Op-Ed Editor of the great NY POST, in July 2020)

 

“‘33’ beer, a mark of previous French colonial administrations. Its peculiar quality is that it enables one to pass directly from sobriety to hangover without an intervening stage of drunkenness.” – NIGEL BARLEY    (Ahh “33” – “Ba-muy-ba” in Viet, or when ordering 2, “Haya ba-muy-ba! – cold! – and di-di!”)   

 

Behavior

“Either belong or go unnoticed., for what middle ground there is tends to be populated by the perennially eccentric and the terminally bullied.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY      (despite great effort on my part, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck this means….but it is included simply because it sounds cool….)

 

“Put 6 people in a lifeboat and they’ll get along splendidly, but put those same 6 people on a luxury yacht and they’ll fight over who has to serve the drinks.” – CHARLES P. PIERCE (a writer on the NBA in, of all things, GQ, in Aug. ’95)

 

“After years of research, a group of scientists at the Cordelia Wellbeloved School of Medicine, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have established that people can actually be allergic to unkind thoughts. The disorder can manifest itself in sneezing, watery eyes, itching or in general lassitude. The only treatment is to play the sufferer a tape of the courtship squeaks of the male marmoset, a notoriously affectionate creature.” – OLIVER PRITCHETT

 

“You can predict the actions of ten thousand people , but not one.” – STAN LEE (the legendary comic-book guy)

 

“A thief believes everybody steals.” – EDGAR WATSON HOWE (American novelist and magazine editor, late 19th century)

 

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

 

"People don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say." -- DAVID OGILVY (The dapper British-born boss of the monster Ogilvy-Mather ad agency -- the real real-life "Mad Men" if ever there were any -- whose sprawling agency occupied almost all of the remaining building of 589 5th Ave. when DDI, my family’s mining company, had the top, 15th floor therein -- affording us DDI-niks many scenic elevator rides, over the years, as fetching prospective advertising modules would arrive and depart, clutching their large photo “portfolios”. Oh, and  Squire Ogilvy couldn't be more right about the "they don't say what they think" bit -- in these p.c. days, doing so will get you shunned at best, and jailed at worst.)

"People only ask about what they can handle." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE


 “We don't have actual preferences. We only find out what we want by contrasting them (sic) with other things.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“You can try to change people's minds, but this is difficult. You can bribe people to change their behaviour, but it's expensive. Far simpler is to make the new behaviour easy and enjoyable in and of itself.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"Lifts (elevators) are very intimate places in their way. People behave in them in a private, idiosyncratic manner not all that very far removed from pulling faces in the bathroom mirror." – KEITH WATERHOUSE (the late British journalist, novelist and TV scriptwriter)

 

“To say there is a time and a place for everything is trite, but the truth of the sentiment is not to be denied for all that; one could play the accordion while having a bath but probably nobody has ever tried to do that.” – FLANN O’BRIEN

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

"I have noticed that writing things down in a public place tends to make those around you nervous." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (True. As writers discover to their cost.)

 

“I started acting like a cunt in 1975 and I just forgot to stop.” – ELTON JOHN (I don’t know if he really said this — although I strongly suspect he did — but the guy playing him says it in the movie “Rocketman”)

 

“Whether the media today are books or blogs, audio or video, human nature is the same. We are what we think. To change how people act, we must change what they believe.” – MARC RIEBLING (in 2007. Author of “Wedge”.)

 

“The thing that matters is not what you bear but how you bear it.” – SENECA

"The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested." -- B. F. SKINNER     (the old "behaviorist" charlatan, quoted here by Walker Percy in his "The Thanatos Syndrome")

"It's one thing to permit departure from norms, quite another to abandon norms, to make only abnormality normal, or to claim there's no such thing as a norm, even the one that brought us all into the world." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"There is no point in being well-behaved when the guillotine is waiting for you." -- EDDA MUSSOLINI (Benito's cherished daughter, who only died in 1995 -- on her high-living ways.)

"It's amazing how everything you do, even late in life, you did in school." -- WALKER PERCY

"For every electrician who could mend a fuse there were ten people who wanted to play Lear. Just as there are dozens of people who can write books and remarkably few who can do something useful and difficult like setting up type or correcting proofs. Somewhere or other along the evolutionary line process, something went wrong with humanity." -- PHILIP THODY (the British professor of things French, in 1979) 

"If a man behaves outrageously enough, disgrace is impossible." -- POPE BROCK (this amusingly-named fellow is an American author who lives in Arlington, Mass.)

 

“Behaviorism”

“Why are men so much more likely to be interested in trains than women? I believe this to be a question of profound importance. It has implications for the debate about whether behavioural gender differences are inborn or learned. In the argument about nature versus nurture, therefore, a tendency to be interested in railways stikes me as a small but rather perfect argument for 'nature'.” -- MATTHEW PARRIS

 

Belgium

“With its cant, corruption and crude anti-Americanism, Belgium’s ruling establishment is one of the more disgusting spectacles to be found on the European Continent.” – ANDREW STUTTAFORD (transplanted Brit-American journalist, contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW)

 

“This is a state in fancy dress, a country that’s not a nation.” – EDNA POTTERSMAN (just an ordinary Belgian citizen…. By the way, I once heard from another Belgian, “Thee only real Belgian is the King”.  Which was extra-rich, given that the Royal Family in Belgium is German.)

 

“’Belgian Roulette’ – there are bullets in the whole cylinder.” – CHARLES PASQUA (The tough, right-wing one time-French Minister of the Interior)

 

"In short, the more liberal your views, the more Belgian your brain." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“(Belgium”)has long ceased to be a country in any real sense of the word. It has a football (soccer) team, some of the best beer in Europe, the shared memory of  the wonderful Jacques Brel, a spectacularly crass king, a mountain of debt, and that’s about it. Belgian patriotism is now a contradiction in terms. An independent Flanders, on the other hand, would be quite a good financial proposition – and it would be a nation too, not a bloodless bureaucratic fiction.” – ANDREW STUTTAFORD

 

“There are no stereotypes for the Belgians as there are for the French, the Dutch and the Germans. Perhaps this is because all Belgians are only half-Belgian.” -- WYNN WHELDON (reviewing Patrick McGuinness' book “Other Peoples' Countries” in the UK SPECTATOR)

 

“Annexed, occupied, conquered and reconquered, prudent Belgians have long since learned to keep their heads down. It's no surprise national sovereignty isn't such a burning issue over here.” -- WILLIAM COOK (one of many Brits living in Belgo, here writing in the SPECTATOR in July 2014)

 

“Not only is Belgium not a nation, it is a country founded upon the rejection of nationality – indeed the first multi-ethnic multicultural polity. And the end result is the most corrupt, highly taxed, economically inefficient and constitutionally undemocratic country in Europe.” -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN (The Englishman who briefly succeeded Bill Fabuckley as editor of NATIONAL REVIEW)

 

“Belgium as a country has a lack of intelligence culture, and there is a lack of interest in or even mistrust against the intelligence service among politicians and the public.” – ALAIN WINANTS (head of the Belgian domestic security service from 2006 – 2014)

 

"Brussels is ugly and unlovable. You feel its spiritual emptiness. And the wrong neighborhoods are as menacing as they come." -- SOHRAB AHMARI

 

"I much admire the Flemish approach to gastronomy, which rests on the much neglected insight that, provided you offer good chips (french fries) and beer, nobody gives a shit about anything else." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Belgium, a little country created to deal with the aftershocks of Napoleon’s wars.” – ROGER KAPLAN

"Belgium was afflicted by packs of government bureaucrats, droopy gray skies, and practical footwear. It made Albany look like Rio de Janeiro." -- KYLE SMITH     (Albany??? Anyway, this is from his 2006 novel "A Christmas Caroline")
 

"Belgium was Northern Ireland run by the Swiss." -- MARK LAWSON

"One of the things that impresses me about Belgium-- and we are of course dealing here with a very short list -- is how reliable the train timetables are. You can be confident not only that the 14:02 to Ghent will be on time, but that it will always arrive at and depart from platform two, and no other. The platform numbers are printed on the timetables, that's how confident they are." -- BILL BRYSON

 

“When you stop to think about it, Belgium has been the cause of almost as much trouble in the world as Germany.” – MICHAEL WALSH (on 26 Jan. 2020, referring specifically to the EU, and the Belgian leaders in it, trying to sabotage Britain’s Brexit)

 

“If someone were to ask me whose quarters I would prefer to take over – those of French convicts or Belgian soldiers, I would find it hard to say. French convicts draw pictures on the walls of their cells which bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty, but they are fairly tidy in their habits – whereas Belgian soldiers, as I have mentioned before, make lots of work for their successors; Without wishing to be indelicate, I may say that, until you have helped to clean up a Belgian soldiers’ latrine, you ain’t seen nothin’.

It was my stay at Liége, and subsequently at the Citadel at Huy, that gave me that wholesome loathing for Belgians which is the hall-mark of the discriminating man. If I never see anything Belgian again in this world, it will be alright with me.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

"It was one of the weirdest things I've ever read (and I've been in regular correspondence with the Belgian tax authorities since 2007)." -- EMMA BEDDINGTON      (an English lawyer, writer and journalist -- here reviewing a book in 2024)


Belief

"But certainty is not belief. Belief encompasses doubt, and it is doubt which gives belief depth and makes it valuable." -- ANTHONY THOMPSON     (A letter-writer to THE SPECTATOR from Hereford, UK, on 16 April 2024)


Benevolence

“Benevolence is moral heroin. It intoxicates the conscience, and dulls the pain that even a morally obtuse person may feel when he plays the tyrant.” – DAVID STOVE (An Australian philosopher and the author of “What's Wrong With Benevolence?”)

 

“Benghazigate”

“This Benghazi disaster is the worst cover-up I have ever seen, in that lives were lost and we apologized to the wrongdoers.” – BEN STEIN

 

”The core of the Benghazi scandal is the betrayal of the courageous by the cowardly; those who risked everything were forsaken by those who risked nothing more than a negative news cycle.” --  DAVID FRENCH

 

“The Benghazi Embassy was a disaster waiting to happen, and Washington seemed happy for it to stay that way.” – MORGAN JONES (the pseudonym of Dylan Davies, in his “The Embassy House”, in which he, a Welsh security contractor, tells the true story of that fateful night. He has since been dismissed as a liar by the left-wing media, but the main bit of “evidence” against him, a supposedly contradictor interview given to the FBI, has never been brought to light.)

 

“The dark and bitter truth was starting to sink in now: this was a well-orchestrated, carefully planned attack, one they'd very likely rehearsed and trained for exhaustively.” – MORGAN JONES

 

“Even if you do not think there is one chance in hell you can rescue those Americans, you try! You go after it!” – LTC RALPH PETERS

 

Bergdahl, Bowe

“Bowe Bergdahl wasn’t ‘left behind’ – he was left right where he wanted to be.” – LAURA INGRAHAM

 

"Private Bergdahl  himself is the perfect soldier for those whose concept of our military was formed by Oliver Stone movies." -- RALPH PETERS RALPH PETERS      (A retired US Army LTC who now frequently writes columns for the NY POST, Peters was a "mustang", i.e., a non-commissioned officer who was commissioned from the ranks. This is an increasingly rare phenomenon in the Army -- the most famous "mustang" ever being my man Audie Murphy, back in Archie Bunker's Dubbyadubbyatwothebigone.  And Peters correctly refers to Bergdahl as "private" rather than "sergeant" because Bergdahl's post-defection bureaucratic "promotions" to sergeant have all the validity of Mohammed Atta's pilot's license which eventually got delivered to God-knows-who some 6 months after 9/11.)             

 

Berkeley

"In its quest to stay eternally woke, Berkeley went blind." -- ALEXANDER NAZARYAN (an American political writer and a correspondent for Yahoo, of all things.)

 

Berlin

“We stayed the night in one of those grand hotels where marble is mixed with neon to produce a kind of kitsch peculiar to Berlin.” – TIMOTHY FINDLEY (the Canadian novelist, in 1991)

"Berlin may be the only city in the world whose entire tourist industry is predicated upon repentance. The Wall, the DDR, the Stasi, the Holocaust -- Es tut uns sehr leid (We are very sorry)." -- ROD LIDDLE (in 2023) 

Berlin Wall (The)

"Today the dreadful wall lies in designer-chunks all about the coffee tables of the West." -- DIRK BOGARDE (the late actor, in 1995)

Berlusconi, Silvio

"Berlusconi -- Il Cavaliere (the Knight), as his supporters call him -- provokes in opponents the same visceral hatred as Donald Trump does." -- NICHOLAS FARRELL (The English journalist who lives in Italy, in 2022)

Betrayal

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal” – HENRY KISSINGER

 

Bias

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” – JOHN STUART MILL

 

Bible, The

“I read the Bible, but I don't trust what it says” – JIAN ZEMIN (the then-president of Red China, to George W. Bush)

 

“God? Who knows God? Can you believe in someone you don't know? But I believe in the Bible. The Bible is a fact. A record and a prophecy. It's all there. Read your bible, understand your Bible, and you won't go wrong.” – DAVID BEN-GURION (Israel’s first Prime Minister, for him their national airport is named.)

"The Bible is a text wherein we find that woman was the ruin of Mankind." -- GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1340-1400) 

"Bibles aren't allowed in schools any more but are encouraged in prisons. Perhaps if kids were allowed to read the Bible in school they wouldn't end up in prison." -- ROBERT JAMES RITCHIE ("KID ROCK")

"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature." -- ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

"Well, the point, Dud, is that Genesis isn't true in the literal sense, it's an allergy. Genesis is an allergy of la condition humaine." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic, to his great mate Dudley Moore, in "The Dagenham Dialogues" of 1971)


Bicycles

“With no other (than cycling) means of transport, except possibly skiing, can you determine so exactly the path you intend to follow, and arrive there so quickly.” – BORIS JOHNSON (The British PM, when he was a  Conservative MP, and ex-Editor of THE SPECTATOR)

 

“Like many people, I am worried that too few cyclists are being killed on our roads each year.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“You may hate cyclists, but you can’t possibly hate cyclists more than they hate each other.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (an avid cyclist herself)

 

“Just as there are things which work in theory which don’t work in practice, there are things which work in practice but not in theory: The bicycle has been gradually perfected over 100 years – yet physicists still have no idea how it works.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Cycling is right-wing. When you buy a bike you are throwing off the shackles of the state. No number plate, no insurance, no compulsory helmet. People think cycling is left-wing because a lot of left-wing people do it (but) cyclists are acting out of primal selfishness – we want to travel quickly and keep fit. If people cycled to ‘save the planet’ that would be left-wing, but in my experience most of us do it to save ourselves.” – JEREMY VINE  (English TV’s version of Jerry Springer)

 

Biden, Joe

«Biden is a man who has a tendency to speak before he thinks; whose grasp of the English language is impressively tenuous; and who has managed to move between a series of progressively high offices without growing up at all.» – CHARLES W. COOKE

 

“Every single day Joe Biden says something that would end my career if I said it once." – BOBBY JINDAL

 

“The current vice president says dumb things, funny things, weird things. He talks like the sort of guy who sits right next to you on the bus even though there are plenty of empty seats -- just so he can explain how squirrels aren't mammals. (But) Joe Biden is Barack Obama's loyal pet, and like even the most loyal dog, he sometimes has an accident on the carpet. But he still does his master's bidding when asked. And that is the one way Biden matters. He is a reflection of his boss, and an accurate one at that.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Biden’s logorrhea dementia is the most popularly diagnosed malady in political life since Bill Clinton’s priapism.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"(Vice President Joe) Biden's speeches are 'literally' festooned with 'literally's, like hundreds of tethers to the hot-air balloon that is his head. The standard joke is to quote the scene in The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini, ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’ The problem is that Biden insists that he does know what it means. One of his favorite ways to emphasize his seriousness is to say, ‘and I mean literally, not figuratively’, as if ‘literally’ meant ‘I’m really serious’ and ‘figuratively’ connoted some effeminate lack of conviction." --  JONAH GOLDBERG      (When the guy was still VP candidate. And Joe Biden is proof that – with the exception of Sarah Palin, who actually helped McCain’s numbers – it doesn’t matter a rat’s patoot who or what flavor of maroon you pick as a Veep.)                        

 

 “Biden has a very long history of being unjustifiably confident about how the world works and being proven wrong.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in January 2022)

 

«Joe Biden is the designated blunderbuss in the Democratic arsenal.» – WESLEY PRUDEN

 

"Biden always gives me the feeling that his real aim in life is acquiring the world’s coolest model-railroad set." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“The American presidency should be smaller — and in that way, if in no other way, Joe Biden may turn out to be just the right man for the job.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“It would be easy to call him a weathervane, but a weathervane is anchored on something and centered. President Biden is more like that plastic bag blowing around — empty, lightweight, subject to the moment’s prevailing wind.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Biden was consistently one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate. To hear him described as a moderate could happen only in Washington, D.C.” – HANK BROWN (ex-GOP Senator from Colorado, and ex-President of Colorado University)

 

“We choose truth over facts” -- JOE BIDEN      (in 8 August 2019)                                                                                                          

"I have acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom and know more than the vast majority of people." -- JOE BIDEN  (in May 2023)

“I’m not sure you should assume I’m not corrupt.” - JOE BIDEN (as a senator, in 1974)

“A Biden ramble is a pot aslosh with twaddle, and painting ‘NO MALARKEY’ on his bus is like hanging a ‘NO ICE CREAM’ sign on the door of Baskin-Robbins.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Joe Biden is the Loch Ness Monster of the Swamp.” – DONALD TRUMP JR. (on 24 August 2020)

"This charmless zombie staggering from one diplomatic howler to another." -- MARK DOLAN (a regular on "GB-News", in April 2023)


 "There is no Joe Biden. There’s a smiling/frowning face on billboards and on TV, and behind it there are terrifying people." -- BEN STEIN (on 21 Sept 2020)

 

"Joe Biden is a tired half-century of lies and bag money." -- JAMES WOODS

 

“Three decades ago, people cared when Biden lied. Now nobody cares. It’s hard to oppose, let alone revile, a man who no longer seems to have any idea of what he is saying. Biden lost contact with reality years ago. Maybe we did too.” – FREDDY GRAY (the Deputy Editor of THE SPECTATOR, in October 2020)

 

“The only person who fights harder than President Trump is the kid getting their picture taken with Joe Biden.” – CRYSTAL MONROE (a lady who calls herself a “political operator”, on the Twoot, 14 Jan. ‘21)

 

"President Joe Biden has decided not to donate his salary, instead he has opted to donate yours and mine.." -- MATT COUCH (blogger, "The DC Patriot”, in Feb. 2021)

"Tricky Dick was a saint, compared to crooked Joe." -- FRANCISCO FUENTES (A Cuban-born retired engineer, and a great American -- in May 2023) 

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

"Communist China's point man in the White House is Joe Biden, and make no mistake -- it's time we realized that." -- MARK LEVIN (On his radio program, 3 Feb 2021)

 

"Joe Biden, the human pandemic." -- MARK LEVIN (on 18 May 2021)

"Joe Biden is an old anti-black racist who's turned into an anti-white racist. He talks out of both sides of his dentures." -- MARK LEVIN (30 Jan. 2023) 

"Joe Biden is the sleaziest man ever to sit in the Oval Office. And a coward and a fool." -- MARK LEVIN (9 Feb. '23)

"This guy is the closest thing we've ever had to a fascist. I'm talking about Biden." -- MARK LEVIN (May 8, 2023)

“Joe Biden, that demented usurper in the White House, who isn't fit to be a 7-Eleven manager.” – FRANCISCO FUENTES (My good friend on the Twoot, who’s a retired Cuban-American engineer)

"I think Joe Biden has been selling access to our enemies for decades." -- REP. JAMES COMER (the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, in July 2023)
 

“Joe Biden is a smooth but pure demagogue.” – RONALD REAGAN (not so smooth by 2020...)

"The free world is run by a person who probably couldn’t find his way home after dark" -- ALAN JONES (Of and on Sky News, Australia,  on 5 July 2021)

 

" ‘'Buy a man eat fish, he day, teach fish man, to a lifetime.'.-- Joe Biden" -- BUZZ PATTERSON (Californian -- ex Air Force officer and carrier, under Clinton, of the Presidential nuclear football.)

 

"Every day Biden wakes up, we lose." -- JOHN CATSIMATIDIS (the Gristedes supermarket tycoon & owner of WABC radio station in Noo Yawk City, on 4 Oct. ‘21)

“Biden is a damp sock puppet in human form.” -- ELON MUSK (in Jan. 2022)

"In 1975, President Ford was left to manage the difficult ending of the Vietnam War. President Ford went to Congress for a relief package to allow American personnel and our allies to evacuate. However, there was one US senator who opposed any such support. The result was the embarrassing and hurried evacuation from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. This senator reveled in the embarrassment and did everything he could to leverage it politically against Ford. Despite the efforts of this U.S .Senator, President Ford managed to rescue 1,500 South Vietnamese allies prior to the country's fall. Had President Ford not acted quickly, these people would have been targeted and slaughtered for their support for America. When they arrived in America, President Ford asked Congress for a package to assist these refugees to integrate into American society. That same troublesome senator torpedoed any support for these shell-shocked, anti-communist, Americans and our helpers, the refugees. Instead, President Ford had to recruit Christian organizations to offer assistance on a voluntary basis. As he did so, the Senator belittled those efforts. What kind of person would oppose President Ford's tireless work to do the right and humanitarian thing? Who would want to play politics with the well-being of innocent people who stood by America in the tragic Vietnam War? That Senator was Joe Biden." -- DONALD RUMSFELD (in his 2018 memoir, "When The Center Held")

"Biden makes Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO

"Biden is not weak. Biden is complicit." -- DR. MARTY FOX (Feb. 2023)

 

"He's (Biden's) become like a Palestinian, but even they don't like him, because he's a weak Palestinian." -- DONALD TRUMP      (during the debate on 27 June, 2024)

"Joe Biden was an asshole, and he’s still an asshole and he’s the worst president since at least Jimmy Carter if not, James Buchanan. He’s not a decent nice guy. He’s an idiot. He’s corrupt. He’s a pervert. And he’s a jerk. A narcissistic, selfish jerk, and he always has been." -- KURT SCHLICHTER     (in July 2024)

Biden Administration, The

“Biden’s strategy can be expected to draw heavily on the weasel words ‘sustainable’ and ‘responsible’ – in short, no geopolitical strategy at all.” – FRANCIS PIKE

 

"It's time to unite and heal -- that is, to submit to the Ruling Class, under its enforcement mechanism of Woke progressivism. If you refuse, we'll de-platform, deprogram, and drone you – all as part of a war on domestic violent extremism." -- BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN      (author, columnist and Federalist contributor)

 

"I'm happy to take questions if that's what I'm supposed to do." – JOE BIDEN (To White House reporters, 3 March 2021)

"We are in the process of making up my mind." -- JOE BIDEN (On 21 June 2022, when asked something about Red China) 

"When stupid meets impossible" -- GAGE KLIPPER    (of THE DAILY CALLER, referring to something called "The Biden Doctrine")

“We have today a president (Biden) who on a good day is an idiot.” -- NEWT GINGRICH (Dec. '22)


“It was not easy to take Joe Biden very seriously as a candidate. It is impossible to take him very seriously as a president. The Biden administration is like an angry chimpanzee at a chess tournament — it isn’t going to win the match, but that isn’t what we should be worrying about.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Biden commands trillions the way previous presidents have commanded billions, while the public is so dazzled by zeros they don't know the difference." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

"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 13-year old that plays Call of Duty has more tactical acumen than anybody in the Joe Biden administration.” – SEAN PARNELL (the “Outlaw Platoon” leader, on 27 August 2021)

 

“I do not really know who is running the United States government at the moment. All we know is that the head of the executive branch is not really heading the executive branch. They bring him out once every few days, take him to an ice cream parlor with a 40-car motorcade.” – MARK STEYN (in September 2021)

 

“How can President Biden can be trusted to defend our entire way of life if he will not defend an airport perimeter fence for more than a few days despite his overwhelming financial, technological and conventional military advantage.” – CHARLES MOORE (the editor-emeritus of the UK Sunday Telegraph and the UK Spectator, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, shortly after China Joe’s ignominious and ignoble final rout in Kabul.)

 

"Kinda looks like Joe Biden and pals hate ordinary Americans. (And) the country is saying, 'Right back at ya, gramps'.” -- KYLE SMITH (in the NY POST, 4 Nov. 2021)

"For nearly half a century, Biden has worked with a pro-Moscow group Council for a Livable World to weaken the U.S. military and undermine American foreign policy. Could Joe Biden become the greatest U.S. president Russia and China ever elected?" - TREVOR LOUDON (The greatest living Kiwi, in 2022)

"Is there anyone in this (Biden) administration who doesn't just vomit up random words?" -- DEREK HUNTER (author, blogger and TownHall columnist, in July 2022)

“If Biden was in charge of the Sahara Desert, it would run out of sand.” — SEN. JOHN KENNEDY

"Never before in the history of our country has any president completely and blatantly disregarded the laws of the United States more than what Joe Biden is currently doing." -- CHIP ROY (Republican Congressman from Texas, in Jan. 2023)

"The world was far more safe on Donald Trump's watch than any single day we've had so far with Joe Biden in the White House." -- REP. JIM BANKS (Republican Congressman from Indiana, on 1 March 2022)

"While touring the damage Hurricane Ian did to Florida, President Joe Biden remarked, 'No one fucks with a Biden.' Reality, as you should expect, is vastly different. Pretty much everybody — nations, courts, even television comedians — 'fucks' with Biden almost every day." -- JED BABBIN (in the AMSPEC, 18 Oct '22)

"If you're voting for Biden in November, you're voting to fund Iran." -- MARK LEVIN

"No one should be surprised that Joe Biden is the first American president to indict the leader of his opposition. This incompetent moron is as dumb as a houseplant and mean as a snake. He's always resented being Fredo Corleone, and now in his dotage he is getting his revenge." -- MICHAEL WALSH (in June 2023)

"He's (Biden's) become like a Palestinian, but even they don't like him, because he's a weak Palestinian." -- DONALD TRUMP      (during the debate on 27 June, 2024)


Bidens, The

“I’ve seen Hunter Biden’s hard drive. The Bidens belong in handcuffs.” – BERNARD KERIK (the ex NYPD Commissioner, in December 2020)

"Dr. Jill Biden is a lightly accomplished, half-educated Ed.D-holding numbskull..." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Bidens are as corrupt as the day is long.” — SEN. RAND PAUL 

"There is no 'white privilege' like Biden 'white privilege'." -- LARRY O'CONNOR (On WMAL, 19 Sep '23)

"It is never a good idea to bet against the Bidens when it comes to corruption investigations." -- JONATHAN TURLEY (the eminent lawyer, 20 June 2023)

"This Biden regime is the closest we've ever gotten to an absolutely Stalinist government ever -- I mean ever, not even during the Civil War." -- MARK LEVIN    (1 March 2024)

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, uh, what are you talking about? China…Nobody else has made money from China.” -- JOE BIDEN (shortly after his son was wired $260k from China, with Joe's Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address)

“No one fucks with the Bidens.” — JOE BIDEN (In Ft. Myers, FL, on 5 Oct. 2022)

“I think they (his dad and Xi Jinping) are in love with each other. They all most (sic) kissed on departure” --HUNTER BIDEN       (in an email on 5 Dec. 2013)

Bigamy

«They sent him to prison for bigamy. Prison. For having ten wives. It's not illegal to have ten girlfriends. It's not illegal to be married to one girl and fuck ten others. It's not illegal to fuck ten girls in one night. But if in addition to fucking tehm you actually agree to give them something in return? Make a solemn public vow to take care of them, feed them, listen to their problems, give tham a place to live? That's illegal. Isn't women's big thing that we can't commit to even one girl? This guy is the Superman of commitment. So they chuck him in the joint. What kind of fucked kind of society are we living in?» – KYLE SMITH

 

Big Bang Theory

“The odds against life having been evolved by blind chance are about the same as the odds against a whirlwind blowing through a scrapyard and assembling a perfect Boeing 747” – CHANDRA WICKRAMASINGHE (All I know about this excellent fellow is that he’s a” professor” and that he’s quoted in a book called “Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist” by a John Michell)


"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. 'Spontaneous creation' is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." -- STEPHEN HAWKING (and I'm bound to say that I never in my puff -- as P. G. Wodehouse would say -- ever heard any more pluperfect horseshit than this....)

"If tiresome fellows like me ask the scientists whence came the matter which constituted the ingredients of the Big Bang, they get tetchy, even shifty." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)


Bigotry

“We are all bigots by tomorrow's standards” – DANIEL FOSTER (political consultant, writing in NR in Feb. 2015)

 

“We live in an age where non-compliance with the Left's agenda must be cast as bigotry.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Indeed, bigotry is no more a human invention than the opposable thumb.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“We are by nature indifferent, even hostile, to strangers; we are prone toward parochialism and bigotry. Some of our instinctive emotional responses, most notably disgust, spur us to do terrible things.” – PAUL BLOOM (Yale Univ. prof of Psychology and “Cognitive Science”)

 

“Do I sound bigoted? People can be bigoted, but facts can't be.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“Big Tech”

“The tech community saw salvation in the abandonment of things, which would be replaced by information. The world’s naiveté was grotesque.” – NELL ZINK (in her 2019 book “Doxology”)

 

“Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google and Apple, or FATGA for short – companies that have established a dominance over the public sphere not seen since the heyday of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church.” – NIALL FERGUSON (in Jan. 2021)

 

“What happened was that the network platform turned the originally decentralized worldwide web into an oligarchically organized and hierarchical public sphere from which they made money and to which they controlled access. That the original, superficially libertarian inclinations of these companies’ founders would rapidly crumble under political pressure from the left was also perfectly obvious, if one bothered to look a little beyond one’s proboscis.” – NIALL FERGUSON (again in Jan. 2021)

 

"And it turns out you don't need a Communist party in charge to have censorship of the internet: just leave it to the big tech companies, which now have the power to cancel the President of the United States if they so choose." --NIALL FERGUSON

 

“It is only a slight overstatement to say that, while the mob’s coup against Congress (“6 January”) ignominiously failed, big tech’s coup against Trump triumphantly succeeded.” – NIALL FERGUSON (still in Jan. 2021)

 

“My whims and those of Jeff (Bezos) and Larry (Page) and Mark (Zuckerberg) shouldn’t be what determines what should be online.” – MATTHEW PRINCE (CEO of something called “Cloudfare”, in Jan. 2021)

 

"A power that is beyond an individual company's competency, it allows a small number of malign Silicon Valley lefties the power to impose their world view over every non-totalitarian-ruled population on the planet." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

 

“The perpetual, shameless, censorship on purely political grounds by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram worries me rather more than our pandemic does, because there seems to be no readily available vaccine for it. If you had thought that Twitter and Facebook’s deliberate suppression of stories, along with a serving US president’s astonishing removal from all social media sites because they didn’t like what he was saying, was simply the consequence of a peculiarly fraught US election, think again. They are still at it now, even more so. Theories which they do not like because of their political consequences, or provenance, are banned under the heading ‘false news’. It is increasingly the case that ‘false news’ is simply news that liberals do not wish you to hear about.” – ROD LIDDLE (in June 2021)

 

"I think that the ban of Donald Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship... Don't tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn't ban anyone.  Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers (Putin or Maduro) and liars and thieves (Medvedev)... Of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state's best friends and the enablers when it comes to censorship.” — ALEXEI NAVALNY (November 9, 2020)

 

“Google made an explicit announcement recently that said that sometimes they would put warnings on things that are factually accurate because, even though they are true, they do not think it is in society's interest for people to be seeing it. Now you will be banned or deleted or blocked or silenced simply for disagreeing with the official version of events. It is just groupthink enforced by a cabal of woke billionaires, who have more power than anyone else on the planet.” – MARK STEYN (in Sept. 2021)

"The company of our so-called elite will one day soon represent the new Hell. No more fires and Dantean circles; just the nearness of (Jack) Dorsey and (Mark) Zuckerberg and their ilk." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

Bill of Rights (the US)

“If the people demonstrated perfect respect for the Bill of Rights, it would not be necessary.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

 

“Our Bill of Rights isn't a bill of needs.” – SCOTTIE NELL HUGHES (An American TV journalist, ex-of CNN. She’s a bit of a conservative – hence the “ex-”)

"The Bill of Rights is less a guarantor of rights than a restriction on our government to deny them." -- JONAH GOLDBERG      (in August 2024, and I've gotta give him a hat tip for this one.)


 

Biology

“Biology exists. It cannot be erased by politically-correct zealots.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA (writing to the Brazilian publication “Epoca”, on 23 March 2018)

 

“There were some questions you couldn’t answer. You could learn biology. But that was all.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

 “It is not as easy as some may, in this culture war, now want to portray it, that the XX or the XY is the clear distinction between the men and women. This is scientifically not true anymore," -- THOMAS BACH        (Head of the International Olympic Committee, in Aug. '24) 

“Bi-Partisanship”

"Whenever you hear the word 'bipartisan', be sure to check for your wallet." -- ROBERT NOVAK

 

“Bipartisanship is just a pleasant word for rationalizing tack-to-the-wind courses of action you actually believe to be wrong just so you can be in harmony with other people who are wrong.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

 

“There is a quote out there that sometimes get attributed to Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen and sometimes not. The quote is that there two parties in Washington — the stupid party and the evil party. Every once in a while the stupid party and the evil party get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. In Washington, that is called bipartisanship.” -- ERICK ERICKSON (the author of the “RedState” blog)

 

“ I don't want the people in Washington to get along. I want them to get out.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Right now, politicians have the power to suddenly decide to tax us all at 100% and then spend the money replacing all of our roads with a high-speed rail system. What keeps them from doing that? Common sense? Come on, look at the morons we have in government – Congress is filled with idiots who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and who have grand visions to transform the nation. No, the only thing stopping them is that they’re divided into two parties who viscerally hate each other. If they ever got along, a big new government overreach like the Patriot Act or a giant boondoggle like Obamacare would be passed every couple weeks. By the end of the year, we’d have the government spying on our every movement as we lived flat broke in shanty towns, eating our government-allotted corn cob half we’d get every other day.” – FRANK J. FLEMING (columnist for PJMedia and the NY Post)

 

" ‘Bipartisanship’ has only ever meant, in anyone's memory, the GOP caving in and acceding to whatever Democrat hornswoggle is being pushed.” – JACK JOLIS

"We have two parties here, and only two.  One is the Evil Party, and the other is the Stupid Party. Occasionally, the two parties get together and do something that's both evil and stupid. That's called bipartisanship." -- M. STANTON EVANS (conservative author and the long-time publisher of NATIONAL REVIEW) 

“The two scariest words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus' – it’s like when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

"When presented with a good idea and a bad one, there is no point in being a little bit stupid for the sake of compromise." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Birthdays

“A happy birthday at my age is a terminological inexactitude.” – TAKI THEODACOPULOS (who was already in his 80s when he said this, in 2017)

“No male beyond the age of twelve has any business celebrating his birthday.” — JACK JOLIS

Bitcoin/NFT

"Bitcoin will become the currency of third rate countries whose central banks and governments are corrupt, like America.” -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

 

“NFT/Bitcoin is nothing more than the quite natural human desire to liberate economic activity from the arbitrary shackles of government. I don't happen to think they’ll be allowed to get away with it, but that's what it is.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"Bitcoin is a financial product invented out of thin air, contrary to the interests of civilization but useful to kidnappers and extortionists." -- CHARLIE MUNGER (a business partner of Warren Buffett)

 

“Cryptocurrencies are rat poison squared.” – WARREN BUFFETT

 

"I fully understand that our financial system isn't perfect, but at least it's real. By contrast, crypto is just Easter Bunny cartoon cash. I've read articles about it. I've had it explained to me. I still don't get it, and neither do you. Bitcoin is made up out of thin air, and is comparable to Monopoly money. We know money had to originate and be generated by something real, somewhere. Cryptocurrency says 'No, it doesn't'. It's like having an imaginary friend who's a banker. It's like Tinkerbelle's light. Its power source is based solely on enough children believing in it.:" -- BILL MAHER

 

"Slowly we may be edging towards a different monetary system. That is certainly part of the story behind bitcoin: people are looking for a form of money that is independent of the state, in a way that gold used to be." -- MATTHEW LYNN (a British thriller writer, financial journalist and publisher)


Blacks (Negroes)

“A people of beastly living, without  a God, lawe, religion… whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie… whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes for these are their houses and the flesh of serpents their meat… They have  no speech, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.” – JOHN LOCKE (NOT the influential philosopher, but rather an English sea captain, in 1562, and I rather think he’s pushing it out a bit, there, at the end…)

 

“Never in history has there been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.” – RICHARD M. NIXON (to, and as recorded by, his aide H.R. Haldeman)

 

“Even if full rights are granted them, jobs given, total social equality ensured, any chemist who invented a substance that would bleach them and uncrinkle their hair would help a great deal more than a lot of good decent liberals.” – ISAIAH BERLN (the celebrated 20th Century author, professor and “public intellectual”)

 

“All our social policies  towards blacks are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” – JAMES WATSON      (the Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of DNA, who has since become a hated “un-person” directly as a result of comments such as this.)       

 

“The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink. Members of the African race have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing. When the revolution triumphs we are going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.” – ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA

 

“The best way to hide something from Negroes is to put it in a book.” – MALCOLM X

 

“Being black does not define you, not even being black and having ancestors who 300 years ago were taken captive by the Ghanaian elite and sold to English slave-traders. That should not impinge on you – and claiming it does makes you, to my mind, a charlatan and a chancer.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“According to every Human Development criterion, black people in the UK (and USA) are better off than pretty much anywhere else in the world. If you are black and would quite like a decent education, a long, healthy life, a reasonable income, a high standard of living, good medical treatment, democratic rights and suffrage – it’s not Africa you look to , is it?” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“The comfortingly familiar wail of black protest; of soulful grievance which threatens to become a way of life. Being a black man can be turned into a full-time profession.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in 1976)

 

“The Negro does not know how to stop hurting himself.” – MARCUS GARVEY (the Jamaican-born “black power” and “Rastafarian” pioneer, 1887-1940)

"Oxford, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, were built in the 11th, 12th & 13th century, Great Wall of China built around the same same; Peter the great said, lets go build St Petersburg. You've seen St Petersburg, extraordinary city, beautiful city, this man built one of the most beautiful working cities in the world when there was nothing there in the 1700's, and it's a showplace today to the world. 

No White man ever set foot on the continent of Africa back then. 

You can't go to Africa today and find anything that was built in the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century that stands today, because nothing was ever built. There's nothing there, 

James Monroe gave ‘Liberia’ millions, you go to Monroeville now, they're running around there with machine guns, cutting off one another's hands, they don't pick up the garbage, dead dogs laying on the street for weeks, the place is a mess, they don't know how to do nothing. 

'Well the White man kept us from building', no no no, no he didn't, the White man had never been there. 

You can go from North Sahara down to South Africa, there's nothing - and we gotta come to terms with that.

Cecil Rhodes gave them Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and kids were playing with rocks, throwing them, hiding them, etc... the King, the people, no one knew the kids were playing with huge diamonds. No idea of their use and their worth. We have to come to terms, you can go from California to South Africa etc and you can't find one city that black people built, you can find plenty of ghettos, but not one nice city that black people built. 

Stop the foolishness, you've never built anything, that whole continent, there's not one memorial not one thing standing we built. 

We have to stop fooling ourselves, we need God. Help us, we need help. 

The only thing we've ever done, we did it because the White man gave us a platform from which to do it. He gave us schools so we could go, highways so we could travel, we gotta admit it and stop it with the White man did this, the White man did that... we will never be productive, we will never understand anything... we need God." -- THE REVEREND JAMES MANNING         (A bid-deal black American pastor, in North Carolina


Blacks, American

“Back in the Bagel (New York), it gets worse. The permanent underclass, which is a product of a welfare system gone wild, watches television all day and night. Blacks, especially, can no longer articulate the simplest of sentences. American television takes the form of a national teach-in, emphasizing all the wrong values. The black comics are even worse. The F word predominates, followed by the M-F compound one. Gone and forgotten is any subtlety or talent. The F word is all. Yet the cultural elite continues to blame capitalism and racism for the state America finds itself in.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (Man, I really miss the TV version of “Amos ‘n’ Andy”…)

 

“Poor Jefferson, the anti-slavery slave-owner, thought that if blacks were ever freed, they would have to be sent back to Africa, because their just resentment, and the fears of whites, could not be overcome. Wrong, Tom. A lot of shit has gone down, but only a handful of brothers have left for Liberia.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

“The ethos of hypocritical correctness encourages black people to expend energy on relatively trivial matters. It permits them to operate under the illusion that all victims are inherently virtuous because of their victimization. By allowing blacks to don the robe of sanctified victimization, hypocritical correctness permits many of them to cover their eyes to the true sellouts, the true Uncle toms in their midst – the people who shoot down their black neighbors on city streets; the African-American drug dealers plying their deadly trade from the front seats of European luxury cars; the absent fathers and crack-crazed moms, the young athletes who think it’s ‘black’ to excel on the football field or basketball court but who regard it as ‘white’ and somehow improper to try for the dean’s list.” – WARREN BROWN (the automobile correspondent of the Washington Post)

 

“Black people are the most conservative people in America – on Sunday. But Monday through Saturday, liberals are able to give them free stuff and turn them around.” – LTC. ALLEN WEST (in June 2010 when he was running as a Republican for Congress in Florida)

 

“The bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art.” – JOHN McWHORTER (the black American writer with the Manhattan Institute)

 

“IQ is another taboo. But many black children suffer from a disadvantage so acute that intelligence isn't needed to explain anything. The problem with incipient gang members sitting in classrooms, and planning to outwit rival gangs, not to mention the police, is not that they are unintelligent but that they plan to join the lawless world they grew up in. They are not interested in Henry VIII or quadratic equations.” – TOM BETHELL (the English-born American journalist, writing in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“If the Black Panthers were white, everyone would instantly recognize them as indistinguishable from neo-Nazis.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation.” – LYNDON B. JOHNSON  (When he was Senate Majority Leader, in 1957.  hmmmm....)

 

“White liberals in their hunger for humiliation will take as revealed truth anything an angry black man says.” –  S.I. HAYAKAWA (the diminutive tam-o-shanter-wearing Jap who was the President of San Francisco State University during the height of the late 60s leftist student riots, when he bravely faced down the young Stalinists, and he actually went on to be, at least for 1 term, a Republican Senator from California.  Great little guy.)

 

“Black Americans face severe social disadvantages, starting with very poor public schools, but what stands in the way of their improvement is not white racism but the teachers' unions, which happen  to be allied with the Democrats.” -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN       (the English ex-editor of NR)

 

“Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people... It's like a civil war going on with black people, and it's two sides – there's black people and there's niggas, and niggas have got to go... Boy, I wish they'd let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I'd do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” -- CHRIS ROCK

 

"They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life." -- HERMAN CAIN (This would make me more "African-American" than Al Sharpton. Cool....)

 

"The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state." – THOMAS SOWELL

“The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. Right now, about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. That drives poverty. And the lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised. And it has nothing to do with slavery. It has everything to do with you Hollywood people and you derelict parents.” -- BILL O'REILLY

“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)

“I mean, you get — politically correct stuff happens that you don’t want to happen. I all of a sudden became an African — political correctness, African-American. I’m not African.” -- MORGAN FREEMAN    (No you're not, Morg -- you're just another dreary predictable knee-jerk lefty Obamarroid doofus....)

" ‘African-Americans’: They're not, but we'll play along.” – TREVOR NOAH (the “coloured” –  their own term – South African comedian – before he was imported by Comedy Central))

“Having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.” – THOMAS SOWELL      (in June, 2014)

"Liberals wanted to help blacks in the worst possible way, and that is what they did." -- FRED SIEGEL (In his book "Revolt Against The Masses", on left-wing social policy starting in the 60s) 

"One of the reasons we're never going to be successful as a whole is because of other black people. And for some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person. And it’s a dirty, dark secret." -- CHARLES BARKLEY (the  fluent and always amusing ex-basketballist)

 

“There is a class of colored people who makes a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.” – BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (who was a Republican – but of course, in those days, all blacks were Republicans, who'd just, at rather colossal expense, got done freeing them)

 

“More black Africans have voluntarily emigrated to the United States to seek liberty and opportunity than came to America as slaves.” – DENNIS PRAGER

 

"No longer can blacks claim victim status except as victims of Democrats.” – SHERIFF DAVID CLARKE (The outstanding black ex-Sheriff of Milwaukee County, in August 2015)

 

“A black man is worth more in the home is more important than a black man in the White House.” – JASON RILEY (A black American journalist, writing in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)

 

"We never get mad when black people kill each other, which has always bothered me." – CHARLES BARKLEY

 

“It’s a dirty dark secret, you know when there are black kids doing well in school, the loser kids tell ‘em ‘Oh, you’re acting white’. For some reason, we are brainwashed into thinking if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you are not black enough.” – CHARLES BARKLEY

 

“The best way to hide something from Negroes is to put it in a book.” – MALCOLM X

 

“But you know, you know that statistically the greatest danger to a black man in America is another black man." -- STEVE KING (the ex-Republican Congressman from Iowa)

 

“Now suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable?” -- ZORA NEALE HURSTON (granddaughter of slaves; 1891-1960)

 

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see someone white and feel relieved." - JESSE JACKSON (in 1994 or thereabouts)

 

"Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings:

If there are more wounded than killed, then the shooter is likely black.

If there are more killed than wounded, then the shooter is likely not black." -- STEVE SAILER

 

"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 (back in the 1930s... and he hadn’t even had the pleasure, you should pardon the expression, of knowing rap and hip-hop...)

 

"Women lie the way blacks lie. If you're a slave race telling the truth gets you very little. They forget how." -- JOHN UPDIKE (In "Rabbit Remembered, 2000)

 

"I know what is good for the Negro." -- JOE BIDEN     (in 1973. And he didn't.)

"For example, how many Black communities are in a situation where they come from a circumstance where they're in difficult, where they have difficulty? Where the families are in real trouble?  Where you have people who...even those families that are really poor don't have any books in the house. Kids don't hear a lot of conversation." -- JOE BIDEN     (this bit of incoherence was uttered on 14 March 2024)

"White liberals are the most racist people there are, because they put blacks in a box and insist that they think one way -- and if they don't they attack them as illegitimate, all the while denying that their policies destroy blacks." -- DR. BEN CARSON 

 

“Black Lives Matter”

"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)   

 

 "Presumably, none of the elite members of the vast media, corporate and cultural apparatus that has made, almost instantaneously, BLM part of America’s civil religion supports killing cops or insulting them and their colleagues when they are gunned down. But in their fervent embrace of a poisonous and simplistic narrative about policing in America, they are telling a lie about the cops, one repeated over and over again and without challenge in swaths of American life." -- RICH LOWRY (the Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, here writing in THE NEW YORK POST, in 15 Sept. 2020)

 

"A few schools apparently are no longer to be named after Abraham Lincoln, the president who saved the Union, destroyed the slave-holding Confederacy, and freed the slaves at a cost of nearly 700,000 American lives. Now 155 years after his assassination, the present generation—the most leisured, entitled, and wealthiest cohort in civilization’s history—deems him unworthy and unfit for any commemoration. Do any of the street-brawling Antifa/BLM radicals seem tough guys in comparison to the Union troops at Gettysburg or those who marched with Sherman?" -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

“The white man will not be our equal but our slave.” – SASHA JOHNSON (The head of the UK “New Black Panthers”, and “a” leader of the BLM organization in the UK,   in 2020)

 

"The knee-bending in support of a genuinely odious organisation, black Lives Matter, was encouraged from the top-down by virtue-signaling idiots. But when the public is absent, corporate wokeism faces no corrective from the real world, any more than do our advertising agencies, who now think it necessary to have a black face central in just about every single TV advert. This irks the public, not becasue they object to seeing black faces but because they understand that they are once again being hammered over the head by patronising and frankly racist corporate wokeism." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“It is not the anti-racist element of BLM that people loathe, but the rest of it – the Marxism, the critical race theory stuff, the corrosive hatred towards  capitalism nd white people. It is not the slightest use trying to tell us that it’s not about that. That is like making a Nazi salute and claiming it’s nothing to do with Hitler – it’s simply not true.” – ROD LIDDLE (in June, 2021

"BLM = Buy Large Mansions" -- DAN BONGINO 

"The manufactured leftist social unrest that calls itself 'anti-racism'.”-- MICHAEL WALSH

"Black lives matter? Black lives only matter when a black life is taken by a white cop -- otherwise nobody gives a damn." -- GREG KELLY
 


"Black Lives Matter et al have hyper-racialized the left to the level of insanity." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"Today thugs, rioters, and thieves destroy our cities. They've done the cost-benefit analysis, and find they risk nothing, and, like the children in peer mediation, enjoy the concern, that is, the approbation, of those who are paid to control their behaviors." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)

"It's not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it's under capitalism. And it's not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression and gender oppression." -- ALICIA GARZA    (a.k.a. Alicia Schwartz, her maiden name, one of the communist co-founders of BLM)

“Black Studies”

“'Black Studies' is a kind of syllabus of malevolent mythology – nothing more than warmed-over voodoo, tarted up by juvenile Marxist-Leninism and glazed with white guilt.” – JACK JOLIS

 

Blair, Tony

“Tony Blair does a good impersonation of a human being.” – MAX HASTINGS

 

“Anthony Blair, a former Trotskyist who may not be that former.” – PETER HITCHENS (in Dec. 2020)

 

Blame

“The great narcissistic fun of always blaming yourself for everything is that you make everything about you.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“You know, no matter what you do, you’re always someone’s son of a bitch.” (“Tu sais, on a beau faire, on est toujours le salaud de quelqau’un”) – JEAN ANOUILH

 

“'Blame' is best applied to those who behave badly, rather than those who guess wrongly.” -- MARTIN VANDER WEYER (economics columnist for the UK SPECTATOR, in Jan. 2016)

 

“Blame is envy’s bad-seed baby. It’s trying to win by pretending to lose. And since we’re talking about bad seeds, victimhood is envy’s sibling.” – BRIAN T. ALLEN (an art historian)

 

“Envy and blame are states of being but also states of mind. When people don’t feel free and independent, envy and blame rear their ugly heads and toss their curls.” – BRIAN T. ALLEN

 

“In adversity blame flows downhill. The low man on the ladder kicks the dog.” – RICHARD FERNANDEZ (the columnist /blogger“Wretchard”)

 

"It is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loath to admit to being in the wrong." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

"Recriminations are excuses for failures." -- BING WEST

 

“Blame America First”

“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

 

Blasphemy

“Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that let him try to blaspheme Odin.” -- G. K. CHESTERTON

 

"Blasphemy is not a crime. It is a right." -- DON SURBER (the pugnacious American journalist and columnist. My sort of chap)

 

“Blasphemy should be so widespread that it's boring.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“There is no blasphemy in a democracy.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE (A guy who should know. He said this in September 2016)

“ 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion'. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." -- SALMAN RUSHDIE

'To be French is to defend the right to mock. To be French is to defend the right to laugh, jest, mock and caricature, of which Voltaire maintained that it is the source of all other rights. Freedom in France includes the freedom to believe or not to believe. But this is inseparable from the freedom of expression up to the right to blasphemy.” – EMMANUEL MACRON (5 Sept. 2020)

 

Blinken, Antony

"From the look of it, (US Secretary of State) Blinken is our man. But he should not make public statements of this kind. It may lead to his failure." -- VLADIMIR PUTIN (on 15 Feb 2024, commenting on Blinken's comment that "Kiev was "traditionally Russian”)

“Blogs”

“To me, bloggery is much like modern poetry: more people want to write it than read it. Most blogs are read by fewer than 10 people a day. Only 10% have more than 100 hits a day. You’d reach a wider audience if you photocopied a few sheets of paper and left them on the Underground (subway)”” – CHRISTOPHER HOWSE (Brit journalist in June 2007)

 

Bloomberg, Michael

“You can marry a person of the same gender in New York City, but you can’t eat your own wedding cake without Bloomberg slapping it out of your hands.” – JIM TREACHER (writing in the Daily Caller, in 2011)

 

“Want to ban gay marriages in NY?  Tell Bloomberg they’re fun” –  DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

”Bloombergism at a national level is merely Democratic Party liberalism stripped of any concern for public opinion.” – JONATHAN CHAIT

"Bloomberg doesn’t much care what the people want because he knows what’s good for them. And if he doesn’t know, he can discover it through data management and effectively synergizing backward overflow intergotion."-- JONAH GOLDBERG

Boats (and Ships)

“Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“Something happens to boats as they get bigger. The bigger and more expensive they get, the further away they take your form the sea. Boats aren’t really for going anywhere in but are all about the sea, and all you want to really feel the sea, it’s best to sit in a tiny boat. The biggest pleasure boats, no matter how fantastic they are, even the ones with a helicopter parked on one end and a submarine dangling from the other, are just like bad hotels.” – ALEX JAMES (bassist for the English band “Blur”, as well as being a columnist.)

 

“One thing is for sure. The bigger and flashier the boat, the shorter and uglier the owner. Better yet, the longer the boat, the shorter the willy.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“A boat is only good for picking up women. Otherwise you just put on weight, drink too much, sit too much, get too much sun.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“They used to say that the primary function of a boat was to be beautiful. I suppose that is why boats were feminine.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Once you own a ship, you, like a honeybee, are wherever you are voluntarily. If you choose to, you can sail away. You're in a position to negotiate with the king. He may put you in a ghetto, but the joke is on him, because you can fly (sic), he's the one that's rooted in one place like a shrub. In fact, if you can find such a crazy place, you can base yourself where there is no king, where everything is up for negotiation, someplace across the sea like Attica or America.” – DANIEL CLOUD (A Princeton prof.)

 

"Ships were the Internet of things before electricity." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“I’ve often noticed that you usually want to return a hire boat long before the end of the time for which you’ve paid.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

 

Body, The

“The body was like the surly, recalcitrant electorate of a democratic state, with the mind a nervous, impatient and ultimately helpless executive. The body required autocratic government.” – DAVID LODGE

 

“The number of things you can do with the human body is really quite limited.” – ALAN JUDD (Thankfully, he was talking in reference to sex, when he said this – not, say, torture....)

 

"Suppose, for the sake of argument, I shave off a quarter of inch of bristle every week. That's one inch a month. A foot a year. That's a fifty foot beard during a life, give or take a foot or two. I try to imagine myself with a fifty-foot beard. Think of all the hair we men remove in a lifetime. think of all the hair the human race cuts and shaves, plucks and depilates from heads, armpits, legs and groin. Think of all those locks and fuzz, whiskers and fluff building up through the history of recorded time. Where has it all gone?" -- WILLIAM BOYD

Boer War, The

"At the turn of the century, an enlightened official at the War Office decided that the costly journey to South Africa might be wasted on soldiers who died on the voyage to the Boer War, and so it was decreed that to become a soldier of the Queen, you had first to pass a medical examination. (Prior to this, all you had to do to join the Army was commit a crime.)" — CLEMENT FREUD (Sigmund’s grandson, in an article in PUNCH Magazine, July 1987)

“The Boer Woer” — ALBERT E. JOLIS (my English-born dad — a wry fellow…)

Books

“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other people lent me.” – ANATOLE FRANCE (1844-1924)

 

“The publication of a book is, as much as anything else, an act of prolonged rudeness. Human discourse is supposed to be two-way speech, but a book is a monologue, immune to interruption.” – THOMAS MALLON (the American novelist and critic, in 1986)

 

“Books can be divided, like Americans, into fast ones and slow ones.” – SUSAN HILL (The English lady novelist)

 

«A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition» – RUDYARD KIPLING

 

"I try not to judge books by their covers; I judge them by their indexes." -- DENNIS DUNCAN (a prof at the University College, London, and an author of a book on... indexes)


 «As everyone who reviews books knows all too well, most of them can be judged quite easily by their covers.» – TERRY TEACHOUT

 

«Books are never done, they're merely abandoned.» – DANIEL HALPERN (apparently a famous editor – in any case, Amy Tan's editor. And here he was referring to the writing of books, rather than the reading thereof.)

 

“What's the point of a cover if not to judge a book by?” – ALLAN MALLINSON

"To visit any library is to walk past the graveyard of the forgotton.” -- A. N. WILSON 

«Of all the ways of acquiring books, the one considered most respectable is to write them.» – WALTER BENJAMIN (a lefty German Jewish philosopher of the early 20th century.)

 

«Books are now status symbols; souvenirs for suntanned selfies.» – EMILY HILL (in  October 2020)

"Bookstores are a kind of window shopping for the mind." -- JONAH GOLDBERG    (in 2024)

 

«A book can tell you whether an author’s mad or not.» – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (Quite a claim. Food for thought.)

 

Borders

"Wherever you have a shared wall or fence, there exist countless opportunities to be a bit of an arsehole." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"Why is it so hard to see that defense of the Westphalian sovereign nation state system that is based on secure borders is as critical for others as it is for our own country?" -- CLARE LOPEZ

"While sitting behind deeply protected , carefully patrolled borders they dream of a borderless world. For a few days they imagine living in a beautifully curated agrarian idyll and dream of extending the limits of consciousness and understanding. Only for the mudslide of reality to make its inexorable entrance." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (after the "Burning Man" fiasco of 2023)

“Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.” -- VLADIMIR PUTIN   (on a billboard in Moscow in January 2024)

"Borders only exist if you defend them. Otherwise they do not exist." -- GIORGIA MELONI (Not particularly original, but I'm happy to include these words by the excellent young lady who, when they were spoken -- in August 2022 -- was poised to become the Prime Minister of Italy) 

“Globalization is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become - is visibly becoming - a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.” -- PETER HITCHENS      (in June 2024)

Bores & Boredom

“It’s generally held that the best way to achieve success is to be agreeable.  But an infinite capacity to be bored gives far better results; making money as well as success with women can be adduced almost entirely to this gift.” – NICOLAS-SEBASTIEN CHAMFORT (1741-1794)

 

“The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring.” – RICHARD M. NIXON

 

“Only the high-born animals have the ability to be bored.” – FRIEDRICH NIETSCHE

 

“The threshold problem of existence is not wealth, or health, or even death, but boredom.” – EVELYN WAUGH

"No one can have any conception of what boredom really means until he has been to the tropics." -- EVELYN WAUGH     (in Central Africa, in 1930)
 

“Somewhere I have read that boredom is the torment of hell that Dante forgot”. –ALBERT SPEER (in his “Spandau: The Secret Diaries”)

 

“Something’s boring me, and I think it’s me.” – DYLAN THOMAS

 

"If you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. Journalists hate writing about boring people.” -- JON RONSON (young, er, cutting edge English journalist from Manchester)

 

“Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it has even less use for boredom.” – ROBERT ARDREY      (The great anthropologist  – and, incidentally, the screenwriter of one of the best movies of all time, “Khartoum” – was talking about some species, such as seagulls, who appear to exist for no other reason than to squabble and fight.)

 

“Before the rise of social media, if you didn't have anything interesting to say, you didn't say anything. Back then, to be seen as boring was the verbal equivalent of having bad breath or body odor. In that world, you could be a drug addict, a transsexual, an alcoholic, a thief, a liar, a psychopath – or all of the above – and no one would bat an eye. However, to be a bore was met with moral disgust. But today no one worries about boring other people – or being branded a bore.” – COSMO LANDESMAN (The British-American social hot stud about town, and writer-editor. Friend of Toby Young and at one time married to the redoubtable Julie Burchill)

 

“The truth about women is that you can do anything you want to them except bore them.” – CORMAC McCARTHY

 

“It's better to be ridiculous than boring.” – MARILYN MONROE

 

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

 

“The definition of a bore is someone who values his past more than your present.” – LLOYD EVANS

"The ability to bore is a matter of style rather than content." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy) 

“If they were smart enough to get bored, they wouldn’t be doing a job like this in the first place.” – DAVID LODGE

 

"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)

 

“There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” – ERIC HOFFER

 "There is nothing so soporific as an author's account of his career after he has got over the rough part." -- P. G. WODEHOUSE

“Only boring people get bored.” – GUY BELLAMY

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." --DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON


"Someone who continues to speak to you, while remaining unaware of the gap between how interesting they think they are, is the very essence of a bore." -- HARRY THOMPSON (a one-time BBC producer and biographer of Hérgé {Tinton} and Peter Cook)

“Although women are a major source of the word’s boredom (insisting, as they do, on a regular annual income and attendance at church, school, and dinner), they themselves are seldom bored. They seem perfectly content in situations that would reduce a male or a child to tears and yelps. A woman can spend eight hours at the beauty parlor and two additional hours fooling with her makeup, talk on the phone about nothing for six hours, follow four soap operas, shop all afternoon for something no one wants, and then complain of having ‘too much to do’.” – JOHN HUGHES (one of America’s greatest film-makers, here writing in the old NATIONAL LAMPOON, in the early 70s)

“Boredom is the root of all evil.” -- SOREN KIERKEGAARD 

"Have you bored me? Certainly not! I wasn't paying attention." -- ARISTOTLE

 

Bosses

"If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn't have a job if he was any smarter." -- RICHY RIZZO (A guy who follows me on the Twoot)

 

Boston

“Boston is the tapas of American cities: It's got everything, but nothing you want.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON       

 

“Boston is becoming an honorary borough of New York.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1987, speaking to Martin Amis.)

 

“Bourgeoisie”

“The bourgeois holds the world together for the poet.” – MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

Boxing

“Everybody in boxing makes out well except for the fighter.” – MIKE TYSON

 

“As his own opponent, he was undefeated.” – RANDY ROBERTS (on Sonny Liston)

 

“A fighter blesses himself in the corner. Will it help? Yes, if he can punch.” – JIMMY BRESLIN

 

“Boxing is a contest in which the winner seems often to be the one who inflicts more brain damage on an opponent than he himself sustains.” – DR. PETER HARVEY (English doctor who had to treat a boxer, Nick Blackwell, who got his ass handed to him, in 2016)

 

“Boxing is primitive and atavistic and also like bullfighting, it is surrounded by bullshit.” – CRAIG RAINE (writing in the UK SPECTATOR, April 2017)

 

"A Champion is someone who gets up when he can't." -- JACK DEMPSEY

 

“Bloody noses cease to be an issue once you put on gloves and begin to box in earnest.” – NORMAN MAILER (to his friend John Updike)

"Marred physiognomy and an occasional death doesn't seem an ideal life objective." -- MARIANNE MOORE (The celebrated American lady pote) 

"Why do we box? The fact is that fist-fighting is an archetypal form of combat. It's the way people fight when they're not fighting for their lives. In normal circumstances, when people fight for honor or precedence or access to females, they put their fists up -- and afterwards, the the winner is a good deal happier than the loser, they carry on living." -- SIMON BARNES

 

Boys

“Boys are different. Very like each other, and very different from girls. After three daughters, a son is a revelation. Watching him and his friends one both sees and remembers, boys want only to explore, to fight, to test, to climb, break and rearrange everything they see. They will find a way to ruin a featureless, titanium chamber.  Our American school system (public and private) is against them. It is no wonder the boys have developed or been diagnosed (which is to say marginalized) as possessing a whole alphabet full of acronyms, which may be reduced to 'I give up, drug them'.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“Boys are born to contest with the world, and if we are going to breed out of them that ability, the land is going to lie fallow.” – DAVID MAMET

 

"They are daft, teenage boys; filthy-minded, but also sensationally innocent." -- DEBORAH ROSS     (fim critic of THE SPECTATOR)

                                                                                                                                                                               

"A lot of boys have an early interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), because they're all about building stuff, blowing up stuff, and building stuff that can blow up stuff." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"Ten times a day, if you're a boy and hope to be a man, you're called upon to brace yourself, to make a greater effort, to show courage you don't really possess. Ten times a day you're terrified that once again going to reveal your weakness, your cowardliness, your general lack of character and unfitness for man's estate." -- MICHAEL FRAYN (in his 2002 novel "Spies")                                                                                                                  

 

“Boys are never happier or more alive than when they’re together outdoors doing man stuff. The ultimate paradigm of this is war.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

                                                                                                                                                                               

"Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout 'Bang!'" – the late GEORGE WILL

 

"Schoolboys see the adult world with the delighted, faintly hostile astonishment of the tourist." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

                                                                                                                                                                               

"Whatever a boy happens to be doing, his father will surely want him to be doing something else. Even if the boy can fit in both things, his father will try to stop him." -- ERIC JACOBS         (Kingsley Amis’ biographer)

"What’s the difference between boys & men? The price of their toys!" -- SEBASTIAN GORKA

"The conspiracy of imagined speed and triumphant violence that boys erect around themselves like a tent in the back yard under the scary stars." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

Boys and Girls

“My teenage son told me once that he had never doubted that girls are brilliant in every way, but the never-ending hymn of praise made him wonder if there is supposed to be something wrong with boys.” – LEANDA DE LISLE (English “country lady” and writer)

 

“When happy, little boys jump and start hitting things with sticks; little girls do a dance.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Little boys stay little boys till they’re forty-something; little girls’re  just sawed-off women.” – JOSEPH WAMBAUGH

Bravery

"The deed is all, not the glory." -- EDWARD C. BYERS JR.        (Navy SEAL, Medal Of Honor recipient)

 

“It is by acting bravely that we become brave.” – ARISTOTLE (seems self-evident, but, like bravery itself, it's not.)

 

“Brave isn't something that people are. It's how people, (sometimes), act.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold." -- JOHN LEONARD        (movie critic 1939-2008)

“I don't ask you to be unafraid, simply to act unafraid.” – GENERAL CHARLES GEORGE “CHINESE” GORDON      (of “Khartoum!” fame)

"Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid." -- COL. DAVID HACKWORTH

Brazil

“Brazil – it’s the country of the future, and always will be.” – CHARLES DEGAULLE

 

“Brazil is not a serious country.” (“Le Brésil n'est pas un pays sérieux”) – CHARLES DE GAULLE

 

“There are two kinds of Brazilians: the depressed and the really depressed.” – NIALL FERGUSON

 

“Brazil is not for beginners.” – ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM

 

Brevity

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." – BLAISE PASCAL (French  philosopher and polymath, 1623-1662)

 

“If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn." – ROBERT SOUTHEY (English pote 1774-1843)

 

“Brexit”

“Almost all of the economic arguments for membership of the EU are based on fear of freedom. It is, unfortunately, a powerful emotion.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

"The Brexit question is a classic example of something which is simple but not easy. It is 'Do you want to be ruled by those you can choose, or by those you can't choose?' Voters understood this and gave a clear answer. Clever people kept complicating it."-- CHARLES MOORE


"In the blame game, how much should the full Brexiteers be criticized? Only really, for one thing. When they won the referendum, they folded their tents and went home. If they lose -- and it is completely unclear who will win -- it will be for this reason. Remain 'took back control'." -- CHARLES MOORE (in March 2019)

 

“If the majority of Mps do in the end block Brexit, they will indeed have abdicated their role as representatives upon which their legitimacy rests.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

"We are with Europe, but not of it; we are linked but not compromised. We are associated but not absorbed. If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (1953 )

 

“This rebellion wasn't caused by racism or a paroxysm of infantile anger. It was considered. The workers spied an opportunity to take the elite that despises them down a peg or two – and they seized it. They asserted their power, and in the process, blimey: they changed the world.” – BRENDAN O'NEILL (writing in the  UK SPECTATOR)

 

“I don't see why we can't just get out. What's the problem?” – QUEEN ELIZABETH II (Just before the referendum on 23 June 2016)

 

"Brexit is the best move Britain has made since Trafalgar." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Geologists have discovered a land bridge that once ran from Dover to Calais and deep into Cheeseland, until the Almighty decreed Brexit. All this may have taken place a very long time ago, 450,000 years or so, but it's proof that God never wanted Britain to be part of Europe. End of story, you atheist, tantrum-throwing dilettantes, you preening, foul-smelling youths, you uninformed, lefty, combed-over BBC caricatures of real people. You've lost, so move to Brussels, share your wives and girlfriends with transsexual Belgian couples, take orders from the malodorous Jean-Claude, and like it.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“The British people had decided that they no longer wished to be led by and take orders from a peanut-vendor from Muxembourg called Jean-Claude Asshole. Yippee!” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"I'd rather be a poor master than a rich servant." -- MICHAEL CAINE

 

"Up until I was 20, I thought Luxembourg was a radio station. I didn't even know it was a country, and now he's running my country, and he doesn't seem to like us." -- MICHAEL CAINE


“Negotiating Brexit is like negotiating a divorce settlement with 27 ex-wives.” – NIALL FERGUSON

 

“The people vote and, you know, they have to get on with it. Suddenly it's like 'Oh, well, we didn't like that vote'. What do you mean don't like that vote? You had that vote, this is what won, let's get on with it. I voted for Brexit, yeah, I voted to get out. (But don't tell Bob Geldof.) I think it's a great move. I think, you know, to be in control of your own country, is a good move.” – RINGO STARR

 

“If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“The problem is the mismatch between those who lost but still control how we leave, while mostly thinking Brexit is a terrible idea.” – HELENA MORRISSEY (the head of personal investing at something called “Legal & General Investment Management”, in July 2018)

 

“The disruption caused by no deal would be temporary, but a bad Brexit deal could linger for years, destabilising and defiling British politics.” – JAMES FORSYTH (the editor of the SPECCIE, in Nov. 2018)

 

“By an overwhelming majority, MPs legislated to let the public decide. But ever since the voters returned the opposite answer to what the Commons was expecting, MPs have struggled to come to terms with the result. Too many of them have been preoccupied with neutering or overturning it rather than making it work.” – JAMES FORSYTH (December 2018)

 

“A government class that was largely horrified by the decision, approached it as a damage limitation exercise rather than as an opportunity.” – JAMES FORSYTH (December 2018)

 

“You can only deliver Brexit if you believe in Brexit.” – THERESA MAY (pity she didn’t listen to herself...)

 

“23 June 2016 – a mass outpouring of anger at the ruling elite in Britain and Brussels, a passion for a nation state and sovereignty, a long weariness over immigration and a great disdain for the well-heeled liberal establishment that believes Leave voters are ill-educated racist scum who should shut up and get back in their boxes, to their call centers or wherever it is they work these days. If they work.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“What we voted for does not matter because they will not let it happen. We have endured two years of hysteria, bed-wetting and tantrums from our masters, our defeated masters. There have been threats, dire predictions, spiteful calumnies flung at those who dared to vote in a way with which they did not agree.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“Leaving a trade organisation is not, in reality, a terribly troublesome business. Nevertheless, we have made it so.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“Brexit has been handed over to an institution that is opposed to Brexit by a majority of more than two to one, so I’m not absolutely certain that, within this milieu, doing everything you possibly can to thwart the will of the people is necessarily brave. Especially not when there is a Speaker who wants to stop Brexit, a House of Lords that wants to stop Brexit and a broadcast media that wants to stop Brexit, all situated in a city that wants to stop Brexit.” – ROD LIDDLE

"Is there anyone who, when alone, with the lights low and the curtains closed, really believes that Britain will stay in the EC?" -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London -- already in 1992!) 

“Brexiteers in Britain and the Trump administration in the U.S. recognize the EU as, like Nazi Germany and the USSR, a misbegotten imperial project – an ideologically rooted effort, conceived and driven by an arrogant and self-regarding elite, that has steadily encroached on individual liberties, steadily weakened economies, and steadily evolved into something that looks increasingly like a suicide pact. If twentieth-century Europe was almost destroyed by various totalitarianisms, twenty-first-century Europe now risks destruction either at the hands of Islamic totalitarianism, to which the EU honchos have kowtowed for two generations, or at the hands of the burgeoning totalitarianism of the EU itself. Or both. ‘Europe as an idea,’ Bernard-Henri Lévy tells us, ‘is falling apart before our eyes.’ Good.” – BRUCE BAWER

 

“It is now clear that the Brexit vote and the Trump election are hugely important milestones in both democracies, not because of what has or has not been achieved but because both constitute the first democratic mandate in either country that an elite in each country has refused to accept.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in January, 2019)

 

“Brexit was a mutiny. Like all mutinies, it was driven by anger at authority rather than by a strategy for the future.” – PAUL COLLIER (author of “The Future Of Capitalism)

 

"The problem with Brexit is that parliament is not designed to do what the people have commanded it to. MPs feel their job is to construct their own manifesto and deliver on that, not on something foisted upon them by an ignorant public in the name of 'popular sovereignty'." -- PETER JONES      (of the SPECCIE, in March 2019)                               

 

“After the patronizing idea that no Leavers knew what they were voting for, I simply say this:  they all assumed voting Leave meant ‘leaving the European Union’, as stated on the ballot paper, not partly staying in it. So the much-scorned ‘crashing out with no deal’ option is most in line with what people probably thought they were getting.” – PIERS MORGAN

 

“Whatever the Prime Minister had in mind when she first declared "Brexit means Brexit", it obviously doesn't mean leaving the European Union. Either through malice or stupidity or condescension, the political class opted to widen its breach with the people.” – MARK STEYN (in May 2019, after the disastrous “European elections”)

 

“The House can in accordance with the constitution be deprived of power [when] there is fair reason to suppose that the opinion of the House is not the opinion of the electors.” – A.V. DICEY (1835-1922, he said this in 1885. He was a leading Constitutional Jurist of his day)

 

“The serfs are thinking for themselves and their betters don’t like it.” – STEPHEN DAISLEY (a British political journalist, in Sept. 2019)

 

"It may come as a surprise, but many African political systems today would never tolerate the sorts of things that are currently going on in the United Kingdom." --AIDAN HARTLEY (A pro-Brexit Brit who lives in Kenya, in 5 October 2019, and he’s referring to the anti-Brexit manoeuvres by Parliament in 2019)

 

"Remainers are accustomed to having their own way." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“When Boris was confronted by businessmen angry with Brexit, his response, capturing the popular mood, was ‘Fuck business’.” – TIM STANLEY

 

Brezhnev

“What we have,  we keep.” – LEONID BREZHNEV (This folks, was the first half of the famous “Brezhnev Doctrine”, the second half of which was “...and what's yours is up for grabs”.)

 

“Broadway”

“Broadway, which is perhaps the most gay- and transgender-friendly major institution in our culture.” – KYLE SMITH

 

Brooklyn

“I don't know Brooklyn. No one does, really. People always go there and never come back. Lotsa streets in Brooklyn nobody ever heard of, like Funyew-Ogstein-Crypt Boulevard.” – MARK HELPRIN

 

“Get a train to Brooklyn. It's a complicated borough to begin with: the subway map is merely theoretical, a starting point for the endless hidden agenda of breakdowns, reroutings, and service interruptions. Then, Billyburg. Boho heaven. Sidewalk anarchists, PhD waitresses, organic-vegetarian soup kitchens, coffeehouse Commies, the Feminists That Time Forgot. Give it up for the twenty-six-year-old hipsters whose trust funds free them to live their lives in quotation marks, faithful parishioners at the church of irony, people who moved to Brooklyn because they're so downtown that downtown wasn't downtown enough for them. Even the dogs seems vaguely political. All those newspaper articles written by imported-car-buying white people about how much they hate oppressive genocidal imperialist globalist white people? They're written here.” – KYLE SMITH

"Heading to a place I’ve heard people call 'Brooklyn', wish me luck. Have just learned that in order to get there you literally have to take the L. North 7th Street, what is that. A street is east or west. Brooklyn is Dutch for Land of Men With Shrubbery-Beards." -- KYLE SMITH  (on a return trip, in November 2022)

Brotherhood

"Your dad wakes you up one night and tells you 'Your mother wasn't really fat' and 'This isn't your room any more'." -- CHARLIE SHEEN (as Charlie Harper, of course, in “2 1/2 Men”, but I can’t find the writer of that episode, so Sheen said it....)

Buddhism

“Buddhism is the least religious of religions. In its pure form, its doctrines are atheist.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

Budget, The U.S. Federal

“Let’s face it, budgeting is boring, or at least it’s supposed to be.”  – DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN (former Director of the Congressional Budget Office)

Bullfighting

“College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.” – ELBERT HUBBARD (the early 20th century American "writer, artist and philosopher")

 

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” – ERNEST HEMINGWAY

 

“In Barcelona on Sunday I went to my first and last bull fight. I was fortunate enough to secure a seat in the front row – and it was all too lovely. I saw fine horses gored to death and three bulls baited and finally murdered in the course of a half an hour, after which I left charmed and awed by the sportsmanship and refinement of the Spanish Nation.” – NOEL COWARD (in 1925)

 

“Bullfighting is about the only thing left that keeps Spain from being Sweden. There is nothing like it in the world.” – BRUCE SCHOENFELD (in the AMSPEC, August 2005)

 

“A contrived, composite ritual of the Christian and Mithraic sacrifices. Sometimes the man is gored and disembowelled. He offers himself to God. Sometimes it is the bull. But the horses always suffer.” – ANTHONY BURGESS (referring to bullfighting in the time of Cervantes, when perhaps the bull didn’t always die – I dunno. But this is from his short story, “A Meeting In Valladolid”)

Bullies (-ying)

“We need bullies. Pressure makes diamonds. Not hugs." -- CHRIS ROCK

"We need bullies. How the fuck you gonna have a school without bullies? Bullies do half the work. Teachers do one half, bullies do the whole other half. And that’s the half you’re gonna use if you’re a fucking grownup. Who gives a fuck if you can code if you cry because your boss doesn’t say ‘Hi’? You think people were nice to Bill Gates in high school? “Hey, Gates, you Charlie Brown–looking motherfucker!” -- CHRIS ROCK

 

“We will rue the day we all decided bullying was a bad thing. The consequence is that the inept, the imbecilic and the perpetually frit will hang onto their jobs and we will become a much less efficient country. By bullying I do not mean physically beating someone up and stealing their lunch money, which is what it used to mean when it had a proper meaning. I mean telling someone they’re useless and deserve to be sacked, which is what bullying means today.” – ROD LIDDLE (in Feb. 2020.)

 

“All bullies become more and more irritated by their victim’s acquiescence in being bullied, which inclines on to bully all the more.” – STEPHEN FRY

"Bullies are necessary in a Darwinian world. Now that they’ve been outlawed, abnormal adaptations have weakened the species." -- DREW BRODY    (a guy on the Twoot -- and that's one way of looking at it, anyway...)


 

Bullshit

"You should know that if anybody wears pins that say whatever program 'works' you can take it as an assumption that it doesn't work. You don't see military people saying 'Machine guns work!'." -- NICHOLAS ZILL (American author and researcher at the URBAN INSTITUTE)

 

“You know, I actually believe my own bullshit.” – BARACK OBAMA      (To NEWSWEEK reporter, author, Richard Wolffe)

 

“Nothing in life is absolute, except absolute bullshit.” – JACK JOLIS

"I think the CIA, the FBI, and the government in general should always try out their bullshit on bartenders, barbers and taxi drivers before they try to sell it to the country." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"Empty phrases sound like philosophy if you say them with sufficient confidence." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

 “We have the enormous power of bullshit, using bullshit in the political science sense, as a technical term meaning ‘political science’.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

"Sure, you can say a lot of it's crap. A lot of anything is crap." -- JIM GERAGHTY (Words to live by. Actually, NRO's Brother Geraghty was referring to the aggregate amount of  “news" available on W's Interwebs, but the larger point stands)

 

“The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” – HARRY FRANKFURT (a philosophy professor and something of a maven on the subject to hand, as he's also the author of a book called “On Bullshit”)

 

“(Sturgeon's Law): Ninety percent of everything is crap.” – THEODORE STURGEON (The noted American science-fiction writer enunciated his “law” in 1958)

 

“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” --  W.C. FIELDS (1880-1946. Always worked for me....)

 

"For 95 per cent of jobs, if you can't learn to bluff it in a year, you probably shouldn't being doing it at all." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Something the consulting firms understood all too well is the role played by justifying bullshit in the modern economy. For every hour of economically productive work, ten must be spent in senseless activity to maintain the illusion that what you are doing is more difficult and labor-intensive than it really is.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

                                                                                                                                                                                       

“You can’t go building a bullsh** farm and plant it thickly with bullsh** and then act surprised when there’s bullsh** under foot.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON     (his aster**ks)        

 

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough,we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you've given a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." -- CARL SAGAN (he could have been talking about the "election" of 2020, except that he died in 1996)

Bureaucracy

“As their trust in me grew, I gave them my darker secrets of operational success: chiefly, to obey the spirit of the law, not the letter. All of my successful ops had involved tricking the bureaucracy. I’d led the bureaucracy to think that operations were much less dangerous than they really were. I’d contacted targets without permission; I avoided the dreaded layers of managers whenever possible. Had I followed the rulebook to a T, I don’t think I’d have had a single successful operation.” -- ISHMAEL JONES (The pseudonym of an excellent CIA case officer and the author of “The Human Factor”)

 

“It is never in the interest of the bureaucrat to solve any problem whatsoever.  Indeed, he regards any solution as a threat to his job and therefore his mortgage repayments.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (The pseudonym of the English M.D. and author Anthony Daniels.)

 

“If you go into an average government office you will at once be struck by the look of intense worry on everyone’s face.  It is as if a furrowed brow were a token of deep public responsibility. Were earnestness a guarantee of efficiency, Britain would have the finest public services in the world.  Alas, such earnestness is a guarantee of nothing except lack of sense of humour.  And a very high proportion of public servants know perfectly well that they are parasites, that their so-called work would be much better left undone, and that it is nothing but outdoor relief for the unimaginatively ambitious, which is why their earnestness is combined with furtiveness and an inability to look you in the eye.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“America is an intensely bureaucratic country, where everything has to be signed for in triplicate and half the population is permanently on hold. Bring back the three-martini lunch, I say.” – WALTER ELLIS (a “freelance writer living in New York, although I suspect he’s a Brit. Although if he is, he ought to know that American bureaucracy is like Churchill’s democracy – the worst in the world except for all the rest.  Although he’s perfectly sound on the mythical three-martini-lunch….)

 

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the actual costs and benefits of existing federal regulations with accuracy. We lack good information about complex interactions between the different regulations and the economy.” --  (THE U.S. FEDERAL) OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET (as part of a public acknowledgment in June 2000, and this rather stunning statement should be -- SHOULD be, mind you, nothing about WILL be – salutary reading to all paranoiacs out there who persist in believing in the “conspiracy theory” of government…)

 

“The main, and in many cases the sole, aim of most public servants is to keep their jobs by obeying orders. The public be damned.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“The main purpose for holding a top job in the public sector must be to retire from it.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“As I see it, the battle against state bureaucratic power is like housework. We don't ever 'get anywhere' but my goodness it is so much worse if we don't try." -- ELISABETH PASCOE (An English grandmother from the outskirts of Liverpool whose "Victorian home" in a Westville (NJ)-like neighborhood called "Edge Lane West" was just bulldozed to make way for the construction of a new "housing complex" by something called "Bellway Homes", after a 4-year losing battle against the "eminent domain" thuggery of the local and national left-wing (Labour) governments.)

 

“The French revolutionary intellectuals and merchants who founded the modern state  spoke of political equality. But they knew that if the masses governed, they might well have guillotined them rather than the nobles and the priests. And so, they set up, and Napoleon perfected, a system of government that consisted of bureaucracy.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

"Crap is now our lifeline. As bureaucrats have always known, dealing in overcomplicated matters makes people feel important and powerful." -- FLORENCE KING (in 2006)

 

“I have learned two things: 1/ A federal bureaucracy must either grow or die; and 2/ a federal bureaucracy never dies.” – FRED  SCHWARZ (the Deputy Managing Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, in Sept.  2009)

 

"The primary purpose of every jobs program is to create jobs for the people who run the program. No Bureaucrat Left Behind!" -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“My visit to the British Museum started me thinking about ancient civilizations, and it struck me once more that bureaucracy (rather that prostitution) is the oldest profession. Writing was not invented for poets, but to make it easier to collect taxes.” – MARTIN GAYFORD (English artist, art historian, and author on art, writing in March 2010)

 

“It is an inviolable law of bureaucracies that bureaucrats don't get sacked; everyone else does instead.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“In New York and California and many other places, sexual license is about the only thing you don't need a license for.” – MARK STEYN

 

“Bureaucracy (if it is not openly corrupt) stops the world, or least the economy, from going round.” -- MARK STEYN

 

“American government is not noted for its sense of proportion. This is a bureaucracy whose Fish and Wildlife agents fine an eleven-year-old Virginia schoolgirl $535 for the crime of rescuing a woodpecker from a cat and nursing him back to health; whose National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agents threaten a marine biologist with twenty years in jail over whistling at a whale; whose Food and Drug Administration agents want a hundred grand in fines from some onanistic weirdo in Fremont who gives away his sperm to infertile couples.” -- MARK STEYN

 

“If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"The great parasitic class in the United States isn't the people receiving welfare checks but the people writing them, the vast array of desk-occupiers, time-servers and pornography enthusiasts who consume the public payroll." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

 “Conquest's Third Law of Politics:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” – ROBERT CONQUEST

 

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

"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

  

“.  .  . vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“Secrecy is part of the currency of bureaucratic life, there to be traded. The only way to keep them is not to tell them until they rust, when no one is interested.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“As always with bureaucracies, no one carries the can for something that everyone is involved in.” – ALAN JUDD

 

"The weakness of all dictatorships is that they are vast bureaucracies. What is not on file does not exist." -FREDERICK FORSYTH (1971)

 

“French red tape, compared to which that of which Great Britain and America is only pinkish. Where in the matter of rules and regulations London and New York merely scratch the surface, these Gauls plumb the depths. It is estimated that a French minor official, with his heart really in his work, can turn more hairs grey, and have more clients tearing those hairs than any six of his opposing numbers on the pay rolls of other nations.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

 

“There was surely some law of thermodynamics expressive not of chaos theory but of continuous reversion to comfortable stasis.” – ALAN JUDD

 

"Could Walt Disney create Disneyland today? From ground break to ribbon cutting in nine months. You couldn’t get a permit to cut one orange tree in that time today." – GLENN BECK (in May 2018)

 

"Red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful." – DONALD TRUMP

 

"Desks win in the end." -- ALAN JUDD

 

“There is a rule by which all public institutions gradually evolve so as to be run for the exclusive benefit of those that work within them and take no account of any direct external purpose.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

"Don't knock cipher clerks. Like any other branch of the bureaucracy, all the work's done low on the food chain. Everyone else just has meetings." -- MICK HERRON

"It seemed to me, and it still seems to me, that there should be more to life than fighting governments." -- ANTHONY BURGESS                                                                                                                                                                                

“Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” – JACK WELCH      (the long-time, legendary generalissimo of General Electric)

 

"A black hole of bureaucracy has been created, sucking every aspect of government accountability into its dense and incomprehensible abyss." -- P. J. O'ROURKE      (On 20 June 2020)

"It's not saying no that's the problem: it's saying yes slowly." -- MATT RIDLEY

"When all the crises are over, it is officialdom that really rules the world." -- ALAN MOOREHEAD 

“We often associate bureaucracy with the public sector, or Soviet communism, but it is everywhere. All it takes for a bureaucracy to form is the requirement for two people not in the same place at the same time to ratify a decision.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

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

"We usually attack bureaucracy because it's wasteful. This is letting it off too lightly. The much bigger problem is that it destroys the most interesting forms of innovation." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"If  there is a conservative failing, it is our noble, but long-term strategic failure to seed our federal bureaucracy with talent." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.    

                                                                                                                                  

Buses

“If, at the age of 26, a man should find himself on a bus, he can count himself a failure in life.” – MARGARET THATCHER (a bit rough, perhaps, but… consider the source…)

 

“Buses are for sad people.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (ex- Conservative English MP, journalist, and poof.  And, as for the above, me, I’d say rather that it’s buses that make people sad, but I’m not going to quote myself in this volume…)

"Waiting for a bus is about as thrilling as fishing, with the similar tantalisation that something, sometime, somehow will turn up." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

"Where there's buses, there's hanging around." -- WILL WILES (the English novelist)

"The point of being famous is that you don’t ride the bus, (aka Walmart-on-wheels)." -- MARGARET MITCHELL      (Not the "Gone With The Wind" wahine, but rather an English journalist, in June 2024)


      

         

Bush, George H.W.

“What can I do to put backbone into this man?” – MARGARET THATCHER (Reported by the legendary “maverick” Labour, then Independent English MP Frank Field, to  who she said this.)

Bush, George  W.

“Bush is the modern enemy of convolution.  If there is ambiguity alive in his system, it has resisted lifetime energies at extirpating it.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

“This is much to Mr. Bush’s credit: To an anti-American, he is the archetype, the quintessential American.  He is Mr. America, America personified, even caricatured. He brings out all the envy, fear, and emotional anxiety which lies at the root of the anti-American disease.” – PAUL JOHNSON

 

“Tony Blair with a ranch.” – MARK STEYN

 

“History will decide whether George W. Bush was a successful President. But he was faithful. He had a charge to keep and he kept it.”  -- JIM TOWEY (President of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, PA.,and an ex White House Director for Inter-Faith Something or Other,  in Nov 08.)

 

“(George W.) Bush was as good as it was going to get.” – JOHN PODHORETZ

" 'I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.'  With this profound understanding of politics and leadership, he (George W. Bush) declared war -- but against nobdy in particular." -- ANGELO  M. CODEVILLA 

Business

“My law of the financial cycle says that things go wrong when the last man who can remember what happened last time has retired.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES (wrote the “City and Suburban” column for the UK Spectator)

 

“Leroy's Second Rule, whether you like it or not - never take on the government as a private corporation; you will lose, even when they do as well.” – LEROY W. SINCLAIR (my old fraternity brother, pal, mentor, and one of the few good, i.e., sane, Democrats I’ve ever had the pleasure of “discussing” with… I forgot to ask him what his First Rule was....)

 

“The only good committee is a committee of one.” – KEN FOREMAN (the CEO of Attwoods, the UK’s biggest garbage Co. Reminds me of the old Pollock joke: a guy’s pushing a cart down a Polish town street yelling “Garbage? Any  Garbage?” And a woman leans out a window and yells “Yes please – I’ll take 2 bags, please!”)

 

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. – ADAM SMITH (fairly well-known, but essential anyway....)

 

“Just because business thrives under capitalism doesn’t mean businessmen are necessarily principled capitalists. Businessmen – at least those at the helm of very large corporations – do not like risk, and capitalism by definition requires risk. Capital must be put to work in a market where nothing is assured. But businessmen are, by nature and training, encouraged to beat back uncertainty and risk. Hence, as a group, they aren’t principled capitalists but opportunists in the most literal sense.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"’Government’ is just a word for things we do together. ‘Corporation’ is just a word for things we do together voluntarily.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large." — THOMAS SOWELL

 

“It is my contention that the airlines and Time-Warner Cable have done more to advance the cause of Communism in these United States than all of the Ivy League radicals and Hollywood reds combined.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"If you want to fly around on someone else's jet, be a CEO. If you want to fly around on your own jet, start the company." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them, because sooner or later one will." – WARREN BUFFETT

 

“Fundamentally, there are only two kinds of industry. There is the insurance industry, to protect us against something going horribly wrong, and there is the entertainment industry, which distracts us from the fact something will soon go horribly wrong. Everything else is just an elaborate variant of one or both of these two businesses.” – JACQUES ATTALI (Twentieth Century French economist, author and civil servant)

 

“Costs are like fingernails, you have to cut them constantly.” -- CARLOS ALBERTO SICUPIRA   (One of Brazil's biggest businessmen, born in 1948)

 

“It is useful rule of thumb that any business which reduces its name to its initials is heading for trouble.” -- MARTIN VANDER WEYER (the SPECTATOR's business columnist, in May 2016)

 

“Why should businesses pay tax at all? That’s a provocative but forlorn question. Business pays corporation tax on profits because that’s what voters expect, partly because many are conditioned to believe profit is a sin and partly because all would prefer to pay less tax themselves.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER

 

"Retailers don't make money on customer satisfaction. They make money on customer dissatisfaction." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (D'oh! -- because they buy something else)


"Ever since the UK adopted American business culture, less and less time seems to be spent being usefully busy than on fatuous activities designed to advertise just how insanely busy you are." – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Something the consulting firms understood all too well is the role played by justifying bullshit in the modern economy. For every hour of economically productive work, ten must be spent in senseless activity to maintain the illusion that what you are doing is more difficult and labor-intensive than it really is.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“And herein lies one magic quality of business: It is only area of human activity where you get paid to change your mind. And when everyone else zigs, it pays to zag.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Most businesses exist in a permanent state of disruption.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Business is the opposite of politics, where the system overall is dumber than the people within it.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"The media depiction of business is of nothing more than a vehicle for greed: yet free markets are also the greatesst problem-solving mechanism ever devised. Granted, a lot of business people seem stupid. That doesn't matter, because the system is clever. (In academia, the people are clever, but the system is stupid.)" -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"Genuinely productive people now form a minority in any organisation.... The chief preoccupation of the modern organisation is the collation of numbers. Any money left over will be used to hire even more people in bogus administrative roles, largely as a reputational firebreak for the executive team, who are much more motivated by fear of scandal than by satisfying customers." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“There is only one surefire way to succeed in business: make something people want, make it well, and make it in one size.” – DAVID LODGE

 

“Crackpot ideas that used to be confined to neo-Marxist professors in grievance studies departments have been enthusiastically embraced by the giants of capitalism. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola are all on board and anyone who publicly challenges this new orthodoxy is not merely endangering their chances of promotion, but at risk of being fired.” – TOBY YOUNG (in March 2019)

"I have two rules: never do business with any country that has green in its flag or where they don't wear overcoats in winter. They have stood me in pretty good stead." -- SIR BENJAMIN SLADE (Chairman of something called Shirlstar Container Transport Co., in 1995)


"It never works to take two unhappy companies and blend them into a bigger pile of misery." -- MARTIN VANDER WEYER

"You can judge a company by the quality of its acronyms." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

“I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way." – LEE IACOCCA

"All business is modeled on the structure of the doughnut shop -- the guys who make the doughnuts and the guys who sell the doughnuts. Everything else is overhead." -- NEAL B. FREEMAN

"We often assume that organisations which make money are officered by men of wisdom, cultivation and plain common sense." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (referring sarcastically to movie production companies) 

"They're not called anything. Research shows that things without a name scarcely ever get complained about." -- MILES KINGTON

 

“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

"You must always know when to pull out. A businessman isn't a mathematician. Never become hypnotized by the beauty of numbers. A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he's got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

" 'Le client n'a jamais tort' ('The customer is never wrong') said the hotelier César Ritz (died 1918) and he made a fortune. But the more common attitude among today's business owners is to regard customers not as kings who are never wrong but as potential muggers, racists and a thoroughly dodgy lot." -- QUENTIN LETTS     (a DAILY MAIL columnist, in Jan. 2024) 

“The best deals are made by the guy who’s least hungry.” – RALPH SCHNEIDER (An executive at Diners Club, Inc., to his friend Matty Simmons, the NATIONAL LAMPOON honcho.)

 

“Nobody traveling on a business trip would ever be missed if he did not arrive.” – THORSTEIN VEBLEN (The leftist Norwegian-American economist, 1857-1929, and certainly NOT a businessman)

 

Business, Big

“The Republican Party is the party of small business, not big business, because big business doesn't have a party.” – HALEY BARBOUR (the Republican then-governor of Mississippi.)

 

"The multinational (company) is in the position of the bank robber in the old West; all he has to do is ride straight and hard to be safe, because the posse can't cross the border." – DONAL WESTLAKE

 

“Most things don’t exist. The Ford Motor Company hardly exists. It’s just a time-saving expression for a collection of financial interests.” – JESSE ARMSTRONG (the screenwriter for the final Episode 10 of Season 2 of the TV blockbuster series “Succession”, as spoken by the patriarch tycoon Logan Roy.)

 

"Nike is a brand that is of China and for China" --JOHN DONAHOE (Nike CEO, on 25 June 2021)

 

Business, (“E-business”)

"The biggest obstacle to the growth of e-commerce is not how good it is when things go well, it's how bad it is when they don't." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Business, (“Minding One's Own”)

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." -- ERIC HOFFER      (The famous anti-leftist longshoreman-philosopher who was a lonely voice of sanity from the 40s through the 80s. Reagan gave him the Medal of Freedom in '83)

 

“Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” -- CALVIN COOLIDGE

 

"If you are on God's business, you got no time to be in anybody else's business!" -- THE REV. J. D. HOLMES (A preacher in Murphy, Cherokee County, NC, as quoted by Denis Johnson in his essay "Run, Rudolph, Run", in 1996.)

 

“Business Taxes”

“When you tax a business, you are taxing the owners, the employees, and the customers of the business.” – MARK STEYN

“Businesses never pay taxes, they only collect them.” – RONALD REAGAN

 

Butlers

"But if you want comfort and convenience that's the solution, marry your butler." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

Buttigieg, Pete

“Butt-edge -edge is America’s Teacher’s Pet.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“Buttigieg isn’t really Mayor Pete. He’s Saint Pete. He’s Credential Man.” – KYLE SMITH