H

Habit

“What does man achieve? Nothing except habits.” – V. S. PRITCHETT (in 1942)

"Habits stick to lonely men like barnacles to boats." -- LAURENCE SHAMES

"The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken." -- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

Habitat, (Natural)

"The Eskimos have the Arctic. The Pygmies have their jungle. The rain-forest Indians have or have had their rain forest. My co-op on Riverside Drive is very nice, and the view is quite pleasant, but no, I wouldn't call it my natural habitat. Maybe white people no longer have natural habitats." -- STEVE TESICH

Habsburgs, The

“As is the case with so many useful conservative institutions, the Habsburg empire worked in practice rather than in theory.” – SAM LEITH

"The Habsburgs were a remarkably hideous gang, if their busts and portraits are accurate. It seems as if God had designed them to be caricatures. If I'd been any of the monarchs who had been thus portrayed, I'd have lopped the artists' heads off." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog") 

Haiti

“Haiti is so relentlessly depressing that it tires you out. Haiti makes Burundi resemble a holiday destination. Haiti is the permanent emergency.” – AIDAN HARTLEY

“Haiti is the Job of the New World.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“Haiti might be the only place where death with dignity entails being buried five-to-a-cardboard coffin.” – MATT LABASH

“If Haiti, a God awful thing to say, if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn't matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.” – SEN. JOE BIDEN (the great statesman, in 1994 – and he didn’t even make any sense, even back then... I mean, “...sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet” – that’s not even English....)

"We call New York City the Port-Au-Prince of America." -- ERIC ADAMS    (the idiot-Mayor said this in  March 2024, and a better poitical epitaph than this I cannot imagine)

Haley, Nikki

"Nikki Haley is like canned spinach: we're told that we have to like it. We're told that it's good for us. But nobody actually likes it." -- EMERALD ROBINSON (NEWSMAX White House Correspondent, Feb.2021)

"Nikki Haley is the media, Democrats, and establishment’s favorite Republican for a reason." -- MARK LEVIN

Halloween

"Halloween is simply the night when it’s most socially acceptable to act eleven." -- KYLE SMITH

“Hamptons, The”

" ‘Still, it’s the Hamptons.’

'That coffee will be $6, sir.'

'Do you take bearer bonds?'

'Sure.’

'Okay,' he says, pulling the bonds out of an old briefcase.

'They’re Swiss,' she says, 'and too new.  We only accept Swiss bearer bonds with maturities of 30 years or more'.”

-- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

Happiness

“Happiness isn’t easy.” – WENDY COPE (an English lady writer and considered to be, by some, a “wit”.)

“On my travels I’ve observed that the pricier the watering hole, the less likely vacationers are to look happy.” – JULIE BURCHILL

“My philosophy has always been that disillusion is the only safe foundation for happiness.” – GEORGE SANTAYANA (the great American philosopher. I shoulda put this under PESSIMISM.  Or, better yet, WISDOM)

“There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.  Much would be gained if, through timely advice and instruction, all young people could have eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.” – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

“Those are only happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.” – JOHN STUART MILL

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” –  JOHN STUART MILL (same as the above, only shorter.)

“Blissful happiness is not conducive to inventiveness. If we were content in the world, would we be moved to write great novels? The most inventive are at odds with the world and themselves.” – ANTHONY STORR (Dr. Storr was here speaking to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in 1999)

“Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” – EVELYN WAUGH

“Misery is the natural and inescapable condition of man. That is why the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once wrote a paper in The Lancet proposing that happiness be classified as a disease. Not only is it statistically aberrant, but it leads to disastrous consequences (proposals of marriage, for example) and is grossly inappropriate to man’s true situation.”  -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE, M.D.

“What is it with happiness, anyway? It’s like being thin; everybody wants it, no one can have it.” – ALEX BEAM

“Restlessness is discontent – and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man – and I will show you a failure.” -- THOMAS EDISON

“Happiness is hard to attain; harder to maintain; and hardest of all to recognize. Pick the time of your life when you know you were happiest. You didn't know how happy you were at the time.” P. J. O'ROURKE

“Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.” – THOMAS CARLYLE

"The secret of a happy life is to have no secrets." -- CHARLES McCARRY     (even if true, is there such a thing as a human being without secrets?)

"Happiness is in part a matter of being absolutely clueless." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

"You're only as happy as your unhappiest kid." -- BERNARD MCGUIRK (the late conservative talk radio giant, speaking to his WABC colleague Frank Morano)

 “You are mistaken. Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his wives weeping and wailing, ride his horse, and use the bodies of his daughters as bedclothes.” – GENGHIS KHAN (Upon being told that the very apotheosis of “happiness” was, of all things, falconry.)

“Until a man is dead, keep the word 'happy' in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky.” – SOLON (the 6th Century B.C. Athenian statesman)

“I think happiness research is interesting. I am still thinking through how it should inform policymakers. The idea of a government actively trying to make people happier gives me the willies. I don't want the federal family getting into that business too actively. At the same time, I'd like to see it get out of the habit of making people unhappier.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“May we always be happy, and may our enemies always know it.” – SARAH PALIN

“If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” -- MONTESQUIEU (he was actually The Baron de Montesquieu -- his real name was Charles Louis de Secondat.) 

“The truly happy man is the one who makes five dollars a week more than his brother-in-law.” – H.L. MENCKEN

“We either makes ourselves happy or miserable, the amount of work is the same.” – CARLOS CASTANEDA (The Peruvian fabulist, not to say bullshit artist, 1925-1998)

“You have to accept limited happiness because all happiness is limited, and to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with the joy.” – ELIA KAZAN

"There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is either to have a clear conscience, or none at all" -- OGDEN NASH

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- OSCAR WILDE
 

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

" 'Are you happy?’ 'Yes, I suppose I am.' 'Then you have a fever.' " -- REDMOND O'HANLON (the English explorer-author)

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” -- TOM BODETT  (the Motel 6 guy)

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN (like many other Einstein “quotes”, it’s possible that this is apocryphal. But I read it attributed to him, so I include it.)

“Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.” – THOMAS SZASZ

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

"Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

“Nothing good happens in the world by being happy and cosy. Nobody achieves anything great because they’re happy and cosy.” -- ALEX HONNOLD (The young American “free solo” rock climber)

"Happiness comes only by indirection and can never be achieved by a conscious effort of the will." -- W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

“Happiness, except in Tolstoy, doesn’t bear much describing.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.” – MARCEL PROUST

“It is always unwise to say one is happy.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

“Happiness comes and goes. It tends not to hang around. Unhappiness has a habit of outstaying its welcome.” – CONOR O’CALLAGHAN (in his novel “We Are Not In The World”)

"If you were happy all the time you wouldn't know what happiness is." -- DAN BONGINO (on 1 Oct. 21 -- and this is a bit tautological, but, alright, I'll give it to ol' Dan)

"When we plan to be happy, we may end up less happy than when we don't plan at all." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (I noticed something very similar when I was a young chap, "on the make" -- whenever I expected to "score", I rarely did, while those occasions when I did “score” were when I least expected to)

"I have a good friend who greets people with a cheery 'Hi there! Are you happy?' It takes a good ten minutes every time to recover from the sudden feeling of despair." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story" -- ORSON WELLES 

Hardness/Hardship; (Difficulty)

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” – ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"Difficulties should make us better, not bitter." -- C. DENNIS PEEK                                                                         (An American engineer -- pal of mine on the Twoot)

"Difficulties are things that show a person what they are." -- EPICTETUS                                                             (One of the Greek Stoics.50-135 AD)

Harris, Kamala

“She loved me, I loved me. It was the perfect relationship.” – WILLIE BROWN (the ex-Democrat Mayor of San Francisco with whom the young Veep-to-be Kahaha Matriss had an adulterous affair, that propelled her political career)

"To win elections in this country these days you've got to campaign down to a thirteen-year-old's level of mental development." -- WILLIE BROWN (this should more properly be in "Politics", but I put it here because it might got a long way to explaining the strange and opaque pronunciamientos of the ex-Mayor of San Francisco's one-time girl-friend, Kahaha Mattris)

"Kamala Harris is like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but without the bartending experience.”-- JOHN KENNEDY (Republican Senator from Louisiana, on 12 August 2020)

"Kamala Harris is one step above an inflatable doll. Willie knows. Plastic as can be and just as intelligent." -- C. DENNIS PEEK (a retired professor of engineering, on the Twoot, 24 Oct 2020)

"This girl always looks like she just can't wait to hit the next frat party. And she's the Vice-President! Woman -- did I say girl? I probably shoulda said woman." -- JOE BENIGNO (The radio-sports guy, on 16 June 2021)

"Vice presidents are meant to be dependable -- and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she's the most unpopular vice president since polling began. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in public because she is so painfully annoying." -- FREDDY GRAY (the Assistant Editor of the UK Spectator)
 

"I actually do not like writing negatively about Kamala Harris. She is a zero, and I always fear I have wasted my readers’ time, an hour or two of my life, and some 2,000 precious English words every time she forces her way briefly into the public consciousness. Alas, one of the responsibilities I bear is to comment on matters of public concern. Somehow or other, she manages to slither in. I despise her because she slept her way into public life." -- DOV FISCHER (An Orthodox Rabbi and blogger from California)

"All politicians blather, but Harrisblather is like an air salad with vapor croutons and nullity dressing. She went all the way to France to offer insights like, 'We must together. Work together. To see where we are. Where we are headed, where we are going and our vision for where we should be. But also see it as a moment to, yes. Together, address the challenges and to work on the opportunities that are presented by this moment.'  I’m a columnist, so I recognize straining-to-make-a-word-count syndrome, but this is how she always is. Where did she learn to talk like this? Every time she speaks, it’s like watching Wile E. Coyote’s feet keep spinning madly even after he’s run off the cliff." -- KYLE SMITH

"Kamala is perpetually self-impressed. Mommy told her she was special. In adulthood she retains the vain affect of someone long allowed to believe she's more physically attractive, personally charming and intellectually discerning than external reality could possibly justify." -- LIONEL SHRIVER 

"Harris, the dim-witted irrelevance, the international joke, the simpering lightweight who giggles during press conferences and makes banality-crammed speeches that seem to be aimed at pre-schoolers." -- LLOYD EVANS (23 April 2022) 

"Kahaha Mattris, that giddy, drunken, descended-from-slave-owners queen of 'woke' befuddlement." -- JACK JOLIS

"Kahaha Mattris has proved two things: 1/ She can be coached (Willie Brown knew how to pick 'em); and 2/ Like many obnoxious drunks, she's even more obnoxious when sober." -- JACK JOLIS        (After her debate with Trump)

"The constant vibe that she’s giving a book report on a book she didn’t read.-- there’s a nervousness or insecurity to Harris. She always seems like she’s bluffing." -- JIM GERAGHTY       (21 June 2024)

“Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question.” -- CHARLES C. W. COOKE

 "From top to bottom, Harris is an unalloyed disaster. She has no useful thoughts in her head, and, in consequence, she has no useful words in her mouth. She’s a rambler, a meanderer, a peregrinator extraordinaire. She imparts crumbs in an avalanche. She cackles for no reason, she slips into faux seriousness at inopportune moments, she mistakes indignation for gravitas, and, when pushed, she makes any bad situation considerably worse. She is Charles Dickens’s futile Circumlocution Office in its final, human form." -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE      (Aug. 2024)

"Kamala Harris is a radical liberal who would raise taxes, take away guns & health insurance, and explode the size and power of the federal gov’t. She wants to recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle"-- LIZ CHENEY       (11 Aug 2020)

"Kamala Harris is not a rental, she’s owned by the left." -- MARCO RUBIO

"(Kamala Harris) is even less articulate than her predecessor -- a man with advanced dementia." -- LAURENCE FOX      (The English actor and leader of the UK Reclaim Party)

"If Kamala Harris isn't a 'DEI' hire -- I'd like to know what is." -- DOMINIC CARTER       (the black radio talk show host on WABC in NooYawk, on 31 July 2024)

"Let me be as charitable as I can: If I took all of the students that I've taught in my 30+ year career as a professor, Kamala Harris is by far the one who would be the most imbecilic know-nothing schmuck. It's not even close. She knows nothing; she says nothing; she's done nothing." -- GAD SAAD      (Canadian professor of marketing)

"Black. White. Indian. Jamaican. Caucasian. Irish. Hindu. Christian. Atheist. Privileged. Underprivileged. American Descendant of Slaves. Descendant from slaveholders. There is only one identity that matters when it comes to Kamala Harris: She is a COMMUNIST." -- KYLE BECKER

"I will snatch their patent, so that we [the American government] will take over. Yes we can do that! The question is: 'Do you have the will to do it?'!" -- KAMALA HARRIS

"I learned that with the swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with the lowest level offense. And because of the swipe of my pen, that person could be arrested, they could sit in jail for at least 48 hours, they could lose time from work and their family, maybe lose their job. They'd have to come out of their own pocket to help hire a lawyer. They'd lose standing in their community. All because of the swipe of my pen. Weeks later I could dismiss the charges, but their life would be forever be changed. So I learned at a very young age, the power." -- KAMALA HARRIS

"Best case: she’s drunk Worst case: she’s not." -- JOSHUA STEINMAN      (A "cybersecurity" guy on X, in Aug.2024)

"Harris is a Pez dispenser for asinine lies that media and the Democrats have been plying for years. Unbearably atrocious." -- BANSI SHARMA     (a wise person on "X", on 11 Sept. 2024)

Harry and Meghan

"These people are entitled to no more bowing and scraping than the Kansas City Royals. … Since he had his tender bits chomped off by the Megalodon, though, Hammerin’ Hank has become Girly Harry, an Instagram influencer (whatever that is) who posts cringey pictures of himself with Jon Bon Jovi alongside the squishy sayings of ’80s motivational speaker Leo ‘Dr. Love’ Buscaglia.” – KYLE SMITH (On the World’s Naffest Couple’s visiting Noo Yawk City in Sept. 2021)

"The Fredo Corleone and the Yoko Ono of the (British royal) clan" -- JIM GERAGHTY

"At this point, Meghan and Harry are not really 'Royal' any more, are they -- they're more like Kansas City Royals." -- JIMMY FAILLA       (of Fox News, in Aug. 2024)

"I sometimes feel for Prince Harry, who instead of marrying a steadfast Brit, shackled himself to the deranged one-trick phoney from the States." -- PETRONELLA  WYATT       (an accomplished English lady who is, among much else, and ex-girlfriend of Boris Johnson's)

Harvard University

“Unreported in ROTC-back-at-Harvard story is sad fact that Harvard undergrads are barely coordinated enough to tie their shoes.” – JAKE TAPPER (in a “tweet” in February 2011)

“There is nothing worse for the environment, or nothing worse for the economy, than when Harvard University hires another professor. I’m serious. All the terrible ideas of this (Obama) administration emanate from the Charles River.” – PETER MORICI (Economics prof at the University of Maryland, on 2 March 2012)

“I don't know why anyone would phone in a bomb threat during a Harvard final. Everybody gets an A anyway.” – JOHN PODHORETZ (when some Oriental – Korean, as it happened – did, in fact, phone in a hoax bomb threat at Hahvahd during exam week in 2013)

“Where once men fretted about getting into heaven, now they fuss about the chances of being accepted by Harvard.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE (Needless to say, he did not say this approvingly.)

 “Harvard is basically a hedge fund masquerading as a university.” – CAROL ROTH (the “financial commentator”)

“The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories.” – ADAM BEGLEY (an American author/biographer of, among others, Houdini and John Updike – and he wrote this in December 2020)

"If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market." -- BILL MAHER (after the whole place erupted in a huge pro-Hamas "shonda" in Oct. '23)

Hate

“Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.” – WILLIAM HAZLITT

“Hatred is the essence of communism.” – V.I. LENIN (he actually said this…  strewth….)

“Lenin proclaimed that 'the basis of communism is hatred'. You cannot live like that: you can only die like that.” – CHRIS HARRIES (a letter-writer from Bristol in THE SPECTATOR, on 1 July 2017 – and excuse me, Mr. Harries, if I borrow this in the future...)

“Hating feels amazing while you do it and terrible the next day. It's the red wine of emotions.” – JOSH GONDELMAN (some random oik on the Twoot. And…. Red wine????)

“Truth, after all, is hate to those who hate truth.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Even though you no longer exist, we still hate you.” – JEAN ANOUILH (“Vous avez beau ne plus exister, nous vous haissons encore!”)

"Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something." -- ANTON CHEKHOV

"Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil." -- ERIC HOFFER

“There is something magnificently fatuous in trying to outlaw an emotion, and especially one as productive, on occasion, as hatred.” – ROD LIDDLE

“We live in a narcissistic society, and for the narcissist, any form of criticism of their political position is 'hate speak' and 'extremism'. But they are neither of those things; they are simply opposing views.” – ROD LIDDLE

«We dislike the other side more than we like our own.» -- DAVID FRENCH

"They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it." ~ THELONIOUS MONK (1960)

"But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drink than to master hate. And that is saying something." -- PHILIP ROTH

"If they don't hate you, you're a nobody." -- MAYRA JOLIE                                                                                     (the young black lady who got famous for nodding behind trump during the 1st debate with Biden in 2020)

"Hate, like love, is a morally neutral emotion. Perverts love depravity, after all, and the Bible of course enjoins us to 'hate sin'." -- JACK JOLIS

“There is nothing that stokes fire like hate.” – (COACH) VINCE LOMBARDI

“You cannot love if you cannot hate.” – TANYA GOLD (seems self-evident, but also seems worth repeating... in these parlous “hate speech” times....)

"I can tell you for sure that there's no more ferocious motivator than hatred -- and there is such a thing; it bears little resemblance to whatever feeling underlies the mild verbal faux pas that's currently prosecuted as 'hate speech'." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

“Hate Crimes” (“Hate Speech”)

“One of the most dangerous trends of our times is making the truth socially unacceptable, or even illegal, with ‘hate speech’ laws.” – THOMAS SOWELL (In Jan. 2021)

“Claiming 'hate speech isn’t free speech' is akin to claiming “guilty people don’t need due process.” That’s why the law’s there, dumbass.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

"There is a reason that our would-be arbiters of taste spend so much time stupidly insisting that 'hate speech isn't free speech', and that is that they know that in America it is. They know that there is no such legal category as 'hate speech' in the United States; they know that the Court reaffirmed this as recently as last year, and they know that it did so 9-0, with even their favorite justices enthusiastically joining the opinion." -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE

"We abandoned the principle of free expression the moment it brought in laws against 'hate speech', which in legal terms lies entirely in the eye of the beholder." -- LIONEL SHRIVER  

"Hatred is an emotion. It is not the business of the state to legislate how we feel or to make us into nice people by fiat."-- LIONEL SHRIVER

“I'll let you ban hate speech if you'll let me define hate speech.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"There is no such thing as a 'hate crime.' There are only crimes and non-crimes and should be adjudicated as such." -- MICHAEL WALSH     (the American novelist, 8 May 2024)

"Laws against 'hate speech' are simply female-driven ways to control maleness. Men speak 'hatefully' to each other all the time, even when they're just horsing around. Women speak nicely and then backstab. Admit it -- you know I'm right." -- MICHAEL WALSH

“There is something magnificently fatuous in trying to outlaw an emotion, and especially one as productive, on occasion, as hatred.” – ROD LIDDLE

“It worries me that many things you can say these days are both true and a hate crime.” – ROD LIDDLE

"That most overused  of terms, 'hate speech', which is very often simply someone saying something which someone else does not want to hear." -- ROD LIDDLE

“But who decides what is 'hate speech'? The phrase has become the 21st century equivalent of 'heresy'. It's what you call something before you proscribe it.” – NIALL FERGUSON

"A vet has accused me of a 'hate crime' for making a joke about vets. On the basis that everything is a hate crime, I am not getting too upset." -- MELISSA KITE (Melissa’s English, and thus when she refers to a “vet” she means a veterinarian, and not a veteran.)

“On the basis that everything is a hate crime, I am not getting too upset." -- MELISSA KITE

“The problem with it (“hate crime”) is not only that it attempts to read purpose and imagined consequences into words, but that it inevitably comes framed to give ideological protection to whoever wields power at a particular point in time.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

“Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate’.” – JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO

“A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all.” – JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY

“You cannot love if you cannot hate.” – TANYA GOLD (seems self-evident, but also seems worth repeating... in these parlous “hate speech” times....)

"There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy." -- TIM WALZ      (as evil a word-salad as you're ever likely to come across)

"Hate speech is not a thing." -- GEORGE ALEXOPOULOS     (American cartoonist. In Sept. '24)

"They don't ban hate speech; the ban speech they hate." -- ELON MUSK

“Have A Nice Day”

“Whenever someone says ‘have a nice day’ to me, I want to go back to them the next day and tell them exactly what kind of day I had – in great detail – when they’re really busy.” – TONY HAWKS

“The one thing I regard as an impertinence too far is having someone tell me what sort of day to have.” – MELISSA KITE

Hawaii

"I resent the implication that no serious discussion can take place in Hawaii." — SEN. DANIEL INOUYE (the old fossil was actually referring to his exasperation at how every time anybody tries to have a conference or something similar in Hawaii, everybody thinks they're just off on a big drunken hoo-ha pants-down.  I know for myself, I always had a devil of a time getting our accountants to accept legitimate business expenses I incurred with customers in Hawaii.....)

“Growing up in Hawaii is as close as you can get to growing-up abroad and still be in the United States.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (actually, you can say the same thing about Noo Yawk City)

"Hawaii is the last resort. It is, you know. This is where America ends. If you keep going past Hawaii, you wind up in the East, in Japan, Hong Kong. We're out on the rim of Western civilization here, hanging on by our fingertips." -- DAVID LODGE (in his masterful 1991 comic novel set in Da Kine, "Paradise News")

"All there is to show for a thousand years of Hawaiian history before Captain Cook are a few fishhooks and axe heads and pieces of tapa cloth in the Bishop Museum." -- DAVID LODGE

"Hawaii seemed bizarre -- it didn't sound like a serious place, where anyone would do serious work. It was somewhere you went for vacations, or your honeymoon, if you were kind of corny and had the money and didn't mind long airplane trips." -- DAVID LODGE (I know what he means -- I once had some actually business to do in Hawaii, and felt extremely odd about donning my suit and tie and going about it) 

"Hawaii is not only owned lock stock and barrel by the Democrats, but by a uniquely infantile, goo-goo brand of Democrat -- it's a whole state run by Romper Room Progs." -- JACK JOLIS

"In Hawaii:

The Chinese run the commerce;

The Japanese run the politics;

The Whites (the ‘haoles’) run the boardrooms and the country clubs;

The Local Hawaiians make up the loud Grievance Groups and dominate the Media;

The ‘Pilipinos’ and the ‘Portagees’ do the blue collar/menial jobs;

And the Blacks (who aren’t many) are mostly retired military.

The only majority in Hawaii are Leftists. It's the Land of Kindergarten Progs." -- JACK JOLIS

Hawley, Josh

“Hawley’s field of regard is international, but his purposes are not transnationalist – he is committed to a particular community and its flourishing.” – ELBRIDGE COLBY (Of the Marathon Institute, and previously an Asst. Sec-Def under Trump. A good guy. Here describing Hawley’s foreign policy – which is pretty much the same as mine.)

Health (“Health”: Health Care)

“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until government gives it away for free.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

“A great deal of disease is culturally (not scientifically) defined. The history of multiple personality disorder demonstrates that people’s disquiet will manifest itself in the systems offered by the age. Furthermore, we now go to great lengths to console ourselves that conditions like alcoholism are diseases. This is not a clinical finding: it is an expansion of the definition of disease. Any such expansion is clearly limitless.” – BRYAN APPLEYARD (British author, self-described  expert of “immortality”.  Huh?)

“The Americans are now plunging carelessly into the creation of a national health service, an exercise  almost certain to leave most of its citizen with worse health care, while spawning an ever more gigantic bureaucracy.” --  JONATHAN MILLER (the late famous English actor, comic, playwright, theatrical producer, and, incidentally, a medical doctor. He was in the original “Beyond The Fringe”, in 1962))

“Diabetes is like a once-elite university which keeps lowering its standards to attract more funding. It’s also desperate to recruit new patients. Once upon a time it was a perfectly respectable blood disorder, fatal if not treated immediately. Nowadays it’s a greedy global franchise boasting a wide range of models to tempt the public. Only type 1 (insulin-dependent diabetes, the one popular on Himalayan plane-crash dramas) causes death without treatment. The rest are manageable conditions with various symptoms and no single cause (hence the questionable claim that half a million of us (Brits) have the disease, even though it doesn’t produce any dis-ease whatever.) – LLOYD EVANS (Brit journalist writing in Sept. 2006)

“Socialized health care is the biggest cause not just of the infantilization of the citizenry but of the state.” – MARK STEYN

"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," -- BEVERLY McLACHLIN (the Chief Justice of Canada, from 2000 to 2017 – and she said this in 2006)

"Today's health care situation is like an NFL football game -- 22 people on the field in desperate need of a rest, and 70,000 people in the stands in desperate need of exercise." -- MIKE HUCKABEE (I'm not sure how this pertains, exactly, to the Democrat "health care" juggernaut which is just about to sink what's left of the once-great American free market economy, but I thought it was a not entirely un-nifty thing to say anyway....)

“Medicare is like a $500 hamburger: I assume it's good -- it had better be -- but no one would say, ‘That’s a fantastic success!’” – ANN COULTER

“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” – MARK TWAIN

"I haven't breathed in fifty years." -- KAREN JOLIS (my sister-in-law -- she was referring to her asthma, but my daughter said to put it in, so ... here it is) 

“Health care reform is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue of politics. Beautiful, enticing, generously endowed legislation like this is not for reading. How it looks is what matters. From the neck up it can be as empty as you like.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

“We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN (he was speaking of health care at the time)

"If you support Medicare the way it is now, you can kiss the United States of America goodbye." – REP. (LTC) ALLEN WEST

"Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday lying in the hospital dying of nothing." -- REDD FOXX (Tres drole black fella -- "Sanford and Son" on TV -- funny thing was, his real name was John Sanford)

“The introduction of government health care changes the relationship of citizen and state to something closer to that of junkie and pusher.” – MARK STEYN

“Filling a prescription in America is like going to a very fashionable night-club: You can never be entirely certain the doorman will let you in.” – MARK STEYN

"It turns out the CDC (the Center for Disease Control) is just the DMV with test tubes." -- MARK STEYN (The fact is, EVERY government organism is "just like the DMV", once you get up close  and personal with it.)

“I confess, as a guest host for Rush Limbaugh on the radio, that my heart sinks a little whenever a caller wishes to explain the particular indignities heaped upon him by his health-care "provider", becasue generally it takes a good 20 minutes just to lay out the facts of the case, and even then it doesn't really make sense. I don't like to think I'm a total idiot. When the ISI guy from Islamabad expounds on the ever-shifting tribal allegiances of North Waziristan, I'm on top of every nuance. When a London tax expert explains money laundering by Russian oligarchs through Guernesey and Nevis via Ireland and Cypus, I can pretty much keep up. But when a victim of American health care starts trying to fill me in, round about 40 minutes in I have a strange urge to stab forks in my eyeballs. Except then, of course, I'd have to go to an American hospital.” – MARK STEYN

“...Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves inwardly and outwardly with health biscuits and health garments.” – SAKI

“I can envisage a world in which the human race spends all its energy on being healthy. There's nothing to life except not dying, and nothing on the walls but an occasional surgeon general's warning.” – DAVID GELERNTER

“You can’t socialize medicine without socializing people.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

“Logic goes out of the window when it comes to health debates.” – JAMES FORSYTH (Columnist and Political Editor, and temporarily Annie Jolis' boss and tormentor at, THE SPECTATOR – in January 2015)

“Essentially, the health-and-safety agenda programs us to live life to the empty in order to live dying to the full.” – STEWART DAKERS (in the SPECCIE, April 2016)

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.” – RAND PAUL (not my favorite Republican, but he’s OK on some – mostly domestic – stuff. Plus, he’s a doctor.)

“You get the feeling that healthcare has evolved to be about empowering people to feel good about dying. No more starched, old-fashioned curing.” – MELISSA KITE (in Nov. 2018)

"A life is a right. A healthy life is an option." -- JACK JOLIS

“It's always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.” -- DENIS JOHNSON

“In a nationalized, bureaucratic health system, each patient is a cost. It is the opposite of, say, a restaurant or a plumbing business, which lives by getting more customers. A cost is a burden, and so the system instinctively identifies those costs which are most burdensome and easiest to jettison. These are the old. Thus a feeling seeps through the machine that the old are to be fobbed off, sent home, neglected, drugged up or, in the worst cases, put to death.” – CHARLES MOORE

"Caveat emptor: that's the only rule that should apply to alternative remedies, because it respects free trade, personal responsibility and the customer's intelligence. Where something as sensitive and important as their own health is concerned, I believe that people should be granted absolute autonomy -- not bullied by the regulatory system into thinking there's only one sensible way to go." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

"We worry (or rather the nanny state worries far too much about the possibility that someone might make the wrong health decision. What we don't value nearly enough is the wisdom of crowds -- especially now we have the internet -- to enable people to find the most effective cure available at any given time." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

“The only real crime is to be sick.” – ADOLPH HITLER (now that’s what I call a hardass.)

"Socialized medicine is great, unless you get old or sick." -- TREVOR LOUDON (author of THE NEW ZEALAND BLOG)

“Preexisting is related to one of the great nonsense phrases of our time: ‘insuring against preexisting conditions,’ which is like placing a bet on last year’s World Series.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Declaring a rightin a scarce good such as health care is intellectually void, because moral declarations about rights do not change material facts. If you have five children and three apples and then declare that every child has a right to an apple of his own, then you have five children and three apples and some meaningless posturing — i.e., nothing in realityhas changed, and you have added only rhetoric instead of adding apples.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“For the curtailment of civil liberties, public health policy, graciously instituted for our own good, has been the thin end of the wedge for decades. Over time, that wedge has been getting fatter.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“People don’t ever know what’s wrong with them, they’ll believe any bad thing.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in his most amusing 1990 novel “S”.)

“Not good for you anyway, this health business.” – JOSEPH CONNOLLY (in his otherwise rather unfunny 1995 novel “Poor Souls”)

"Baby boomers had measles, mumps and chickenpox. Today's kids have autism, learning disorders, diabetes type-1, asthma, allergies, eczema, other autoimmune diseases, and even cancer. Isn't it the time to research, Why? What has changed?" --DR. KAMAL PREET SINGH (health expert and author of "Advanced Nutrition Therapy", in May 2022) 

Health (The British NHS)

“As the NHS becomes the dominant and only untouchable force in the state, so its enemies (the eaters, the drinkers, the old, the inform) become enemies of that state. This was always one of the perils of a socialized medical system.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

“It is an enduring eccentricity of the British that we regard our National Health Service as the envy of the world, despite the evidence staring us in the face of slum hospitals staffed by surly trade unionists (the doctors surliest of all) and run by vast legions of bureaucrats accountable to nobody, least of all the customers. The problem is an anachronism that cannot be fundamentally improved because it is based on the false proposition that the state is competent and rich enough to provide cradle-to-grave health care for everybody.” – JONATHAN MILLER                                                     (The famous British author, onetime comic, philosopher – and doctor – from a The London Times column in, I think? 1995)

“The National Health Service is the closest thing that the English have to a religion.” – NIGEL LAWSON (Mrs. Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer and, incidentally, once the Editor of THE SPECTATOR — And while many people are familiar with that statement, many fewer know how he finished his thought: "... with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This makes it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.")

“No NHS (UK National Health Service) GP (General Practitioner) has ever known anything I have asked him or her about anything, ever.” – MELISSA KITE

“Within the monolith of the NHS, patients, particularly the eldersly, are able to disappear from view as effectively as prisoners in the Soviet gulag. If they don't re-emerge alive, no one except a close relation can discover why.” -- JANE KELLY (a volunteer worker in English hospitals in February 2017)

“Our health service enjoys a position akin to the Thai monarchy: no breath of complaint, question, or even levity is permitted.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

"NHS hospitals are like lobster traps -- easy to get into but hard to get out of." -- DR. ADRIAN BOYLE (the president of the Royal College Of Emergency Medicine, in Nov. '22)

"Much illness involves unavoidable misery, but the NHS, if you use it often, usually adds to the sum of human unhappiness." -- CHARLES MOORE (in May 2022)

"The NHS does not work. It is bloated with managers and stupid job titles and staffed at the front line level by people who too often treat patients with condescension and contempt, no matter how vibrantly coloured their lanyards: Trying to find someone who actually knew something proved entirely impossible for six days, during which my wife's condition deteriorated." -- ROD LIDDLE (January 2023)

“There are two kinds of people who support single-payer health care in the United States: Those who point to the British system as a successful example, and those who know something about the British system.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (in Sept. 2021)

Heaven

“If life on earth is not a road to heaven then it is a treadmill, a merry-go-round minus the merry.” PETER KREEFT (A Dutch philosopher in his book entitled, originally enough, “Heaven”.  And, incidentally, “Kreeft” means “lobster” in Dutch)

“The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a heaven that it shows itself cloddish.” – EVELYN WAUGH

"In any case, I don't think one takes any luggage to heaven, do you? It must be like a perfect weekend with no luggage." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

"RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) is up in heaven rolling in her grave.” -- SEN. CHARLES "Schmuckie" SCHUMER (wrong on about 6 different counts....)

“In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.” -- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (Shaw was a socialist ass, but this quote I like)

"The only paradise is paradise lost." -- MARCEL PROUST 

“Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” -- JOHN MILTON

"Heckler's Veto"

"The heckler's veto is the opposite of free contract, and is indeed the great virus that afflicts it. It's the rhetorical Cosa Nostra. This thing Of Ours that gets between a speaker and his listeners to rip off the one and rough up the other." -- DANIEL FOSTER    (In NR, May 2018)

Hedonism

“Be very light on vices such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.” – SATCHEL PAIGE (the great Negro relief pitcher, philosopher, and namesake of one of Woody Allen's kids)

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

"The government thinks guns, fast cars and alcohol should be banned. I think guns, fast cars and alcohol should be our national motto." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"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.) 

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

Hell

"In my conception of hell, the only books to read are bound volumes of New York Times editorials." – JOSEPH EPSTEIN (the American author)

“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"My idea of hell is being stuck in a hotel room without a book to read!" – RONALD REAGAN

“Hell is stewing in one's own juice.” – ARCHBISHOP MICHAEL RAMSEY (the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, during the '60s and '70s)

“The definition of hell is being condescended to by idiots.” – ANN COULTER

“Dante's 'Inferno' is about a man who gets a tour of hell and finds it is comprised almost entirely of Italians of the wrong political party.” -- JAMES LILEKS

“In hell, the angels would sing nothing but Kumbaya.” -- JAMES LILEKS

“In hell, all the messages you ever left on answering machines will be played back to you.” -- JUDY HORACEK (The Australian cartoonist and author)

“Where do people in hell tell people to go to?” – RED SKELTON (the old American TV comedian from the 50s and 60s)

"I don’t know what Hell looks like, but I assume it’s a mixture of child birthday parties and group texts." -- JESSE KELLY (On 25 October 2021)

“Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” -- JOHN MILTON

"Hell, I know now, will be an eternity of traveling by the local train services towards East Sussex." -- AIDAN HARTLEY

 "Maybe this world is another planet's hell." - ALDOUS HUXLEY

"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

"You capitalize 'Hell'. It's a place. Like Scarsdale." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR;

Hell-Heaven

“Heaven for climate, Hell for company.” – MARK TWAIN

“Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” -- JOHN MILTON

Hellman, Lillian

“One of the Great Bitches of the 20th Century.” – CHILTON WILLIAMSON (the American author, mostly on Western themes, even though he was originally from Vermont)

Heresy

"These days, if you mock the prevailing fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another  term for a heretic." -- TOM WOLFE (in 1980)

Heroes

“Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.” – BERTHOLD BRECHT (pretty apt comment from this Prometheanly unheroic Stalinist…)

“A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just a picture of death.” – LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (a clearly better sort of Kraut – though not, in truth, much better – than the above piece of shit.)

“In totalitarian societies, the totalitarians rely on a simple truth: Heroes are always in short supply.” – MICHAEL MOYNIHAN (An editor of both “Vice” and “Reason” magazines.)

“Heroes can't be heroes without disasters.” – BRIAN MASTERS (the author of “The Emperor of Ice Cream”)

“Heroism often  emerges from self-preservation rather than altruism. Which makes one wonder why there isn't more of it about.” – JONATHAN RUGMAN (An English TV news reader)

“Show me a Hero, and I'll write you a Tragedy.” – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“We can’t all be heroes. Some of us have to stand on the curb and clap as they go by.” -- WILL ROGERS

Hezbollah

“Hezbollah is nothing more than the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

Hierarchy (Relative Importance)

“The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.” - LEONARD BERNSTEIN

"Sometimes the largest question are the most trivial, because they cannot be answered, while the seemingly trivial ones, like where one sits at dinner, are the most fascinating." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

High School

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." -- KURT VONNEGUT (....and I don't even like Vonnegut -- but credit where due, this one is passably jocose....)

"All human institutions are essentially a reboot of high school." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

Hilton, (Paris)

“The logical conclusion of modern America.” – HUGO RIFKIND                            (Brit columnist on this lady’s “prison” saga….)

Hindsight

“Hindsight is an exact science.” – GUY BELLAMY

Hinduism

"Hinduism is extraordinarily permissive. It has no founder or prophet, no prescriptive tenets and -- a crucial difference from the Abrahamic faiths -- no divine revelation, no revealed word of God. There are any number of texts to which one can apply the adjectives ancient and sacred. There is no dogma, and therefore no such thing as a heretical thought. The result is a pick'n'mix religion with thousands of gods and which allows you to live the life you want to live.

But Hinduism is big on duty. It's known as dharma and is one of the four primary aims of human life. The other three are artha (wealth), kama (pleasure), and moksha (liberation)." -- SAMIR SHAH (Dr. Shah describes himself as "Vice Chair of History Matters at Policy Exchange", and I must say, he makes Hinduism worth giving a second look at....)

Hippies

“There’s a case to be made that the hippie generation was responsible for every ill of the modern age, from dumbing down to al-Qaeda.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“Hippies wanted freedom rather than nature.” – SYLVAIN TESSON     (the French writer and author of “Consolations of the Forest”)

“Indeed; God invented patchouli so blind people could hate hippies too.” – RICK DAY (An old guy from Atlanta, on the Twoot)

"Hippies:  long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, irregular sleeping arrangements and a guru." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (in his 2020 novel "Utopia Avenue")

"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)

Hipsters

“Hipsters – a subculture so spineless that it had to borrow its name from its parents. Hipsters are an uptight bunch. Organized and particular hipsters know how to detest big business. Yet they expect a level of service that can only be delivered by a multinational corporation.” – GEORGE HULL (in the SPECCIE, March 2016)

History

“The population at large plays only a marginal role in history, or at any rate in political and military history, which is the preserve of the small elites:  people do not make history – they make a living.” – RICHARD PIPES (in his autobiography, VIXI.  He’s a distinguished Russia-poobah, a great dude, and was on Reagan’s National Security Council.)

“History is a mental construct: it does not exist as reality. Hence you cannot be on its ‘right side’. You can only be on its ‘right side’. You can only be on the ‘right side’ of historians.” – RICHARD PIPES (who died in May 2018)

“Men don’t change. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” – HARRY S. TRUMAN

“There are decades where nothing happens, then there are weeks where decades happen.” – VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” – GOLDA MEIR

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” – MARK TWAIN

“For the Left, the past is another country.  And a repulsive one.” – BRUCE ANDERSON (an editor of the UK “Spectator”, in 2005)

“A country without a memory is a country of madmen”. – GEORGE SANTAYANA (An American historian.  I mention this because, when I was a student, he was pretty commonly known, but now I’m sure he’s gone phutt! Down the memory hole…)

“Technology changes history more than ideas do.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (interesting… and counter-intuitive… But, if you think about it, probably true…)

“Everyone likes to say that we must learn from history, but that's difficult to do when the history you're learning from didn't happen.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“We need the past like drivers need rearview mirrors. Get rid of the mirrors and, eventually, something terrible will happen. Similarly, if you concentrate on them too much, you’re sure to crash as well. Progress depends on knowing where you’ve been.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The more you know about the past, the further you can see into the future.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (Well, he said it one way or the other – I’ve read it both ways.)

“Make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future.” – BERNARD LEWIS (the great Arab/Muslim/Middle East scholar.)

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

"Conservatives have the advantage over the Left by being unembarrassed by history." -- CHARLES MOORE (Columnist for the {UK} DAILY TELEGRAPH and ex-Editor of the {UK} SPECTATOR, 22 March 2008)

“History can get depressing, because it makes you realize how long people have been the way they are.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“In the socialist state, it is the past that is unpredictable.” – SIR PERCY CRADOCK (The British Ambassador to Red China in the '80s)

“Humans are the only species with a history.” – WILLIAM VOEGELI (Senior Editor of The Claremont Review, in  2011)

“The history department is the center of the university; if our students don’t learn history, they learn nothing.” – DAVID GELERNTER “A professor  of computer science, at Yale. And, incidentally, one of the victims of “the Unabomber”, that darling of the Left – to whom he lost a hand)

“Those who care nothing for the past care nothing for the future, for what is our future if not our successors’ past?” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (eh?)

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child all your life.” – CICERO

“To be ignorant of history is the remain always a child.” – CICERO

"History is all explained by geography." -- ROBERT PENN WARREN (There's a lot to history than geography, of course, but it is a big part of it, certainly) 

"When we lose history we gain histrionics." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

“We don’t need Orwell to remind us that control of the future is predicated on possession of the past. In the absence of historical certainty, that past becomes a palimpsest upon which convenient ‘truths’ can be re-inscribed with impunity. Without history we are vulnerable, atomized, denied identity. How can you vote for what you want to be when you don’t know who you are?” – LISA HILTON (An English, er, historian….)

"The medicine for a sick mind is the study of history." -- LIVY (TITUS LIVIUS) (Roman dude writing in the 1st Century A.D.; and, in fairness, it should be pointed out that he had considerably less history to deal with than we do….)

“Peoples for whom their past is more important than their future deserve all they get.” – PETER JONES (the noted  British “classicist”)

“History is a tragedy and not a morality tale” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"History is hydraulics." -- ROBIN WHITE (No, I don't get it either, but it might have something to do with the fact that White was an American geologist before he turned to writing thrillers)

“Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.” – THOMAS CARLYLE

"The history of the world is but the biography of great men." -- THOMAS CARLYLE (the, er, great-man historian, 1795-1881)

"The great controversies in history are never settled, they are simply left behind." -- WALKER PERCY

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times; and in innumerable guises, and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” – PAUL JOHNSON

"History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes." -- MICHAEL AUSLIN (an extremely rare thing -- a conservative history prof at Yale)

“The most important things in history aren't provable.” – DAVID HERBERT DONALD (the eminent American historian, who specialized in the Civil War)

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” – JULIAN BARNES (The English novelist)

“History requires documentation, and you can't have documentation without some kind of writing.” – ARAM BAKSHIAN, Jr. (Bakshian was an aide/speech-writer to Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and what he says here explains why black Africans, Hottentots, American Indians, and other unlettered aborigines literally had no history – “pre-historic” – until others came around and gave them one.)

“History confounds our attempts to rewrite behavior.” – JAMES LILEKS

"History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues." -- T.S. ELIOT   (and "issues", here, meant "exits".)

"Schools should teach history, not repeat it." -- DEBBIE ALDRICH

"We in the West have ruined our education system and most of our youth are thus amnesiac, with no knowledge of past conditions or of the work and bequests of prior, far more deprived generations." – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ignorance of the past & present. And that is never truer than among today’s American college-degreed (but otherwise economically & historically illiterate) youth" -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“History has become an inventory of political grievances.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

"All history is gossip." -- CLARE BOOTH LUCE (1903-1987, a great conservative lady, and, among other things, a one-time lover of the great Roald Dahl) 

"Ironically, nothing dates faster than history." -- SINCLAIR McKAY (the author of "Meeting Churchill")

“One of the worst things about being a progressive and so being on “the right side of history” must be that you thus make it impossible for yourself to learn anything from history.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“Having disposed for the most part of the living kind of history, which we call tradition, progressives now think it expedient to expunge any record of the fact that people once thought differently from the way they think now.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“History, hitherto the soul of culture, tends to be to the progressive what it so often is to the scientist: not just useless but a positive hindrance to understanding, a history only of error. That's what makes the progressives' alliance with a supposed science-based culture so fruitful for their purposes.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that Raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.” – JULIAN BARNES (charmant, coming from this English “public intellectual”.....)

“While we should learn from history, we should not be paralyzed by it.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." ~ C.S. LEWIS

“History is a record of 'effects' the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.” – JOSEPH SCHUMPETER                                                      (The old Austrian economist -- he actually became Austria's Minister of Economics after WWI, and after all that dissolved into the famous Inflation Gotterdammerung-Geschplund, he became an American citizen. Rather fittingly, somehow, he coined the term "creative destruction".)

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” – HARRY TRUMAN

"There is properly no history, only biography." -- RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

“Getting your history wrong is part of what makes a nation.” – ROBERT TOMB (English historian, author of the massive “The English And Their History”)

“The people who don't remember the past and are hence doomed to repeat it - they make everyone repeat it, even though you remember it well.”-- JAMES LILEKS

“Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past” – GEORGE ORWELL

“The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their own history.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“Every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” --GEORGE ORWELL

"Those who ignore history are doomed to get their nuts cut." -- CARL HIAASEN (bringing it all back home, as it were....)

“The trouble with looking for patterns is that you are likely to find them. History tends to rhyme rather than repeat.” --  SAM LEE                                   (an American stock market analyst)

“The political opinions of history professors are just as pedestrian as everyone else's, and less smart than the typical Wisconsin farmer.” – MARIO LOYOLA

“If history teaches anything it teaches that the future isn't some grand, happy, place just because it lies ahead.” – THOMAS F. MADDEN (noted American medievalist historian)

“If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.” – KARL MARX

"Men do not rule circumstances, circumstances rule men." -- HERODOTUS (contemporary of Socrates)

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that have forgotten this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and basic freedoms." -- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” – MICHAEL CHRICHTON

"It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future." -- F.W. MAITLAND (British historian)

"History in general only informs us what bad government is." -- THOMAS JEFFERSON

"The reason we don't learn from history is because we don't learn history." – MARK LEVIN (heh, the one who used to be known as "The Great One", but who has now become "Denali" since ex-President Corpseman changed the name of Mt. McKinley)

“About seventy percent of history is classified.” – DANIEL SILVA

"A major calamity of not teaching history is that new generations emerge to whom socialism seems like a new, even a good, idea -- rather than an old, disproved and disgraced one." -- JACK JOLIS

“For the Left, history is ideally erased, but when that's not possible, it’s rewritten. That's why so many Leftists are historians – it's a big job.” – JACK JOLIS

"For the Left, history is optional." -- JACK JOLIS

"For the Left, history's optional. Ideally, Leftists would prefer to have history erased entirely, but when that's not possible, they settle for re-writing it. Either way, it's important for the Left to ‘own’ the historical ‘narrative’." -- JACK JOLIS

"Historical ignorance facilitates those who are already in power." -- JAY COST

"The intrigues and cock-ups of the past are far easier to believe by looking around at the present." -- ALLAN MALLINSON (author and retired British Army officer) 

"The only history we adore is the history of wars." -- MAO TSE-TUNG (Well, if anyone should know, it's him -- and yes, he said "adore"... or at least that's how his "Old Xiang" Mandarin was translated)

"History is on the side of those who read it." -- HUGH HEWITT (Radio talk guy, author, Harvard fella)

"There were too kinds of history: the kind you read about, and the kind you lived through -- or were actually part of." -- NELSON DEMILLE

“Almost everything in history that isn't straightforwardly bad is morally complex.” – SPENCER CASE (a philosophy PhD candidate at U. of Colorado in Boulder, in 2018)

"History could be rewritten. History was the record and the record was the only thing about the past that could be changed." -- ALAN JUDD

“It sometimes seems that contemporary liberals have only two points of historical reference. The first is Watergate and the second in Adolph Hitler.” – DAVID HARSANYI

“Being liberals, they think that what actually happened, i.e., history, isn’t important and if it offends them it can be rewritten or simply expunged.” – ROD LIDDLE

“For liberals, history is not something which happened some time ago. Instead it is something which must be controlled from the eternal tyranny of Now. Now is right, everything else is wrong and therefore they feel no compunction in twisting history to suit their own purposes.” – ROD LIDDLE

“For the Left the past either did not exist or should not have existed, and those aspects which conflict with our modern sensibilities must be airbrushed out of the picture.” – ROD LIDDLE

"We have a generation for whom history means absolutely nothing: it is a dark and dismal place where people behaved terribly badly to one another and may, even, on occasion, have misgendered people." -- ROD LIDDLE (in Dec. 2022) 

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape." -- JAMES JOYCE

“Most young people couldn’t care less about the past: for them the present moment and its so-called pleasures are all-important. No, all-important is not quite the word, for it implied an awareness, albeit subliminal, of something other than the present moment. In fact, young people these days don’t even know there had been a past: the world began with them, and each moment was unconnected with any other.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (in his 2017 short story “Bildungsroman”)

“The fact is that we do not remember the past. We rely on historians to recall it.” – SIMON JENKINS (this strikes me as rather useless tautology, but Jenkins is a “distinguished” Brit, so in it goes....)

“Most of Europe’s wars have resulted from too much memory, not too little.” – SIMON JENKINS

“One lesson of history is that no one learns from history.” – OTTO VON BISMARK

"The world was divided roughly into three hemispheres -- Europe, where there had been a war; it was full of towns like Paris and Buda-Pest, all equally remote and peopled with prostitutes; the East, a place full of camels and elephants, deserts and dervishes and nodding mandarins; and America, which besides its own two continents included Australia, New Zealand, and most of the British Empire not obviously "Eastern"; somewhere, too, there were some 'savages'." -- EVELYN WAUGH                (in 1927)

"A little history can go a wrong way." -- CHARLES MURRAY

“History, unlike fiction and physics, never quite jells, it is an armature of rather randomly preserved verbal and physical remains upon which historians slap wads of supposition in hopes of the lumpy statue’s coming to life. History in its jaggedness constantly tears at our smooth conception of human behavior.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“History buries most men, and then exaggerates the height of those left standing.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Truth isn’t what we want from Presidents. We have historians for that.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

“History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

“History isn’t something over and done, you know. It’s now, too.” -- JOHN UPDIKE (in his 2006 novel “Terrorist”)

“The rise of political anger in our time coincide neatly with a spike in the gross national ignorance of the past.” -- TRACY LEE SIMMONS (writing in in NR in May 2019)

“Read no history, nothing but Biography, for that is life without theory" – BENJAMIN DISRAELI

"You can't see yourself in history, but that's where you are, in history." -- MARTIN AMIS

"All history is sex and violence." -- IAN FLEMING                                                                                                                      (to the BBC's "Desert Island Discs")

“History resembled an annoying relative you could avoid visiting but never fully disown.” – ELIF SHAFAK (a most fetching Turkish-British lady writer/novelist)

"To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.” -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITZYN

 "There are hyenas in human form who are ready to tear open the graves of the buried past and whet their insatiable appetites for revenge on the slain heroes and spit venom on those who survive." -- JOHN BELL HOOD (the Confederate general, commenting on fellow Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston's memoirs.  Incidentally, Gen. Hood was memorably played by Levon Helm, the drummer and one of the singers for The Band, in the excellent 2009 movie "In The Electric Mist") 

"That is one of the terrible lessons of history. To build up a community, a city, or an empire can take generations of concentrated effort by wise and prudent men. To wreck one takes about five minutes. All you need is the right fool in the right place at the right time." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“History is the past. We never live through history. When we are old, we discover to our surprise that we have lived through it. When we die we join it.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

“History was what happened to dead people. It didn’t act on the living, like yeast.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS  (channeling Squire Burgess, see above)

"History is the means by which we justify the present." -- FERDIE ROUS (I only include this because it sounds glib -- but it's often untrue: Communists like the Khmer Rouge, for example, don't use history to justify the present at all -- they eliminate history. That's what "Year 1" means. Oh, and Ferdie is a Brit journalist.)

“Liberty depends on memory. Doing away with the past is the chief technique of modern tyrants.” – DAVID BARCLAY (the late billionaire co-owner, with his twin brother, of the UK DAILY TELEGRAPH and the UK  SPECTATOR)

"The present can have no meaning if we keep erasing the past." -- RICHARD MADELEY (the English host of their "Good Morning Britain) 

“I’m occasionally stunned by how many people think history began around the time they started paying attention to the news.” – BARTON JACKA (A Californian, on 21 April 2021)

"History has fairly well established that when political tensions rise, the first thing blown up is an oil pipeline." -- ROBERT BAER (the “legendary” CIA officer)

"A page of history is worth a volume of logic." --OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. (US Supreme Court Justice, 1841-1935, and an ΑΔΦ fraternity brother of mine) 

“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.” -- ERIK VON KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN       (1909-1999 - an "Austrian-American nobleman and polymath".)

History, (“Revisionist”)

“Revisionist history always revises downwards.  It always lowers our estimation of the great.” – FRANK JOHNSON (that’s because it’s promulgated by pygmies.  Anyway, this particular Johnson is a British author and journalist. A cousin, I believe – anyway, a relative of --  the great historian Paul Johnson.  And, certainly, no pygmy….)

“How do you convince a great nation to author its own destruction? You start by telling a new story.” – DINESH D'SOUZA

"The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century." -- BRIGID BROPHY (Lady Levey, as was her formal title -- the British novelist, 1929-1995)

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

"One of the great lessons of history is if somebody tells you they want to kill you, believe them." -- TED CRUZ

“And everything before 1968 is a Bad Thing.” – JAMES LILEKS

"The remnant evidence of America's brilliant and contentious past must be quietly euthanized, like an old, sick dog. There's but one history to know, one story to take to heart: a tale of wretched, oligarchical oppression that ran unchecked until about 1968, when people at Berkeley received the first Gospel from Abbie Hoffman. Or something like that. America is not an achievement; America is an imposition, a grotesque construct that smothers and steals." -- JAMES LILEKS

"History is not the past. It's the method we've evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past." -- HILARY MANTEL

“You have to remember a war even to regret it.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (despite her name, this is a lady – an American lady novelist-journalist living in the UK, and she said this in 2017, in response to all the destruction of Civil War statuary in America)

“As a rule of thumb, the further back in history you go, the less evidence there is and, consequently, the more vulnerable it is to mostly left-wing sociology types pretty much making stuff up so it accords with their ‘progressive’ Weltanschauung’.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

"For the Left, history is optional." -- JACK JOLIS

“Poets, novelists, lexicographers, and historians have, over the centuries, been central to excavating and delineating the identities of nations, toward the goal of establishing proud, self-governing people. In the United States, this class has turned its back on a nation-buttressing role and instead embraced a hostility to the American nation as such, to its cultural supports, its traditions, and its history.” – RICH LOWRY (in Nov. 2019)

“Leaders of the country, including government mandarins, were robustly nationalist until the latter half of the 20th century. Then in the 1960s and 1970s they began to promote measures consciously designed to weaken America’s cultural and creedal identity and to strengthen racial, ethnic, cultural, and other subnational identities. These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.” – SAMUEL HUNTINGTON

“Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs;" – DAVID BEN-GURION

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” - GEORGE ORWELL

"For the first time in American history, American history is no longer allowed in America." -- KAMBREE KAWAHINE KOA (on 16 July 2020, on the twoot)

"In this day and age, it's not so much whose army wins, but whose story wins." -- STEFAN HALPER (the CIA/MI6 liberal Republican professor that the Obamarroids inserted as a spy into the Trump campaign in 2016)

“The problem is that people looking at the past desperately want to take sides.” – DAVID ABULAFIA (A professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University, in 2020)

“It is one thing to admit that history has been taught in universities from a heavily Eurocentric perspective. It is quite another to insist that the past should be reconfigured as a moral lesson in the depravity of European empires.” – DAVID ABULAFIA

“History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of current values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.” – LAWRENCE JAMES (historian and author of “The Rise And Fall Of The British Empire”)

History, “Wrong Side Of”

"This 'wrong side of history' nonsense is nothing more than a religious belief in supernatural causality. It implies that history isn't shaped by men but, instead, by outside inevitable forces that can always be counted on." -- MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

“History does not have sides, although historians do.” – JAY NORDLINGER

“You can't be on the wrong side of history. History does not actually take sides.” -- MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY (American conservative journalist/editor)

“If someone says you're on the wrong side of history, it is their smug and stupid way of telling you that you are wrong and they are right, no more.” – RODLIDDLE

“Conservatism is always on the wrong side of history because it is innately opposed to profound social change. Social change is always good, you see, even when it is utterly calamitous or pointless or unnecessary.” – ROD LIDDLE

“'The wrong side of history' – as if history was a living and deeply moreal entity, a bit like God, except more understanding about transgenderism.” – ROD LIDDLE

“This is the liberal gleichschaltung; get with the program or be flattened by it.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

Hitler, Adolph

“Hitler: a neo-pagan vegetarian failed artist and fashion designer with ironic facial hair who hated bankers.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939

"Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming." -- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW                                                        (at the time)

Hobbies

"I honestly think that the reason men have hobbies is mostly to get away from women, while women don't have hobbies so much as compulsive, reflexive habits -- like knitting, gossiping and just generally... emoting." -- JACK JOLIS

Holidays                                                                                                                    

“The thing I really hate about going on holiday is the way when you get back you realize that your life is collapsing about you and that the relaxing break you thought would improve things has actually made things worse.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE                                                                                (the  great English TV critic)

“I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world.” – ROGER SCRUTON

"I don't think people really want to go on holiday, any more than they really want to go to church. They've been brainwashed into thinking it will do them good, or make them happy. In fact, surveys show that holidays cause incredible amounts of stress." -- DAVID LODGE
 

“It really isn't a family holiday until someone's crying.” – MARY WALTER                                                                          (the morning talk hostess on WMAL in Washington D.C., on 22 Nov. 2017)

"Don't ever take a vacation. They might realize they don't need you." -- DAVID MAMET

Holiness

“Many things are made holy by being turned upside down.” – G. K. CHESTERTON (eh? The more you think about this, the worse it sounds....)

“We live today in the glare of affluence, and cannot easilty discern sacred things, which glow more clearly in darkness.” -- ROGER SCRUTON (in May of 2014)

Holland (and the Dutch)

“Wherever you live,  Amsterdam is weirder.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"Put all the Dutch people in Ireland, and Ireland would be the garden of Europe. Put all the Irish people in the Netherlands, and it would sink." -- OTTO VON BISMARK  

"Of all the languages in the animal kingdom, Dutch is the closest to human." -- RUUD LUBBERS (ex-Dutch Prime Minister, from 1982 to 1994 – Christian Democrat)

"You think that German doesn’t sound sexy until you hear how Dutch sounds." -- VELINA TCHAKAROVA (who works at an Austrian "security think-tank" called AIES)

“The Dutch are a race of opportunist, polyglot people. Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best.” – MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ (the Frogue “provocateur” novelist)

“No wisecracks in Holland – just boors and beers and burghers and bores. And the air is thick with the ugliest language in Christendom.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 "Amsterdam wraps itself around itself." -- DAVID MITCHELL   (the serious novelist, not the comic actor -- and if you look at an aerial view of Amsterdam you'll see that it really is nothing but a series of concentric semi-circles)

“That fat-headed Dutchman.” – JOSEPH CONRAD (These three or four, depending on how you count, words are not, of course, in themselves worthy of inclusion here, but I do so due to their being memorable to me because this short phrase, spoken by Lord Jim about a shipmate in the eponymous novel by Joseph Conrad, caused my great Deerfield friend Peter Acly to laugh so uproariously and so consistently that I know that even today, many decades later, if you corner Acly and say to him “you fat-headed Dutchman” he will fall about, helplessly guffawing.)

Hollywood

“I’ve been asked if I ever get the DT’s.  I don’t know.  It’s hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DT’s begin.” – W.C. FIELDS

“For most people, life is a movie.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Hollywood is about getting girls.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

“I hate conservatives, but I really hate liberals;” – MATT STONE (The sainted co-producer and creator of “SouthPark”, as well as “Team America”.  TheBrave. TheFew.  The Anti-liberals in Hollywood.)

“The definition of ‘friend’ in Hollywood is so elastic  that it includes the definition of ‘enemy’”. – ROB LONG

“That’s Hollywood: No one lavishes more care and expense on saying nothing.” – MARK STEYN

“Outside of North Korea and the English departments of certain American universities, Hollywood is one of the last places in the world where it’s advantageous to be an unrepentant Stalinist.” – TERRY TEACHOUT (in 2005, reviewing “Elia Kazan: A Biography” by Richard Schickel)

“If I could control Hollywood, I could control the world.” – JOSEPH STALIN

“One must bear in mind that Hollywood is almost equally divided between cretins and thieves”. – JOE QUEENAN (and when you realize that’s liberal cretins and thieves, you’ve got some cocktail, baby…)

“One in three Hollywood conservatives goes on to become President of the United States” – ROB LONG (one of the writers of “Cheers”)

“Americans will put up with everything, lack of tobacco, lack of booze, masculine women, crime, illegal immigration, Bill and Hillary Clinton, but they will instantly lynch anyone trying to stop producing the crap we see on screen nowadays.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"It's Hollywood at its best -- One kicks downwards and bootlicks upwards." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS  

"Hollywood is a great place in which to get cynical about human behavior." -- DUDLEY MOORE (the great English comic who for about 3-4 years in the early 80s was the King of Hollywood)

“Unlike the tenured revolutionaries of U.S. universities, Hollywood’s devotion to the idealisms of the day is tempered by its need to make great amounts of money. The pressures of the marketplace are a brake, but only a partly effective one. A wag once said that Czarist Russia’s form of government was ‘autocracy tempered by assassination’ and I have said – and still say – that the American entertainment industry now has a politics of its own: utopianism tempered by greed.” – RICHARD GRENIER

“Hollywood used to be a curious mixture of genuine altruism and commercial rapacity. Now it is plain, unmitigated evil. Correction, not plain evil, complicated evil, with all the sexual trimmings. It is an ideal place for a trail run of the neutron bomb which is said to eliminate people without touching property.” – PAUL JOHNSON (in 1996)

“Trying to get a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to cook a steak by getting people to breathe on it.” – DOUGLAS ADAMS (the English author of “The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy”)

“At least in New York, the upper-crust liberals sometimes take the subway. In Hollywood, their private chauffeurs drive them so self-aggrandizing awards parties where they all get together to wear ribbons on behalf of the homeless. Even other liberals around the country know that those in Hollywood live in their own well-enclosed utopia. They're stuck in their bubble, and they can't get out. That's because if the leftists in Hollywood recognized their bubble, they wouldn't be able to live with themselves. If limousine liberals knew they were limousine liberals, they'd either have to give up the limousine or the liberalism.” – BEN SHAPIRO  (The author of the 2011 book “Primetime Propaganda”)

“The television industry, liberal interest groups and the government – together they form a Celluloid Triangle. And that Celluloid Triangle is far more powerful than the military-industrial complex ever was.” – BEN SHAPIRO

“There are more closeted conservatives in Hollywood than closeted gays.” – BEN SHAPIRO

“Hollywood is awful, isn't it. I know this isn't a profound insight, or even a terribly Important one, but every year, come Oscar time, it strikes me anew. There's just no dignity there. It's a cattle show and the cattle are terrified. They're the elect – the luckiest, most beautiful, best people in the world – and they look like they're having no fun at all. Ah, Oscar night! Cheers me up no end.” – HUGO RIFKIND

“Assume that everyone in Hollywood is gay and Jewish.” – GRAYDON CARTER (the “Canadian-American” editor of VANITY FAIR, and this was advice he gave to the young English journalist Toby Young in the '90s)

“And liberalism – especially Hollywood liberalism – is a philosophy for the comfortable.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“In Hollywood everything the Democrats do is good. And everything Republicans do is evil. I doesn’t bother me. I live in Hollywood. It is like that every day.” – CRAIG FERGUSON

“Coming out as gay in Hollywood (and America for that matter) is about as brave as bringing beer to a frat party. Come out as a Palin supporter. That would take some nerve, especially if you are still looking to build your Hollywood career.” – JOHN NOLTE (Of Breitbart)

“In Hollywood 'He's a nice guy' usually means merely that 'he is not a psychopath'.” – ROB LONG

"The characteristic activity of Hollywood isn’t making movies. It is having lunch." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Hollywood ran out of original thought about three decades ago, and the people noticed and so keep avoiding the theaters. How many times can a good-looking, young, green progressive crusader expose a corporate pollution plot, or battle a deranged band of southern-twangy Neanderthals, South African racists, or Russian tattooed thugs, or a deep-state CIA cabal in sunglasses and shiny suits? How many times can the nth remake of a comic-book hero be justified by updating him into a caped social-justice warrior from L.A.?

The ruling generation in Hollywood is out of creative ideas mostly because it invested in political melodrama rather than human tragedy. It cannot make a Western, not just because Santa Monica’s young men long ago lost the ability to sound or act like Texans in 1880, but because its politics have no patience with the real world of noble people who are often doomed, or flawed individuals who are nevertheless defined by their best rather than worst traits, or well-meaning souls who can cause havoc, or courageous men who fight for bad causes.

Political correctness has become Maoist: All art must serve progressive struggle, defined in Hollywood as good race and gender warriors pitted against bad racists and sexists. Political correctness has become Maoist: All art must serve progressive struggle, defined in Hollywood as good race and gender warriors pitted against bad racists and sexists. The result is monotony and boredom." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.” – TREY PARKER

“And Hollywood isn’t half such a crazy place as they make out. I know two-three people in Hollywood that are part sane.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

“The great advantage of this place (Hollywood) is that it is so loathsome the moment you get outside the garden that there is no temptation to do anything but sit at home and work.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (in 1930)

"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) 

“Imagine an army composed entirely of officers. Let me put it another way: imagine an army where everyone thinks they’re an officer. That’s Hollywood, that’s the film business. No one wants to accept the hierarchy, no one will admit they are a foot soldier.” – WILLIAM BOYD

“The only polysyllabic word tolerated in Hollywood is delicatessen.” – TOM STOPPARD

“The movies are probably a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“Hollywood is the most avowedly Left-liberal industry in America.” – JOHN PODHORETZ (on 14 May 2021)

"Hollywood is the twentieth century's equivalent of fiteenth-century Florence." -- A. A. GILL (in 1996 -- and I suppose that to appreciate this bit of wisdom it helps to know what the hell was going on in fifteenth-century Florence...) 

"Find someone to look at you the way Hollywood looks at a Chinese government jackboot." -- DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE (on 25 May 2021)

“Success in Hollywood is half talent, half coincidence, and half knowing how to add.” – MATTY SIMMONS (the long-time publisher of THE NATIONAL LAMPOON, and the producer of ANIMAL HOUSE  and the “VACATION” flicks.)

Holocaust, The

“Holocaust denial is useful for Holocaust preparation.” – WILLIAM KRISTOL (in response to a Tehran newspaper, “Kayhan”, declaring that the Iranian “Revolution” has “busted the myth of the holocaust”)

Home

“Home is perhaps not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” – JAMES BALDWIN

"It is true that romance never takes place at home." -- PAUL FUSSELL

"Home is the only place where you can be yourself, and all travel is a pretense." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house." -- ZSA ZSA GABOR

Homosexuality(–s)

“If  I could push a button and make myself straight, I would”. – KENNY EVERETT (the homosexual British singer)

“What should not be a crime is not thereby a virtue.” – FREDERIC RAPHAEL (The American-born, English novelist and screenwriter. Not a poof.)

“I am fairly appalled and certainly fed up with the amount of fuss and coverage that the media gives so-called gays. There are now, and have been for some time, an elitist group with as little tolerance towards heterosexuals as the non-smokers have about those of us who puff away. Anyway, I can’t go on using that silly word ‘gay’ to describe homosexuals who, when I was a young man, were ‘queer’”. – JEFFREY BERNARD

“Nothing is more disagreeable than having to write about male homosexuality.” – PAUL JOHNSON (boy, does he have THAT right….)

“The theft of this word 'gay' by Californian sodomites and cravenly acquiesced in by lazy sub-editors who should know better, means that many fine old songs are now completely unperformably.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“’The love that dare not speak its name’ has been transformed by the gay lobby into ‘the love that will not shut up’.” – MINETTE MARRIN

“For many heterosexual men, the most enviable and extraordinary feature of being homosexual is just how easy it is to find someone to go to bed with.” – ALAIN DE BOTTON (the Swiss-born, Jewish, English writer)

“Even if gays weren’t oppressed, they’s still be unhappy, since 95 per cent are bottoms and only five per cent are tops.” – EDMUND WHITE (Talk about Too Much Information. Thanks, Ed, you whacking great poof….)

“And no gay man I’ve ever questioned has the slightest interest in female homosexual sex. When it comes to lesbianism, we gay men have – naturally – all the right attitudes on the political questions; and the obvious fellow-sympathies too. We wouldn’t persecute and we don’t disapprove; it’s none of our business. But (secretly) lesbianism bores us, for the truth is – though not a truth we would dare acknowledge on any of the various rainbow coalition committees with acronyms formed from the permutations of L (lesbian) G (gay) and T (trans-gender, transsexual) – that gay men find it hard to see why anything that did not involve a man should be called sex at all. Only lesbians and heteros would call a blonde and a brunette writhing on a tiger-skin rug ‘sex’. Gay men would call it novelty wrestling.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

“In what passes for the gay ‘community’, there’s something of a taboo about admitting, even to ourselves, that quite a few of us could, with a little coaxing and self-discipline, be ‘straight’. There exist strong reasons for this taboo among gays: first, ‘we can’t help it’ was absolutely central to our early pitch for equality and we needed to believe it.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (I always knew that the “born this way” mantra was self-serving bullshit, and here, this major English poofter, writing in January 2019, confirms it.)

“I have a gruelling work schedule and if I happen to look pretty girls in the face now and then, well then, it’s better to be a fan of pretty women than to be gay." --  SILVIO BERLUSCONI (defending himself against.... well, against various accusations. And once again Il Comendatore drives 'em all up the wall. Now that he’s retired, I think he ought to run for mayor of Las Vegas. If not San Francisco...)

“I'm against gay marriage, but that's no offense to gays. It is just in defense of a crucial linchpin of civilization that's already hanging by a thread.“ – ANN COULTER

"How remarkable it is that we as a society seem to believe that people can change their sex but not their sexual habits." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Where once tolerance was the discipline of leaving people in peace to go about their lawful business insofar as it did not harm others, in spite of one’s disapproval of what they did, it is now a demand for total acceptance, approval, and even celebration what one previously found aberrant or even abhorrent.” – ANTHONY DANIELS (he was writing about the “tolerance” of homosexuals in 2012, and how it wasn't enough for the homosexuals)

“Most people (I think) would accept that it was right and humane that laws making homosexual acts in private between consenting adults into a crime came to be regarded as foolish, wrong, and cruel, and that such laws were therefore reformed. But in a comparatively short time, the demand for the right to be left alone became a demand for the right to parade en masse through the streets of cities in sadomasochistic costume, inadvertently reinforcing the most extreme stereotypes in the minds of moralizers, and not so much liberating homosexuals in society as imprisoning them in a little Balkan state of their own, in which their sexual orientation became the most important, if not the sole, aspect of their identity. Furthermore, the right so to parade went along with the duty on the part of other citizens not to object; indeed, they were almost duty-bound to applaud. If anyone were to object, however mildly, to the indecorousness or tastelessness of it all, at its sheer unabashed vulgarity, at the absurdity of such cavortings’ being a manifestation of ‘pride’, he would be reproved not only as a prude, but as a bigot and a bad person.” – ANTHONY DANIELS

“I don’t mind them making homosexuality legal as long as they don’t make it compulsory.” – MICHAEL CAINE                                                                        (In 1967, when they legalized homosexuality in Great Britain.)

“I used to take part in debates about homosexuality. I used to try setting out a careful, principled position on it. Then I began to notice something. It was a subject on which it was pointless to be reasonable. As I began to speak, I could sense a sort of wordless baying noise slowly building in strength. It was the sound of the liberal mob having fun, and I could feel the awful word 'homophobe' slowly forming, in letters of fire just above my head. Against this charge there is no defence. If someone says you are a homophobe, you are. And off you go, into the outer darkness where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Expect no help from those you have until now regarded as allies or supporters.” – PETER HITCHENS

“Although the facts about homosexuality are well enough known, you cannot safely allude to them.  You cannot point to the effect on the emotional development of children, of a culture in which homosexuality is treated as a legitimate way of life, nor can you allude to the correlation between male homosexuality and pedophilia without attracting irate accusations of ‘homophobia’ “. – ROGER SCRUTON

"I was not born a homosexual. I was not 'born that way.' There is no scientific proof, or proof of any kind, that there is a homosexual gene or that homosexuals are 'born that way.' I was sexually molested at the age of 2 and I began making choices at that age that led to a life of homosexuality. I chose that life and I clung desperately to the lie that I was 'born that way' so I would never be held accountable for my choices." -- ROBIN GOODSPEED (an American ex-lesbian)

“Soon there won't be enough gayness to go around – assuming we haven't arrived at that point already.” – JAMES BOWMAN

"I won't knight buggers." -- KING GEORGE V (of England, 1865-1936) 

“Since one's attitude to homosexual acts is now considered the main way of judging whether a person is civlised, one must salute those in public life who defy this. To oppose gay 'equality' today is roughly as brave as it was to be publicly homosexual in, say, 1970: your position is not absolutely illegal, but it is perilous.” – CHARLES MOORE

“The obsession with gay rights and identity, and especially with homosexual marriage, seems to be characteristic of societies with low birth rates and declining global importance.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Do you know what happened to the Romes, Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. The last six. Nero had a public wedding to a boy.” – RICHARD NIXON

"The gay movement (in America) that began as a struggle against social hypocrisy has taken on the traits of a mighty ideology and has thereby acquired its own brand of hypocrisy." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (he saw this happening already in 1985)
 

“Coming out as gay in Hollywood (and America for that matter) is about as brave as bringing beer to a frat party. Come out as a Palin supporter. That would take some nerve, especially if you are still looking to build your Hollywood career.” – JOHN NOLTE (Of Breitbart)

"These guys were the kind who in prison were known as faggots but who out here in the allegedly normal world preferred to be called gay, even though very few such people were even moderately cheerful." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (in 1995) 

“Help me out here.
 The nutball left says ‘born gay’ is an irrefutable dogma.
 But they claim ‘born male’ and ‘born female’ are purely social constructs. 
If you're gay, you were born that way and you cannot and should not change. If your birth certificate says ‘male’, that means nothing, as you can decide you are female and live your life (with or without the appropriate mutilation) as female and impose your femaleness on other women.
 Our ancestors were wiser than we are. Someone claiming that people are born homosexual but not born male or female would have been locked in a padded cell, with the key thrown away.” – RAY BANNISTER (commenter on NRO, in January 2015)

«Homosexuality is no more a ‘human right’ than heterosexuality is.» -- JEAN-MARIE LE PEN

"The Jihadis are going to come in with AK-47s while we're sitting here arguing about pronouns." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (the conservative Scotsman, who happens to be a poofter himself, on the fatuity of his fellow poofs in the lgbt "community")

"It should be made abundantly clear that every letter after B in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet has made the argument for gay rights infinitely harder. In the hands of a new generation of activists the 'live and let live" argument has turned into 'believe what I believe' and 'say what I say'. Meanwhile, the argument that gays were just like anyone else has been replaced by the suggestion that LGBTQIA+ people are in fact practically a different species -- people who must have their own flag and be celebrated or else." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in June 2023) 

«The laws of the land change; I am lucky enough to have enjoyed my youth during that brief, liberal interregnum where neither homosexuality nor homophobia were illegal. Do what you want, think what you want – it did not last terribly long, that concept.» – ROD LIDDLE

«Seriously. If there is something about your sex life that you think warrants a parade on Fifth Avenue, it had better be f-----g heroic.» – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

«It’s always difficult to deal with homosexual badinage in the theatre. There’s so much effusiveness, so much jokey campness that it’s sometimes hard to spot authentic homosexuality.» – SIMON BRETT (in his amusing detective novel, «What Bloody Man Is That?»)

"Perhaps that was the origin of sodomy: avoiding a partner's halitosis." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

“I don’t share such a view, but it should still be possible to claim that homosexuality is a sin against God without ending up in jail.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

"We went way beyond merely legalizing same-sex relations long ago -- so much farther that garden-variety gays and lesbians are passé. There's a big difference, too, between simply allowing a practice and celebrating it or even, yes, promoting it, and in the past decade the West's cultural obsession with the sexual Crayola 64 has gone manically overboard." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"It's not obvious why one's private preference for sticking whatever, wherever should be a source of pride." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"A homosexual can be courageous, active, enterprising, a racing driver, a boxer, a fighter pilot, but can never be virile. To be virile you have to go to bed with women." -- JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (I can't stand this old commie, but I also can't find much to argue with here....)

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

“The world of Hollywood is filled with gay people trying to act straight while the world of rock’n’roll is filled with straight people trying to act gay.” -- TED JOY (A libertarian ex-journalist Army vet from Ohio, I think, on the Twoot -- in Dec. "22) 

"I would never fire someone for being gay, but homosexuality is not a gender, it’s a behavior. Trans is not a gender, it’s a mental illness." -- JOHN NOLTE             (on the Twoot, 15 June 2020, when the Supreme Court made an insane decision that includes trans-sexuals in the civil rights laws)

“Same-sex worlds can get unbalanced fast.” – ANDREW SULLIVAN (A guy who knows these things, of course. In Dec. 2020.)

"There is no evidence that transgenders are born that way. There is, however, evidence that they are suffering from untreated mental disorders such as bipolar disorder, dissociative disorder, separation anxiety, schizophrenia, and personality disorder." -- WALT HEYER (an American ex-trans-sexual fellow)

“‘People are born gay’ ignores empirical evidence. For many teenagers, sexual orientation is unstable and malleable. The most comprehensive study of sexuality to date, the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, found that, without any intervention whatsoever, three out of four boys who think they are gay at sixteen don’t think they are gay by the age of twenty-five.” – ROBERT CARLE (a professor at King’s College in Manhattan, writing in the PUBLIC DISCOURSE journal in 2013)

"They went from gay people were born that way to trans people were born wrong." -- DEREK WHEELER (an "Anarcho-Libertarian Capitalist" on the Twoot, in July 2023)

“I see the government has lowered the age of consent for homosexuals to the same as what it is for human beings.” – SHEIKH ABU HAMZA AL-MASRI (The “British” Muslim “cleric”, as quoted by the English journalist Rod Liddle in June 2021)

Honduras

“Honduras is the banana republic.” – TIM CAHILL

Honesty/Dishonesty

“He had the honest man’s profound fear of extreme good fortune.” – WILLIAM BOYD

                                                                                                      “There’s no such thing as a dishonest erection.” – GUY BELLAMY

"I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it." -- CHARLES DICKENS  (For some reason he sounds like Rooster Cogburn, here...)

"We're all as honest as we can afford to be." -- LENNY BRUCE

"I think a reasonable amount of honesty is the best policy." -- WILLIAM KRISTOL   (in 1993, when he was VP Dan Quayle's Chief Of Staff)

“He had long ago learned not to try to con a con man. Faced with scrupulous honesty, con men were at a disadvantage.” – WILLIAM HOOD  (the ex-spook, turned spy novelist)                        

"Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating." -- DAVID OGILVY

Hong Kong

“The old British regime of Hong Kong – a paternalistic free-for-all, with no politics and few laws.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

“There is just one example in history of a polity in which good government and civil liberties went hand in hand with unelected leadership – Hong Kong under British rule.” – MARK F. PLATTNER (in his book “DEMOCRACY WITHOUT BORDERS: Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy”, 2008)

“The Hong Kong miracle was only a 'miracle' if you believe economies grow and people prosper through magic.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

"I've been to, at last count, 58 countries, more or less (I say more or less, because not all these foreign places were proper countries), and the most free, equitable and generally satisfactory human society I've ever been in was colonial Hong Kong." -- JACK JOLIS

"Manchester with slanted eyes" -- PETER O'TOOLE (in 1965, when he was there for the filming of the excellent "Lord Jim")

Honor

“The struggle to be honorable is nothing less than the effort to become better than one really is.” – TRACY LEE SIMMONS (Journalism Professor at Hillsdale College)

Honor is the good opinion of those that matter.” – JAMES BOWMAN (author and film critic of the AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- CALVIN COOLIDGE (actually, this is a pretty naff quote, but the great “Silent Cal” was so closed-mouthed, that practically anything he said is worth putting up….)

“We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” – C.S. LEWIS

“Honor is in many respects just another word for reputation, integrity, or credibility. These forms of geopolitical capital buy goodwill, cooperation, and deference in the international realm. Fritter them away and you’ll get less of all three over time––and you may need them later.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.” – MARIO PUZO  (the Godfather)

“We live in an age when technology has replaced honor.” – TIM CAHILL            (in 1997)

Hope

"False hopes? There's no such thing." –  BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (the French have an expression for this: “Con, et content de l’etre”)

“Hope is a thing with feathers.” – EMILY DICKINSON (Too bad she didn’t add “…growing out its arse.”)

“Hope is not a plan, except to leftists, where it’s usually just about the only plan, everything else being mean-spirited and uncompassionate.” – MICHAEL WALSH

“It’s not the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” – JOHN CLEESE (in the greatly underrated – and, I sometimes think, unseen by anyone except by me and my family – movie “Clockwise”)

"For a successful Christmas (or life), avoid hope." -- ALAIN DE BOTTON

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

“Hope is not a plan or a strategy. It's a supernatural virtue.” -- JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE (An American “social conservative” activist – head of her Ruth Institute – who began as a libertarian economist)

“I don't want hope. Hope is killing me. My dream is to become hopeless. When you're hopeless you don't care. And when you don't care, that indifference makes you attractive. So hopelessness is my only hope.” --  LARRY DAVID (of course, the writer of the “Seinfeld” episode in which “George Costanza” says this.)

"Hope is a waking dream." -- ARISTOTLE

"He that lives upon hope, dies farting." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN      (easy, big boy...)

"Man is a victim of dope in the incurable form of hope." -- OGDEN NASH 

"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper." -- FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath is passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.” – ERIC HOFFER

Horses (and Horse Racing)

“There will never be socialism in England. You are safe so long as the people are devoted to (horse) racing. Here (in Prussia) a gentleman cannot ride down the street without 20 persons saying to each other, 'Why has that fellow a horse and I have not one?' In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is.” – OTTO VON BISMARK (to his fellow British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli)

“Huh! If you could call it a horse – if it hadn't shown a burst of speed in the stretch it would have got caught up in the next race!” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (My favorite moment in all of Wodehouse, and that's saying something. Here we had an embittered Bingo Little responding when an aghast Bertie Wooster had asked his chum if he'd plonked all his pecunity on a horse.)

“Don't give your son money,  as far as you can afford it, give him horses.  No one ever came to grief, except honorable grief, through riding horses.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL 

"There is only one race greater than the Jews, and that's the Derby." -- SIR VICTOR SASSOON (one of the "Baghdad" branch of the international family of Jewish industrialists and philanthropists)

“Horseback riding was the fastest a human could go before the railroads.” -- DAVID ANTHONY (an archaeology prof at Hartwick College, NY state)

Hospitality

“Any houseguest, like a fish, stinks after three days.” – BEN FRANKLIN

“Always accept hospitality. It forms a bond. Makes you allies.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

“The trick of being a good guest is never to ask any questions about the composition of the household. Hosts, even the grandest, are nervous creatures and interpret curiosity as evidence of dissatisfaction.” – STEPHEN FRY

Hospitals

“You go to hospital expecting to recover from illness, you don’t expect the ceiling to come down on your head.” – LILIANE BLACKMORE (a 75-year old English lady who was being treated at Barrow Gurney Hospital in Somerset, England for a nervous breakdown, of all things, when the ceiling did, in fact, fall on her. Oct. 2005)

“Men in hospital wards have a uniformly vagrant air, irrespective of their social class. The tousled hair, the five o'clock shadow, the ill-fitting gown, the public sleeping.” – JEREMY CLARKE

"Inertia is the most prevalent illness in hospitals. This is no country for passive men." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"The customer is always right; the patient isn't." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Hospitals were where light gathered in corners, and curtains performed the functions of walls. Where privacy was rarely granted, and unwanted visitors far more common than the other kind.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

“Hospitals, all glossy and abounding in exits and entrances and eccentric minor characters, seem made to be sitcom sets.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Hospitals provide education, enlightenment, spiritual guidance and a good cappuccino. They offer you the opportunity to take control of your condition, to pick up your infirmity and, well, run with it. If you can run.” – MELISSA KITE

“The compounded aroma of the clinic was not to my taste either: you were never quite sure what you were smelling.” – GUY BELLAMY

"Hospital, (noun): A medical establishment the main purpose of which is to keep patients/guests/inmates captive as long as possible." – JACK JOLIS (after my own second unwillingly-extended hospital stay in five weeks)

Hotels/Motels

“Posh people can be a nightmare because they want things done properly. The good thing about poor people is that they are just happy to be on holiday. Mind you, some poor people can be quite demanding, so you can't win.” – MARK JENKINS (the owner – actually, ex-owner, you will not be too surprised to learn – of the Grosvenor Hotel in seaside Torquay, England, said to be the “real life Basil Fawlty”)

"The defining architectural feature of the motel -- no need to go through a public lobby to get to your room -- did more than the pill to encourage what would later be rather primly called 'the sexual revolution'." -- TOM WOLFE

"In hotels everything is designed for something else. Meditation gardens you don't meditate in, chairs you don't sit in, drawers you don't fill containing Bibles you don't read. And I don't know who's using those shoe-cleaning machines." -- WILL WILES (in his surreal 2015 hotel novel THE WAY INN)

"All hotels are an interface between the known and the unknown. You inhabit one room on one floor. What does the rest matter to you? You are in an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers, and the hotel must make you feel comfortable and in place. They are structured illusions. Sculpted psychoactive environments. Mirages." -- WILL WILES

“Hotels are at their best at breakfast time.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE (nicely cryptic, what?)

"In the end everyone is a transient visitor, like a hotel guest. We are all ghosts that myseteriously check in and check out." -- SEAN THOMAS    (English journalist and novelist)

“There is nothing more telling than the small square of the world you see from a hotel window.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS   (I have no idea what this even means, much less if it’s true – in my experience, it’s not, particularly – but it certainly sounds portentous enough to make the cut)

Housing/Houses

“Since the primary purpose of flats is to enable at least five families to live where only one hung out before, thereby quintupling the landlord's income, they are apt to lack... spaciousness. From the keen cat-swinger's point of view this is regrettable.” – WILLIAM HEATH ROBINSON (the noted English illustrator, in his 1936 book “How To Live In A Flat”)

“Ultimate realities had resided upstairs.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Rent-control leads only to housing shortages." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN (Econ 101)

"You can’t clean everything all the time, so you have to assume a certain amount of dirt at home. And if you live with others, negotiation becomes necessary. Generally, the amount of dirt women will tolerate is no more than 3 percent, while for men it’s 98 percent. Most guys, after conferring long and hard with their female counterparts, feel thoroughly satisfied with their negotiation of the middle ground, which normally ends up being 4 percent. Take it or leave it. “4 percent take it or leave it” is a scientific measure that even rocket scientists at NASA accept when they have no other choice." -- ITXU DIAZ                                               (Spanish journalist, political satirist, and author.)

“You can hire an architect, you know, but the man with the hammer builds the house.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

"If you wish to reduce rents in the private sector by making more properties available, then be  nice to landlords, rather than nasty. Encourage them to enter the market and allow them a little leeway in how they deal with their tenants." -- ROD LIDDLE

"Show me your downstairs loo and I will tell you who you are." -- LAURA FREEMAN (Laura is English, and "loo" of course is "toilet")

Hubris

“I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on earth.” – BARACK OBAMA

“In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. Conservatism is nothing more than irritable mental gestures”— LIONNEL TRILLING (the lefty American “intellectual” and Columbia University Grand Poobah, in 1950)

“People working on their own get out of touch and it corrupts you... it's hubris isn't it? The funny thing about medical hubris is that nemesis is visited on the patients rather than the surgeon.” – DR. HENRY MARSH (the celebrated English neurosurgeon, and author of the two successful books “Do No Harm” and “Admissions”, in May, 2017)

Huckabee, Mike

“Huckabee is the best advertisement ever for the ACLU.” – LISA SCHIFFREN

“Humanism”

“The primary dogma of humanism – that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others – finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated.” – TOM HOLLAND        (the English historian, not the actor)  

Humanity

“We are here on earth to do good to others.  What the others are here for, I don’t know.” – W. H. AUDEN (this is one of the most genuinely funny entries in this entire Compendium)

“I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.” – JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (in 1778, near his deathbed, and this nicely illustrates the law that posits: The Left loves “humanity”, but can’t stand human beings).

“It is commonly observed that a man who loves mankind in general loves no one in particular.” – ANTHONY DANIELS

“The lesson of the 20th Century, in my view, is that humanity, even with religious restraints, is a force for horror as well as progress.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“Humans are the only species with a history.” – WILLIAM VOEGELI (Senior Editor of The Claremont Review, in  2011)

"It is our sexual repressions that have made us human." -- WILLIAM TUCKER (In his book "Marriage and Civilization")

“It's impossible to love all of humanity. It's hard enough to love those closest to us – our insufferable siblings, our annoying colleagues, the next-door neighbors who sometimes step on our peonies.” – MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

“Ninety-nine out of every hundred people are interesting, and so is the hundredth, for he is the exception.” -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

"We all only look human." -- SHIVA NAIPAUL     (yikes....) 

“Human beings are disgusting until lucky enough, in some cases, to be taught not to be.” – DAVID NOBBS (in his excellent comic novel, “Second From Last In The Sack Race”)

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been." -- WILLIAM HAZLITT (1787 - 1830. Famous English essayist-critic.)

"If the interactions of human beings were drawn in pen, the world would be a giant scribble." -- PAOLO GIORDANO (the author of HOW CONTAGION WORKS)

" 'Liking’ the human race is the prerogative of God -- as no human being can even know the human race." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in an interview in 1953)

“The more the different people of the world get to know each other, the less they like each other – the less well they get along.” – A. E. JOLIS (My dad. And I heard him say this several times – he was not a huge believer in “The Brotherhood Of Man”)

"We assumed more data would help humanity settle its differences: in reality it often exacerbates them. With ever more data, it becomes far easier, even without conscious intent, to find evidence to support your preconceptions." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (not only true enough, but it sounds like he's channeling my late dad -- see above:)

"The difference between humans and animals..... Animals would never allow the dumbest of the herd to lead." -- JOHN SEEMAN (a guy on the twoot who claims he "escaped from New Jersey")

"Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“There are no hopeless situations, only hopeless people.” — MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATURK

“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” – JONATHAN SWIFT (Actually, this is the King of Brogdingnag speaking to Lemuel Gulliver about the latter’s fellow    human beans.)

“Everything is good in the world, apart from us humans.” – PRINCE HARRY, DUKE OF SUSSEX (the ex-Army helicopter pilot-turned-Most Pussywhipped Man In The World actually unloaded this, in 2021)

"We human beings are a bad lot. Unchecked, we divide into predators and food." -- DAVID MAMET

"The future will be about finding a way to reduce the population. Of course we will not be able to execute people or build camps.We get rid of them by making them believe it is for their own good. We will find or cause something, a pandemic targeting certain people, a real economic crisis or not, a virus affecting the old or the elderly, it doesn't matter, the weak and the fearful will succumb to it. The stupid will believe in it and ask to be treated. We will have taken care of having panned the treatment, a treatment that will be the solution. The selection of idiots will therefore be done by itself: they will go to the slaughterhouse alone." -- JACQUES ATTALI ("Of course". Monsieur Attalli is a major Frogue egghead, and was a senior adviser to Socialist President Mitterand. And these chilling words appear in his 1996 collection, "Verbatim, 1981-1983".) 

Human Nature

“Human nature has no history.” – GLENN LOURY                                                                                      (Professor of “Social Science” and Economics at Brown University. And, incidentally, a black guy. And this quote, in 5 short words, sums up the reasons for – the cause of – the eternal failure of the Left)           

“It is an odd paradox of human nature, seen in sergeants’ messes as well as boxing gyms, that there is never more ease of manner, concentration on mastering tasks and skills, and warm fellowship among men than when they have come together in a group to perform lawful acts of physical violence.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

(English expat writer for National Review. A legendary “Young Fogey”)

“Human knowledge grows, but the human animal stays much the same”. – JOHN GRAY (all I know about this eminently sensible fellow is that he’s a professor. Of what and where, I know knot….)

“If men were angels there would be no need for government.” – JAMES MADISON

“I will never abandon man to the ravings of the enemies of human nature. I am not here to be popular. Bishops have paid the price of blood for having opposed Nazism, Communism and all sorts of racism. Never will I be complicit in my silence in this new ideology.” -- CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH
(An absolutely splendid chap -- should've been Pope instead of the Argentine Marxist Bergoglio)

“Complete ignorance of human nature will not necessarily prevent a man from becoming an acknowledged expert upon it.” – A. O. J. COCKSHUT (I don’t know who this splendidly-named old geezer was, but judging from his proliferation of initials he must have been English. Anyway, he was having a go at the British philosopher Herbert Spencer….)

“The one constant in human affairs is human nature itself, and that, left unchecked, its drives and weaknesses will inevitably undermine free institutions.” – JAMES L. BUCKLEY (Fabuckely's younger brother, and, from 1970 to 1976, incredibly, one of the senators from New York)

“The idea of saving the weakest is fundamental to the moral order of society, precisely because of the natural human propensity to do the opposite.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Somehow, over the last few decades, we seem to have taken refuge in a vast structure of wishful thinking about human nature. We have, to borrow one of Fred Reed's words, enstupidated ourselves.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (in July 2006. Now I just wanna go find this guy Fred Reed… and maybe buy him a beer…)

“In any inquiry into human nature, it is always instructive to look at what people do when they are free enough to do as they please.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Trying to change what you basically are is like walking north on the deck of a south-bound ship.” – ELIZABETH BOWEN (the novelist)

“A better understanding of human nature would lead to further progress in the arts and sciences; but not by altering human nature itself – that would be impossible – but only by improving our understanding of it.” – DAVID HUME

"I am under no illusions about people's propensity to do the wrong thing." -- FRED D. THOMPSON

“Outward evidence is worthless when dealing with human nature.” – FLORENCE KING

“I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better.” – BERTRAND RUSSELL

“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Human nature is like putty.” – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (whacking great pratt….  Lenin is reputed to have been very happy to hear this….)

“Man was malleable  That was the great socialist faith of the 19th century. It was a false faith, and after many struggles it dies in the gulags and death camps of the 20th century. Mankind, in short, proved to be a huge disappointment to the socialist dreamers.” – TOM BETHELL

“Finance is a human invention, set to serve human purposes and reflecting human nature. No wonder, too, that the four most dangerous words to be heard in a market are ‘This time it’s different’.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES

“Finance, after all, is human nature in action.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES

“American history is a tale of human nature set free.” – WALTER  A. McDOUGALL (Author of “Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era”)

“No two crises have anything in common except human nature.” – DOMINIC CROSSLEY-HOLLAND (A British economist and TV producer)

“There is, in all radical causes, a kind of disgust with human nature.” – ROGER SCRUTON

“There is no such thing qs ‘liberation’ from human nature; at best there is the attempt to understand it, to live with it, and gently to pressure it in a direction that it will bear.” – ROGER SCRUTON

“The greatest obstacle to calm, rational, evidence-based thinking about human nature, is human nature.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“If you want to know about human nature, start by asking your aunt.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (?)

“No one ever changes his character from the time he is two years old; nay; I might say; from the  time he is two hours old.” –  WILLIAM HAZLITT             (the English writer and painter, in 1821)

“Nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above.” – C.S. FORESTER (Rose, to Mr. Allnut, in his “The African Queen”)

“There are several seemingly immutable, hard-wired characteristics about humans that socialists, liberals and progressives find difficult to deal with and would like to change. People tend to work harder and produce more when they own what they produce. Property is better cared for when it is privately owned. People love to exchange, what Adam Smith called a ‘propensity to truck and barter. To suppress these characteristics requires brute force.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS

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

“Any program or personal activity that doesn’t account for mankind’s fallen nature will likely fail with any given individual and is certain to fail in the aggregate.” – DAVID FRENCH

“A writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” – JOHN STEINBECK (In his 1962 Nobel acceptance speech, and a better example of sheer fatuity and foolishness I can't offhand think of....)

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking thing for granted." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

“Human nature is a constant, like our senses. We don’t turn off our senses of touch, taste, hearing, or sight.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Acknowledging the fact that human nature has no history is the first principle of realism, and realism is conservative." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Human beings are happier with lies.” – FRANCIS O'GORMAN (in his book “Worrying”)

“Human nature is the most controversial and overarching political question of our time.” – STEVEN F. HAYWARD

“And perhaps we should start calling leftists 'human-nature deniers'.” – STEVEN F. HAYWARD

“Our progressives friends accept ‘Born This Way’ for exactly one category of human inclinations: those related to venereal enthusiasms.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The strict biological-determinist model is an argument either for anarchy or totalitarianism.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is, therefore, doomed to fail.” – MARK PERRY (professor of economics at the Univ of Michigan)

“You can’t keep human nature down. But that is exactly what those on the Left attempt to do. – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW

"It is human nature that rules the world, not governments and regimes." -- SVETLANA ALILUYEVA PETERS (née SVETLANA STALINA)

“Once you decide that human nature is a fiction, that human beings are merely the sum of impressions made on them by their surrounding culture, then politics acquires an enormous jurisdiction. Consciousness becomes a political project, and the point of politics becomes the control of culture in order to control the imposition of proper consciousnesses.” -- GEORGE WILL (in 2023) 

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” – IMMANUEL KANT

“People gave me gifts, people liked me, maybe because they sensed I was virtually dead and couldn’t hurt them.” – DENIS JOHNSON

"Human nature does not change, and human nature is what fiction is about." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (in his autobiography "You've Had Your Time", written three years before he died)

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

“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”.)

“I just learned how to convince folks I had changed. But no one ever changes.” – GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN(according to Everett Ehrlich, in his book “Grant Speaks”)

“Leftism is a pathology of human nature. A toxic mixture of Envy, Wishful Thinking and Bossiness, it is present to one degree or another in everyone. And, like other aspects of human nature, it is immutable – and thus it must be fought forever, like endless Whack-A-Mole.” – JACK JOLIS

"The essence of human nature is that far from being 'flawed', we are not very damned good at all. And we know it." -- DAVID MAMET

"For revolutionaries, the idea of a fixed human nature presents a hateful obstacle to their political ambitions." -- LOUISE PERRY   ( author of "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution" and host of the podcast "Maiden Mother Matriarch")

Humiliation

"That enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation." -- TOM WOLFE

Humility

“Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses. Kings and philosophers shit;  and so do ladies.” – MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (The Montaigne. And in case you’d like to know the original, “olde” Frog, it is “Au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul. Les Roys et les philosophes fientent, et les dames aussi.”)

“You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited.” – MICHEL EYQEM DE MONTAIGNE (Hell of a middle name)

“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.” –  G. K. CHESTERTON

“I don’t say there are no humble liberals, and ‘arrogant conservative’ is no oxymoron. But real conservatism at least encourages humility.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“I would be humble, but I’m afraid I’d be proud of it.” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

“Of all the virtues, humility is the one I have the most difficulty with. I mean, what is the point?” -- R. EMMETT  TYRRELL, JR.

“Don't be so humble, you are not that great.” – GOLDA MEIR (to a visiting Diplomat)

“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” – C. S. LEWIS

"And if it's ever a matter of eating humble pie, I'll eat it if it's there but not if some fucking bastard is shoving it in front of me." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left." -- OSCAR LEVANT 

“The more you know of mankind, the more you will mistrust them (sic).” – JAMES BUCHANAN, SR. (the President’s father, who was a Pennsylvania merchant and farmer)

"Though I may have a certain amount of fame from television, I’m always aware that it doesn’t make me any better. Like everyone else, my valet puts my pants on me one leg at a time." -- PAT SAJAK (in March 2022)

Humor

“Freud had it that jokes were essentially a form of aggression.  People who subscribe to political correctness would agree.  For them there are no good jokes – and they, like Freud, aren’t kidding.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

“Wit has truth in it. Wisecracking is just calisthenics with words.” – DOROTHY PARKER

"When you tell a joke to a liberal, there's always that split-second where they process whether they're allowed to laugh or not."  – DENNIS MILLER (And ex-lib, so he knows. And it's bad enough when they're not allowed to laugh, but YOU're not allowed to either....)

“If you keep talking long enough, eventually you'll say something funny.” – GROUCHO MARX

“If there’s no room for laughter, there’s no room for me.” – STEVE HARLEY (leader of the great ‘70’s English rock band “Cockney Rebel” – a hugely fun dude (a sort of cross between Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter and Slade’s Noddy Holder…)

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole.” – MEL BROOKS (oy, such a cruel, cruel man….)

“There is nothing so dangerous as an intelligent man who will laugh at anything.” – NOEL COWARD (I’ll remember this the next time I don’t laugh at any Ben Stiller movie since “Meet the Parents”)

“The American sense of humor? Only a people without a sense of humor would boast about it, and most Americans don’t really understand satire. We’re a serious people who make jokes.” –GEORGE S. KAUFMAN (One of our greatest humorists. Look him up)

“Laughter is our stuttering in a language we can’t speak yet.” – GALWAY KINNELL (he’s a poet, so maybe that explains the opacity of this….. whatever it is….)

“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” – JAMES THURBER

“The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing.” – RONNIE BARKER

“The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. It is the most precious of all assets.” – PAUL JOHNSON (Whew. That’s some concept. What if he’s right? Cool….)

“Being funny, like being married or being president, is really just a matter of managing expectations. You make people expect you to slip on the banana peel. You lead them, through selective takes and camera work, to connect the dots just a few seconds ahead of the action. You flatter them, ultimately, into assuming that they’ve got it all figured out. And then you fall into an open manhole.” – ROB LONG

“For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." -- DAVID OGILVY        (the legendary English advertising pioneer)

“Men love jokes, women don't. Men tell jokes, women can't. Men have cocks, women don't. End of story.” – NORA EPHRON

"Few things are funnier than somebody on the screen to whom everything in life means so much." -- STEVE TESICH 

“He who has the courage to laugh is master of the world much like him who is prepared to die.” – GIACOMO LEOPARDI (wow – sure sounds like a good deal to me…)

“We tend to like our comedians tragic.” –  STEVE PUNT

"The thing about comedy, and why so many comedians are driven mad and driven to the bottle, is that it's an extremely rare commodity, this laughing gas. When it dries up you have nothing to fall back on, and there's nothing worse than drilling and finding that the well is dry." -- JONATHAN MILLER (the medically-trained English comic, one of the original 4 in the famous "Beyond The Fringe")

 “Republicans are easier for us than Democrats. Democrats tend to take it personally; Republicans think it’s funny. “ -- LORNE MICHAELS (the producer of “Saturday Night Live” and, of course, a BIIIIIG lib....)

“The discovery of the reality of evil and the battle against it are at the basis of all gaiety and even of all farce.” – RANCOIS RABELAIS

“Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.” – PETER USTINOV (when you think about it, this is nothing but a fatuous tautology. I liked ol’ Ustinov, but I think I’m sorry I included this bit of idiocy in here.)

“Humor is the antidote to everything.” – T. S. ELIOT

"Do not laugh too much, for laughing too much deadens the heart." – MOHAMMED (Yeah, that’s right, the original “Big Mo”. a.k.a. Mr. Chuckles…)

"Jokes let out forbidden thoughts." -- SIGMUND FREUD (another funny man) 

"Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." – MARK TWAIN

“Do you know the difference between a comic and a comedian? A comedian's a man who tells funny stories. A comic's a funny man.” – BOBBY BALL (half of the English comedy team of Cannon and Ball)

"There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third." – JOHN F. KENNEDY

"Humor is like a good watch. It will go well if left to do its job, but the moment one starts poking around, it goes wonky." -- TERRY-THOMAS (the great English comic actor whose real name was Tom Stevens -- his first attempted stage name was "Mot Snevets" until his horrified agent persuaded him to change it)

"Comedians are not happy people. They all suffer from the blues. If you spend your life trying to make people laugh, you're bound to get a bit fed up when they don't." -- TERRY-THOMAS

"I am sure there must be some comedians who are not megalomaniacs -- the ones you never hear of!  It is such a difficult profession in which to make your way that only the most egotistical can possibly survive. A comedian is on his own. While an actor can always claim that he is merely interpreting his author, a comedian has no one to whom he can pass the buck." -- TERRY-THOMAS

"It isn't what I say, it's how I say it." -- TERRY-THOMAS (Reminds me of one of my favorite early Rolling Stones songs, "It's The Singer, Not The Song")

"A comedian has a different attitude to life from an average person." -- TERRY-THOMAS (to put it mildly) 

"Girls always put a sense of humor at the top of the list of things they find attractive in men. Girls don't particularly like jokes; they really don't want to know the one about the Essex girl and the blind chimney-sweep. But they know, or they sense, or they are born with an instinct that tells them that men are at their most defenseless, men are puppies, men will do anything, face any danger or indignity, spend the rent, risk the job, hock the future --simply to make girls laugh." -- A. A. GILL

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." – E.B. WHITE

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

“There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them.” -- ELON MUSK 

“Dictators hate humor.” – GARRY KASPAROV (the inimitable chessist, freedom fighter, and bon-vivant)

“We know what makes people laugh. We do not know why they laugh.” – W. C. FIELDS

“A man can be told by his laughter: a bad man looks uglier, a good one more attractive.” – LEO TOLSTOY

“It is easier to make a man laugh at a bad joke, but more worthwhile to get a woman to laugh at a good joke.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“Madmen are always serious – they go mad from lack of humour.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“This is the funniest thing about today's comedy world – the funniest material springs from liberals bashing other liberals. But liberals can't even recognize when other liberals are bashing them.” – BEN SHAPIRO (commenting on “Seinfeld”, in his book “Primetime Propaganda”)

“The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” – FRAN LEBOWITZ

“Men need humor to attract women; women do not need humor to attract men.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.” -- JOANNE WOODWARD (The actress -- Paul Newman's wife.) 

“I really do believe that creating a world free of bad, tasteless, cruel, unkind jokes and a world free of jokes will be one and the same thing, in the final analysis. For once it becomes a reality that we cannot joke about anything – and that day will come if we go on like this – then the chances of people actually punching each other out of sheer frustration will go up, not down.” – MELISSA KITE (in June 2014)

"We live in a post-joke world." -- MELISSA KITE

"I think the problem is that in the post-joke era, people increasingly want you to entertain them by making jokes that are in no way connected to them. However, jokes are like the bottle in spin the bottle. Sooner or later it is going to point to you. If we want humour to survive, we all need to be on the wrong end of a joke every now and then, because someone has to be." -- MELISSA KITE

"Can you quantify the hurt the joke caused you? Do you feel abused? It's best if you feel abused. Then we can give you a Twitter hashtag." -- MELISSA KITE

“Laughter is America’s most important export.” – WALT DISNEY

“If everybody gets the joke, then it wasn't that funny.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

”Dave's Law Of Humor: If you have to explain why something is funny, it isn't. If you have to explain why it isn't funny, it is.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“The key to comedy is discipline. The key to not funny is indiscipline.” -- MARK KERMODE (A clever, if often obnoxious anti-American, movie reviewer at the BBC. And he's dead right, here.)

“It is sometimes difficult to explain a joke to the New York Times” – PHILIP HENSHER (Hensher is an English author and journalist. He's also a homosexual, but unlike all the homosexuals at the NY TIMES, he has a sense of humor.)

“Humor is like charm – if you say you have it, you don't” – CHARLES MOORE

“We have a public culture in which everyone is always laughing but no one has a sense of humor.” – CHARLOTTE MOORE (The redundantly, if amusingly, named sister of the great English journalist Charles Moore. In August 2012)

“Old-time comedians used to say that if you mentioned the word ‘Schenectady’, you got a laugh. ‘Schenectady’ was funny. So was ‘Poughkeepsie’. ‘National Public Radio’ has a similar effect on me.” – JAY NORDLINGER

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." - E. B. WHITE (The humor here, such as it is, being compounded by Squire White's apparently hazy memory of his high school bio class -- de frog is 'posed ta be dead before he gets dissected....)

“Religion is more difficult to talk about. I don’t think we could do ‘Life of Brian’ any more. A parody of Islam would be even harder. We all saw what happened to Salman Rushdie and none of us want to get into all that. It’s a pity but that’s the way it is. There are people out there without a sense of humour and they’re heavily armed.” – MICHAEL PALIN                                                                                                                            (The famous Python, at the end of 2013, and while he may have devolved into a politically correct wuss of the first order, at least he’s honest.)

“Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province. It must have been a man who originated the phrase ‘funny like a heart attack.’ In all the millions of cartoons that feature a patient listening glum-faced to a physician (‘There's no cure. There isn't even a race for a cure’), do you remember even one where the patient is a woman? I thought as much.” -- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“You can’t make a joke out of everything. But you can keep trying.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"Make the reader laugh, and he will think you a trivial fellow. But bore him the right way and your reputation is assured." -- W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (Who I never really thought of as a comic novelist before, but here he's put his gnarled finger squarely on the sad fate of humorous writers....)

«Humor is always a man in trouble.» – JERRY LEWIS

«It's a nightmare once comedy stops feeling funny.» – JOHN CLEESE

«The most dangerous people are always those with no sense of humor. Without exception they are nasty, agressive and stupid. Not geniuses by any stretch of the imagination. Not many laughs in the Kremlin. Not many in the Theater Workshop.» -- ROGER LEWIS (The author of the Peter Sellers biography)

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” -- BILLY WILDER

"All left-handed violinists make people laugh." -- CARY GRANT (well... if he says so.... me, I must have missed it...)

«Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.» – WILLIAM JAMES (not, to my knowledge, a noted humorist, but... alright....)

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

«Every joke is a tiny revolution.» – GEORGE ORWELL

“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – BUSTER KEATON

"It's not the jokes that need to be funny, but the people who tell them." -- ADRIAN EDMONDSON (an English comic, and his words remind me of one of my favorite early Rolling Stones songs, "The Singer Not The Song") 

"Tell a joke to a liberal. Between your punchline and his laughter, there is a Progressive Comedy Pause. In this second or two, the liberal will process the joke to make sure he is allowed to laugh." -- JON GABRIEL (A political writer, funnyman and extensive blogger, out of Arizona)

«It is, of course, fatal in English public life to make a joke.» – CHARLES MOORE

"It's said that German humor is about excretion and French humor is about sex. Jewish humor is about ambiguity." -- DAVID MAMET

“The more seriously you play the part, the funnier it is. You see, people are only funny to other people, never to themselves.” -- ARTHUR LOWE ("Captain Mainwearing" in "Dad's Army") 

«Comedy isn't funny. It's very serious business.» – MICHAEL CRAWFORD (the English actor and, among many others, «Frank Spencer» in «Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em»)

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

“A German joke is no laughing matter.” – SUE PRIDEAUX (an English novelist and biographer.)

«Comedy without wit is spite.» – TANYA GOLD (the SPECTATOR's food and restaurant columnist)

“An audience that's thinking isn't laughing.” – LLOYD EVANS

"The best comedies are the ones where everybody is an idiot." -- GARY EATON (a conservative Californian rocker/musician, member of The Army You Have and The Continental Drifters)

"The curious thing about humor is that it is so prevalent and yet so rare. The fact is there are vast numbers of us who laugh. And yet the professional laugh-getter is an unbelievably rare commodity. In a nation of two hundred and million people (sic), the huge majority of whom laugh constantly, there are only... well, how many?... I'd be hard-pressed to name more than top ten or twelve top-ranked comedians." -- GEORGE PLIMPTON 

«Explanations of jokes are like dissections of lab animals: In order to demonstrate how they work, you have to kill them.» – JONAH GOLDBERG

“It's hard to make jokes about sex anymore since everything funny is everywhere taken seriously.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

"It is the ability to take a joke, not to make one, that proves you have a sense of humor."--MAX EASTMAN (a prominent NY mid-20th century «intellectual» communist, then anti-communist)

“Trying to  change people's mind through refutation only entrenches their beliefs. Humour might just work.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"Humorous writers are much more loved by readers than editors ever suspect." -- MARCUS BERKMANN

«Comedy is failed tragedy.» – BARRY HUMPHRIES

"Women like men who make them laugh. I think." -- NELSON DEMILLE (yep -- my own experience has been that this supposed truism is, in fact, an -- how can I put this? -- inexact science)

“Now here's some serious advice: never make jokes.  Any public figure who makes a joke becomes an instant victim of the great conspiracy of the humourless.” – SIMON BARNES

“We all have good thoughts and bad thoughts, but nobody ever expresses the bad thoughts. We just think them and don't say them... But the bad thoughts are funny.” – LARRY DAVID (in conversation with Ricky Gervais)

"I really don’t think that it’s appropriate to attack comedians. We’re on the right side of things. We’re important people." -- JOY BEHAR (A particularly egregious panelist on a daytime TV program by women, for women, called "The   View", yesterday -- and I fear she hasn't quite grasped the essence  of this exotic thing, "comedy")

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard."-- SIR EDMUND KEAN (Great British Shakespearean actor on his deathbed, 1833)

“Things that are not actually funny can still get a laugh provided they are presented in the form of a joke. There is tremendous subconscious social pressure to laugh when presented with something that is shaped like a joke.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Humor is in part an exercise in tribe building.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“When you’re thinking, you’re not laughing.” – JACKIE MASON (Krusty the Clown’s rabbi dad. And I heard him say on the BBC program “Desert Island Discs”)

“Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.” -- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“Humor is the last refuge of the bourgeois, and therefore should be undermined.” – HERBERT MARCUSE

"All comedy is the channeling of private misery." -- KENNETH WILLIAMS (the late, great "camp" English comic actor) 

“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain upon the affections.” – GEORGE ELIOT

“Everything can be funny so long as it happens to somebody else.” – WILL ROGERS

“She has no sense of humor, but she laughs a lot, out of friendliness.” – MARTYN HARRIS

"The impeccably left-liberal New York audience doesn't want jokes that make you laugh, just ones that enable you to applaud the politically correct sentiment. It's a form of bullying, disguised as tolerance. With the subtlest of passive-aggressive menace." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

“Humorists have been scared out of the business by the touchiness now prevailing in every section of the community. Wherever you look, on every shoulder there is a chip, in every eye a cold glitter warning you, if you know what is good for you, not to start anything.” --P. G. WODEHOUSE (in 1956)

“I can only be funny when I am complaining about something.” -- EVELYN WAUGH

"There is no such thing as an 'appropriate' joke -- that's why it's a joke." -- B.J. NOVAK                          (The writer of  the 2005 “Sexual Harassment” episode of “The Office” – in which he plays “Ryan Howard -- as spoken by “MICHAEL SCOTT”/STEVE CARRELL)

“Comedy comes out of resistance.” – JERRY SEINFELD

"We laugh too easily today. Laughter used to be like virtue. It wasn't something you were willing to give away on a first date. And yet, simultaneous with this great homogenising of laughter, comes the latest-wave of offense-taking, washing away the transgressive constitutent from comedy which is often as not is the best part of it. Which makes the world half as funny as it was. And soon not funny at all." -- HOWARD JACOBSON (the humorous English novelist – in July 2020)

“In the western world there are only two comical things; the Christian church and naked women.” – JOHN UPDIKE                                                                        (in fairness to John, these words were spoken by a character – and a provocative one at that, Freddy Thorne – in his 1968 bestseller “Couples”)

“Tension, of course, is the comedian’s friend. Make them laugh here, and you’ve got ‘em.” – TIM CAHILL                (a travel-writer who’s definitely left-wing, but I have to admit – he’s also pretty funny.)

“For me, funny forgives all.” – DAVID BADDIEL                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

“Rich people can be funny.  Poor people never.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER                                                                  (Not sure how true this is – but it’s certainly “quotable”)

“Comedy is an excuse to be racist” -- ROBIN DIANGELO                                                                                        (The white queen bee of Anti-white racism, in July 2021)

“Humor is the mind’s magnetic needle.” – PETER DEVRIES

“To be good at humor, you should know a lot about a lot of things.” – MATTY SIMMONS (the publisher and long-time honcho of THE NATIONAL LAMPOON)

“If you can laugh, you won’t cry. Death and avarice and hunger are stupid. And stupid is funny.” – MATTY SIMMONS

"It's people one has jokes with whom one misses." -- NANCY MITFORD (yes, doesn't one...)

“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential. Every joke has a victim. That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous.

You’ve always got to kick up? Really? What if there’s someone extremely smug, arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be below in society? They’re not all in houses of parliament or in monarchies. There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.” -- ROWAN ATKINSON (Mr. Blackadder-Bean, in 2022)

Hungary

"Most western democracies are governed by and for their metropolitan elites. Hungary is not." -- ANNABEL BARBER (The boss of an English guide-book publishing outfit, in June 2022)

" (The Magyars) are an ungrateful, unbending and rebellious people." -- RAIMONDO MONTECUCCOLI (1609-1680, an Italian soldier -- a Duke of Melfi, in fact -- in the service of the Habsburg monarchy)

“Hungarian cuisine is vigorously, irrepressibly unhealthy.” – ROD LIDDLE

"The Hungarians have always been especially prone to national insularity, a failing that is likely related to their charming yet bizarre language." -- WILL COLLINS       (A high school teacher in Eger, Hungary, in June 2019, quoted in NR)

“Hungary is the only country in the world with more violinists than bus conductors, more guitarists than engineers, and more zither players than surgeons.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE (in 1994)

"No state in the Communist bloc misses its aristocracy more than Hungary." -- BARRY HUMPHRIES     (the Aussie comic in 1981)

"Like so many Hungarians, his real calling had been to be an Englishman. Hungarians make the best Englishmen in the world." -- A. A. GILL

"(Viktor) Orbán is the nonpareil of winding up a certain type of centrist or leftist. His government is avowedly post-liberal, he institutes policies which put Hungary first, and he has attitudes about teaching gender ideology in schools which would displease Stonewall." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Hunger

" ‘Hunger’ in America is not a problem. It is a consequence. And I reject solving consequences for the dumbasses who incur them.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

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

"Hunger is certainly most excellent sauce." – JOSEPH BANKS (1743-1820, the great English natural scientist -- who accompanied Captain Cook to Tahiti.)

Hunting

“Hunt all you like, but don’t talk about it, it’s the most boring subject in the world.” – NANCY MITFORD

“Hunting is one of the last remnants of a dead feudal world.” – ADOLPH HITLER

“I am not in favor of killing animals for sport, as it happens, but when it comes to a nice piece of chicken with some mayo and perhaps a dash of Sriracha, that's not morally indistinguishable from a Taliban brigade that blows up a girls' school.” – JAMES LILEKS

"I'm asked if I want to go monkey shooting. I don't. It will be too much like shooting my own children." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog") 

"Contrary to prevailing opinion, I never found an elephant big enough to justify the sin of killing one." -- JOHN HUSTON     (a big-game hunter hmself, the great movie-maker said this after directing "The Roots Of Heaven", about a hunter who wants to save elephants, in 1958, in Bangui, C.A.R. and  Fort Lamy, Chad)

"The only thing I've hunted in Africa is terrorists." -- RYAN ZINKE (For a while this fellow was Trump's ex-Navy SEAL Secretary of the Interior. Good man.)

Hunting (fox)

“The best thing about (fox) hunting as a sport is that you can smoke and drink on the pitch. The other great thing is that the humans are all linesmen, referees and managers. The actual running about, the game, is played by the animals.” – A.A. GILL

Hurricanes

“Everything you have heard about (Hurricane) Katrina is wrong.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“If anyone rioted (during Katrina), it was the media.” – W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL                                               (quoting the bi-partisan  congressional Report on Katrina, 2006)

Hygiene

“With breath, as with family reunions, the most that one can reasonably hope for is an absence of bad.” – AMMON SHEA

“If there's two things the world can't stand it's a dirty old man and a clean little boy.” – NEIL SIMON

“A big chunk of so-called 'progress' is, in fact, just a matter of simple sanitation and hygiene.” – MARK STEYN

Hypochondria

“I can't help wondering whether many conditions such as eating disorders spread in proportion as they are known about.” – THEODORE DLARYMPLE (This is true – when I was a kid, you never heard of autism, or Tourette's Syndrome, or all these eating disorders, or peanut allergies – or any of the 10 million other allergies that lawyers have cooked up.... veh strange....)

Hypocrisy

“Hypocrisy is the vice of vices. Only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.” – HANNAH ARENDT

“Hypocrisy is the only cement that holds civilization together.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“In matters of right and wrong at least hypocrites know the difference.” – P.J. O'ROURKE

“Our parents were hypocrites. No matter what they were up to they tried to look and act like they were doing the right thing. They didn’t exactly pride themselves on their hypocrisy, but they were proud of knowing right from wrong, and being a hypocrite showed you could tell the difference.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

“My hypocrisy goes only so far.” – DOC HOLLIDAY (Of OK Corral fame – although not a proper quack, he was a dentist – and did all the things he    was reported to have done. Died of TB at the age of 36.)

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” – C.S. LEWIS

"It's one of the peculiar ironies of history that the people most eager to hang the priests are those most eager to replace them." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“I don’t want more hypocrisy in the world, but I’d rather have more of it than have none at all.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Our hypocrisy is what made our humanity recognizable. Barbarians are rarely hypocrites; animals never fall short of their ideals – for they have none.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“We support them ('leftist communists' in Britain) the way a rope supports a hanged man.” – LENIN (VLADIMIR ILYICH ULYANOV)

“Next to alcohol, hypocrisy is our most important social lubricant.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Handing out indictments for hypocrisy in Washington is like writing up people in New Orleans at Mardi Gras for public intoxication." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“People seldom do what they believe in.  They do what is convenient, then repent.” – BOB DYLAN

“If comedy is based on incongruity, hypocrisy is incongruity that has been drained of humor.” – ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST                    (Brit biographer and literary critic. Bit pompous – writes for The Guardian as well as the Speccie)

"Your speech is violence, my violence is speech" -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

“Woe betide any organsation that thinks of itself as especially good. It'll give itself leeway to behave in a terrible way.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

“People gave me gifts, people liked me, maybe because they sensed I was virtually dead and couldn’t hurt them.” – DENIS JOHNSON

Hysteria

“It is necessary to understand the indispensable role hysteria plays on the left.” – DENNNIS PRAGER

"Hysteria is to the Left what oxygen is to biological life." – DENNIS PRAGER

"Hysteria is the tactic of the person who knows he or she is wrong. Which is why it's such a favorite of the Left." -- JACK JOLIS 

"Every liberal is an hysteric whose beliefs are their tranquilizers." -- ROY CAMERON (“ROY CAM”)

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” – H. L. MENCKEN