W

“Wage Gap”

"The dirty little secret is that most men don’t earn as much as other men…" -- DR CHIP BECK (Described in W’s interwebs as a "soldier, sailor, artist, spy" and a member of my online "old boy” network)

"If a woman will do the same job as a man for less pay, why would any sane person, male or female, ever hire a man?" -- JACK JOLIS

Wales

“I personally think the veil should be made compulsory in Wales, for if there is such a thing as an attractive Welshwoman I’m a Dutchman.” – ROGER LEWIS (the quite amusing author of, among much else, “The World of Peter Sellers” and “Seasonal Suicide Notes”, but here he’s talking through his chapeau – I mean, there may, admittedly, not be many good-looking bimbos in Wales, but there is, after all, Catherine Zeta-Jones…)

“I grew up in Wales – the posh bit, mind – and back there, being middle class was pretty easy. You bought a broadsheet newspaper, or The Daily Mail at a pinch, and remembered to remove your pyjamas before leaving the house. That was it. You’d qualified.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“In England, success in life is bound up with where you went to school. In Wales, where I come from, the standard of education can be so miserable that you'd do better to get expelled.” – CHRISTOPHER GAGE (in the UK SPECTATOR in July, 2014)

“Every time he came to Wales he promised himself he would congratulate his father on having had the foresight and courage to run away from the whole shooting-match.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

"The Welsh are loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls." – A. A. GILL (a Scotsman)

"Everything is going to be alright. Provided you stay out of Wales." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (advice given to his grate pal and the model for "The Ginger Man", Gainor Stephen Crist)
 

"Even when they're boring the pants off you with the problems of the coal industry and the wickedness of the Anglo-Saxon invader and exploiter, Welshmen still manage to sound slightly mendacious and endearingly hypocritical. You suspect that they send the kids to Sunday School to ensure themselves the privacy essential for enjoyable afternoon sex." -- PHILIP THODY (An English professor of French)

"The Welsh are a stunted, plebeian race with socialistic tendencies. They sing collectively." -- FRANK PARKIN     (the noted English anthropologist, in his only novel, the wild 1986 "Krippendorf's Tribe")

Walking

"When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours." -- SIDNEY POITIER (Well, ... yeah. Duh. Actually, I probably wouldn't have included this banality except that it was uttered by the splendid Mr. Poitier, who I always liked quite a lot.)

"You walk faster when you're arguing." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

"Solvitur ambulando." (" It is solved by walking.") -- ST. AUGUSTINE

"The beauty is in the Walking -- we  are betrayed by Destinations." -- GWYN THOMAS (the Welsh novelist... whose first name I like...)

Wall Street

“A derivative is something that someone has bought which has turned out to cost him money.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES (uh…. Ok, I’ll buy that…. so to speak….)

Walz, Tim

"Walz is a loser wrapped in a loser." --ROY CAMERON

"When I'm having a tough day .... I think, Ilhan Omar is in Congress, and I smile." -- "TAMPON-TIM" WALZ

"The weirdest candidate since Howard Dean. What a beauty this guy (Tampon-Tim) is." — JAMES WOODS (the great movie actor)

War

“War should be a last resort, but it should be a resort.” – COLIN POWELL

"All warfare is deception." -- SUN TZU (Squire Sun said a lotta stuff, but this is all you need to retain. And I believe he preceded that parveenu Mohammed, see below:)

“Whatever you do, don't miss your war.” – PETE HEGSETH (Actually, this was told to a young Hegseth by a Vietnam vet friend of the family – Hegseth went on to serve with distinction in Iraq and Afghanistan, is active in veteran and conservative affairs, and is the author of “In The Arena”)

“War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn't it?” – DENIS JOHNSON (in his majestic, if interminable, “Tree Of Smoke”)

“War's got to be about something bigger than dying, or we'd all turn deserter.” – DENIS JOHNSON

"The shooting begins -- here, there -- where? Who? You never know, you never see, it's one of the strange laws of urban warfare, you can never see who's shooting." -- DENIS JOHNSON (in my experience, you can say the same about ALL wars, not just “urban”.)

"In almost all conflicts since The Napoleonic Wars, it has been heavy artillery that has caused two-thirds of battlefield casualties. Heavy artillery is thus a prerequisite for a modern army to be taken seriously on the world stage." -- ANDREW ROBERTS 

“A lot of people talk a lot of nonsense when they say wars never settle anything. Nothing in history was ever settled except by war.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (I can’t, I’m afraid, find this anywhere on the Interwebs – but I solemnly swear that I did see this quoted, somewhere... So it stays in, but I don’t use it because I’m afraid I can’t back it up. But this is the only one – all other Churchill quotes are verifiably attributed to him.)

“When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Mistakes made in carrying the battle to the enemy are forgivable." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"War is a dirty shoddy business, which only a fool would undertake." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (in 1898, during the Battle of Omdurman, in which he participated, as a Lieutenant)
 

“War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can." – WINSTON CHURCHILL (Here he was obviously being a cheerleader rather than a combatant)

“Intelligence is the life of everything in war.” – NATHANIEL GREENE (Washington’s most effective general in the Revolutionary War; 1742-1786)

“War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"Only the dead have seen the end of war" -- GEORGE SANTAYANA (I had long thought that this was said by Plato, but it turns out there's no evidence of that -- it turns out it's this chap Santayana's)
 

“War is the father of all things.” – HERACLITUS (ancient Greek philosopher who’s so old he’s only described as “pre-Socratic”)

«War is deceit.» – MOHAMMED (Yeah, him. Sneaky bugger....)

“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” – GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

“It is weak men that get us into wars by accident.” – PAUL JOHNSON (in 2014, referring specifically to Obama vis a vis Putin)

“America can win any war it wants to win”. – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (It’s just a matter of will.)

“So long as you come out the other side, war is a fantastic experience. You know when you’re on a black ski run and you look down and you say ‘Can I manage this?’  Then you get down and you think, ‘How did I manage that?’ That’s what it’s like.” – MIKE PEYTON (A British Army WWII veteran and author of “An Average War”)

“Armies which sustain 100 per cent casualties start to think twice about going on fighting.” – JOHN KEEGAN

"If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting." -- CURTIS LeMAY

"You don't make money in a war, but there's not so much to spend it on either." -- GRAHAM SWIFT (which reminds me of my brother Paul, in his excellent memoir "Going Mobile", describing how as a young bachelor Green Beret lieutenant freshly back from Vietnam, he'd never been so cash-rich... before or since -- an experience I myself shared when I came back from Vietnam in '69 and from Laos in '70) 

"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." -- PAUL RODRIGUEZ (The Californian comic)

"Civilians fight wars.  The professional military holds the terrain until wars begin and then civilians fight the wars." -- ROBERT TIMBERG   (the USNA-graduate, Marine platoon-leader in Vietnam and author of the 1996 "The Nightingale's Song")

“War is hell. So go big or go home.” – SARAH PALIN

“The only mercy in war is rapid victory.” – HELMUTH VON MOLTKE (The reputedly great Prussian Field Marshall)

“Let there be dismissed at once, as preposterous, the hope that war can be carried on without someone or something being hurt.” – REAR ADMIRAL ALFRED THAYER MAHAN

“Wars are like snowstorms – dazzlingly beautiful and exciting at first, but then increasingly dismal as they go on and on and on. And on.” – THOMAS HARDY

“Wars for territory have a finite end; wars for ideology do not.” – RAYMOND CARR

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- LEON TROTSKY (an immensely useful quote, this – can be paraphrased endlessly....)

“War is nothing but a catalogue of errors.” – DAVID BROOKS (got THAT right, sport….)

“The tragedy of war is always error and costly error at that, the side winning who makes the fewest and learns the most from them – and then doesn’t give up.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Wars are not won by evacuations."  – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"War is the default state of the human species." – DONALD KAGAN (History prof at Yale)

“There are no ‘small’ jobs in the business of war – just dead egomaniacs.” -- CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER CAL SPENCER (5th Special Forces Group, US Army, in 2001, during the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, as quoted by Doug Stanton in his excellent book «Horse Soldiers»)

“War is not supposed to be litigation. It's not about rights for the enemy but rather victory for the American people.” – ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

“In war, it’s only worthwhile if you win.” – JAMES E. PARKER, Jr. (One of my fellow CIA paramilitary “case officers” in northern Laos. His code name was “Mule”. Wrote a terrific book about it, which happens to be called “Codename: Mule”. By the way, in case you’re wondering, my code name was – rather extraordinarily -- “Hippie”.)

“It is essential, in time of war, to be in good company.” – MATT LABASH (with, as it happens, Christopher Hitchens in Iraq, 2003)

“The experience of war doesn’t necessarily seem to make people less warlike; just more determined to get it right next time.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Obama warns against ‘open-ended wars’, as if they are almost animate things. But wars end, not when they reach a rational, previously agreed-upon expiration date, but usually when tough, specific wartime choices are made that lead to victory or end in defeat. One party must decide – for good or bad reasons – that it doesn’t want to fight to win, or simply doesn’t believe it has the resources for victory. To say that ‘open-ended wars’ are undesirable is a banality that offers no guidance for these real-life choices. A better truism is that America should not fight wars it does not intend to win.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“The reasons for a war may be highly principled. The conduct of a war can not be.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

"Don't try to destroy the enemy totally in the battlefield. You just need to ensure that the enemy fails to accomplish their mission." -- ADMIRAL LEE HSI-MIN (The head of the armed forces of f the Republic of China -- Taiwan -- from 2017 to 2019) 

“I hate the sound of an AK-47. It's only the bad guys that use them. If you hear one, you are already too close.” – JANINE DI GIOVANNI (the intrepid and semi-foxy war correspondent who is, surprisingly, not Italian but rather American, and even more surprisingly, not a lefty.)

"In America we're reluctant to use the word 'war' when it's a real war, but we love using the word 'war' when it's not". -- BRUCE SCHNEIER (The prominent cryptographer, computer security expert, and author, here referring to such things as "cyberwar" and the "war on drugs" on the one hand, and on the other hand our, let's just say, confused and hesitant use of terminology to describe whatever it is we're doing in reaction to the Jihad against us declared by Al Qaeda and its allied representatives of the Religion of Peace.)

“Every time there's a war, the same damned people always show up. The funny thing is you never see them in between.” – CHRIS ROBBINS (in his 1979 book “Air America”)

“The only endeavor that our friends on the Left do not deem to be the ‘moral equivalent of war’ is actual war.” – JIM GERAGHTY

“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. But not in vain.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (on the “Charge of the Light Brigade”)

“War is now a matter of legality, or nation-building before, not after, the enemy is fully defeated, and that means, given the unchanging nature of man, that it is more difficult to win a war today than it was in the past.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (in 2012)

“The point of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but his will. That's what victory requires: the subjugation of the opposing will.” – SIR BASIL LIDDELL HART (British soldier and historian.)

“Holy shit! Those fucking idiots started the war without me!” – GEORGE KENNING         (My old Agency pal, to me, in my living room in NYC, one Sunday in 1979, upon reading in the NYTimes that the Third {or whichever number it was} Tchadian War had just kicked off – whereupon he fled out the door, not to be re-seen for some considerable time. By the way, our side won that particular skirmish of the Cold War, I’ve no doubt thanks to George....)

«I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all.» – GEN. JAMES MATTIS, USMC (RET.)

«I'm going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for 10,000 years.» – GEN. JAMES MATTIS, USMC (RET.)

"We're gonna keep on fightin' until they're sick of us and leave us alone." -- JAMES MATTIS

"Recognize that not all the best ideas in warfare come from the nation with the most aircraft carriers." -- GEN. JAMES MATTIS

“Common parlance tends to confuse war with forcefully reforming foreigners.» – ANGELO M. CODEVILLA

"War gives only two grades: A and F." -- ANGELO M. CODEVILLA 

«Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won.» – THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

“Wars are not fought in grassy meadows on sunny afternoons.” -- THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON (The Iron Duke being poetic...)

“It's ridiculous to say Iraq was ‘unwinnable’. Most any war is winnable. You just need to win it.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"All wars end as kinetic." -- FRANCISCO FUENTES  (my excellent Cuban “X” pal)

"'War of ideas' doesn't tell you how to fight it. 'Intelligence-driven war' does.» – JACK JOLIS

«Soldiers fighting in a war are morally permitted black humor about it. Snarky civilian bystanders who don't even agree with the war aren't.» – JACK JOLIS

«You can't make more than one mistake in war.» – PETER JONES (the resident «classicist» at the UK SPECTATOR, translating from the Latin, Bis pecare in bello non licet)

«No war can end without someone's boots on the ground.» – BING WEST

«Somewhere between 1966 and 2006, the conditions of war and the acceptability of misery and friendly casualties had changed. We didn’t have enough troops in Iraq partly because of how we chose to fight the war. Some blame this on short-comings in military doctrine, but may be equally attributable to the current mores of American society.» – BING WEST (he said this in Sept. 2006, but it’s truer today than ever....)

"Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love." -- GUY SAJER (The young French – Alsation – kid who was drafted into the Wehrmacht and survived the hell of the Eastern Front, and wrote one of the best war books ever about it: «The Forgotten Soldier»)

“Things are simpler, and they feel more important, in war.” – SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“Never tell a soldier he doesn't know the cost of war.” – GUY HIBBERT (The screenwriter of the excellent 2015 film “Eye In The Sky”, through the mouth of the late Alan Rickman playing LT Gen Benson.)

"Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide." -- HENRI BARBUSSE (in his novel "Le Feu", 1915)

“War and farce are never too far removed.” – JUSTIN MAROZZI (English journalist, historian, and travel writer.)

"Notice how the term 'warmonger' tends to be hurled against people who stand up to actual warmongers." -- JAMIE KIRCHIK (of the Daily Beast, the Tablet, Brookings)

"The soldiers on neither side fought for what propaganda told them, or for principle, or for each other, as is commonly claimed. They fought because they had been set to it, and would hold fast to the impulse of which they were part, which had begun before the beginning of time." -- MARK HELPRIN

"The only halfway decent thing about war is that it teaches you the relation between risk and hope." -- MARK HELPRIN 

"Give me an army of West Point graduates and I’ll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I’ll win a war” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON

“I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” – GEN CURTIS LeMAY (famous USAF knuckledragger.  Good man.)

"Wars don’t end by 'negotiated settlements' or via 'exit strategies'. They don’t even end when one side has clearly won. Rather, they end when the losing side realizes it has lost." – MICHAEL WALSH

“Because give them this much: they knew they were fighting a war. And you couldn’t fight a war without both sides taking part.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

"In War, the Chief incalculable is the human will." -- B.H. LIDDELL HART

“When you go to battle, you throw away the scabbard.” – ANDREW JACKSON

"More wars are fought because of bad intelligence than good intelligence." -- H. KEITH MELTON (of the National Spy Museum)

“Experientally, war is mainly sound.” – JAMES VERINI (author of “They Will Have To Die Now”)

“War also consists largely of waiting for war.” – JAMES VERINI

"Someone brainy once observed that war is first impossible and then inevitable." -- BEN SCHOTT     (and I haven't been able to identify that "someone brainy")

"Democracies cannot win protracted wars." -- J. MICHAEL WALLER

“When war isn’t being loud and boring, most modern accounts agree, it’s being loud and surreal.” – LOUIS AMIS (apparently no relation; a writer for THE SPECCIE)

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

“War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important to him than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” – JOHN STUART MILL               (crikey!)

"War is like my first wife, Lieutenant -- a real bitch, but God, could she stiffen your dick." -- MICHAEL PETERSEN (The Vietnam vet author of "A Time Of War", who subsequently was jailed for murdering his 2nd wife)

 “One goes into a war for reasons of honour and soon finds oneself called on to do very dishonourable things.” – EVELYN WAUGH

“All we had to do was leave Italy and Abyssinia alone and nobody would have got hurt, because I can't imagine anything safer than being in an Italo-Abyssinian war. As far as I can make out, neither side has yet come within fifteen miles of the other.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (in 1935, commenting on the then Mussolini vs. Haile Selassie shadow-war – and the whole thing is redolent of Evelyn Waugh's brilliant “Black Mischief”)

"Well if it's war, and you're sticking it to your own people -- then you're doing it wrong!" -- MARK STEYN                                                                                        (on 28 April 2020, referring to harassment in Maui against the Maui Brewing Company making hand sanitizer)

“War is fear.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

“War is fear, and the trick is to inspire more of it in the enemy than he does in you.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

“It is easy to be critical of one’s commanders after the event and it is a game that all junior ranks enjoy playing. It is wrong to indulge in it too much.” – ROALD DAHL

“Nearly all innovations for mankind’s progress were the result of wars, and the bigger the war, the more advanced the progress.” – PROF JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great “Gonzo Anthropologist” from Colorado)

War (ammunition)

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

"Ammunition  beats  persuasion when you are looking for freedom." -- WILL ROGERS

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

War ("Asymmetrical")

“ ‘Asymetrical warfare’ is a euphemism to avoid acknowledging that my opponent is not playing to my strengths and I am not winning.” – GENERAL RUPERT SMITH (distinguished Brit general, retired in 2002. NATO, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the C.O. of the UK’s 1st Armoured Division)

War (and Peace)

“Democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.” – JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

“Those unhelpful terms: ‘pro-war’ and ‘anti-war’. We’re all anti-war (except for psychopaths): Some of us think that this or that war is necessary and justified, some of us don’t.” – JAY NORDLINGER

“No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” – GEN JAMES MATTIS

“A good peace is better than a good war, but a good war is better than a bad peace." – G. K. CHESTERTON

"War is like hunting, except that in war, rabbits shoot."  "La guerre, c'est comme la chasse, sauf qu'à la guerre les lapins tirent." -- CHARLES DE GAULLE

“Paradoxically, the only means of enforcing deals meant to avoid war is war itself.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

"The American way of war is to win the war in nothing flat, and then spend the next decade losing the peace." -- MARK STEYN (in early 2014)

“War, and preparation for war, are the normal conditions of mankind, while peace is extremely rare.” – MICHAEL LEDEEN

"Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense." -- WALKER PERCY

"War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable." -- WALKER PERCY

"Ex-soldiers keep the peace better than politicians." -- WALKER PERCY     (I don't know if this is true, actually -- but it sounds good.)

"You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well -- you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill to be well again had seemed everything." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"You can't be against war in principle if you don't know it in principle, and you can't know it in principle. And if you can't know war in principle you can only pretend to, and if you can only pretend to know it, you can only pretend to be against it. Many people just like to show that they're thinking the right thoughts." -- MARK HELPRIN 

"Abandoning a war is not the same as ending a war." -- RICH LOWRY

"'Ceasefire'. We cease, they fire." -- BERNARD LEWIS

"War brings Peace." -- WARREN PLATTS

“Let us therefore make war so that we may have peace, for the object of all war is peace.” – HENRY BEAUFORT, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER (in 1416)

“Peace is like health. You can maintain it, but you cannot prevent disease by being healthy. War is like disease. It’s no good saying, ‘We believe in health, so doctors are warmongers’.” – CHRISTOPHER SZPILMAN (the distinguished Polish scholar on Japan)

“It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

“ ‘Peace’ should never be the objective of warfare. Total victory should.” – MICHAEL WALSH

“What is called insolence in the masses in times of peace is called courage in times of war.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

“No one is stupid enough to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers. In war fathers bury their sons.” – CROESUS (Born 596 BC, the famously “rich as” King of somewhere called Lydia, who, like a lot of others at the time, was defeated by the Persians. He was quoted here by the Grik historian Herodotus.)

"His detestation of war does him credit, but seems to blind him to the fact that one is already in progress." -- CHARLES MOORE     (speaking about Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in March 2024)
 

"Nobody wants war but men don't want only peace either." -- JOHN UPDIKE

War, (the U.S. Civil) – see Civil War

War, (Councils of)

“Councils of war breed timidity and irresolution.” – GEN. DOUGLAS MacARTHUR

“The problem inherent to public discussions of the war: where you stand is often based on what you know.” – DAVID FRENCH (A rather cerebral ex-Army Captain who fought with the infantry in Iraq. He’s become a schoolmarmy  National Scold in his recent, civilian years.)

War (Counterinsurgency/”COIN”)

“In a counterinsurgency the people are the prize not the playing field.” – TOM RICKS

“In counterinsurgencies, homefront perceptions and a willingness to win are more important than in conventional infantry struggles. That’s because little is obvious in an unconventional battlefield. Victory doesn’t simply follow a column of troops marching toward an objective. The side that controls the narrative wins the war.” – ROBERT D. KAPLAN (of the ATLANTIC, in Sept. 2006 – the author of “Imperial Grunts”)

“The side that controls the narrative wins the war.” – ROBERT D. KAPLAN

“A counterinsugency expeditionary force should be as political as possible and military as necessary.” – MICHAEL EVANS (The Australian military expert, here referring to the successful Aussie COIN op in East Timor)

“To make war on rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” – T. E. LAWRENCE

“This is Psy Ops. We're talking about unbalancing the enemy's judgment.” – DENIS JOHNSON

"Wars of subversion and counter subversion are fought, in the last resort, in the minds of the people.” – FRANK KITSON (an English general and author of books on insurgency/counterinsurgency)

“Before, it was about hearts and minds. Now it’s about two in the heart, and one in the mind.” – PFC CHRIS FERGUSON (A US Marine, member of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, at the First Battle for Fallujah, Iraq, 2004)

"What do you need to start a guerrilla war? Ten thousand dollars and a telephone. You use the dollars to recruit fighters. The phone you use to call the world's press after your first attack." -- LAURENT-DESIRE KABILA (the "guerrilla leader" who overthrew Mobutu and became president of the DRC) 

War, “Forever”

“All wars are endless and forever when you don’t understand what it takes to win.” – DANIEL GREENFIELD

“It is not very comforting to say that the President (Biden) is retreating from a ‘forever war’. The defense of American interests – and of western interests more generally – is a forever war.” – CHARLES MOORE

“I think standing up for the values you believe in, standing up to protect your interests, is a forever commitment. It’s unending – so be prepared. I mean, when your adversary is constantly challenging you, then you have to constantly stand ups for what you believe and constantly enable the defense of it. And that will be forever.” – BEN WALLACE (the British Defence – sic – Minister, in Sept. 2021)

 
"The only 'forever war' is the war against Leftism." — JACK JOLIS

"The United States does not lose wars, it just loses interest." -- HUSSAIN HAQQANI (A fabulous quote. And Sqquire Haqqani, who was Pakistan Ambassador to the US from 2008-11, was with the Hudson Institute in Dec '18 when he wrote it.)

War, (Future of)

“The future of war is war for an audience.” – KATRINA GULLIVER (an English journalist, reviewing “The Future of War” by Lawrence Freedman, in Sept. '17)

"We live in an age in which war has loosened its strict shape, has shrugged off its uniform: an age of messy, non-narrative wars, of sieges and drone strikes, of wars fought at a distance and without soldiers. Perhaps all modern warfare is a style of psychological warfare – war conducted in the head, in the stories and the fears of the civilians." – DANIEL SWIFT (in the UK SPECTATOR, April 2018)

War, Indian (see Indians, “Feathered”, Wars)

War, Nuclear

“One nuclear device. The Americans could survive it. The Russians might barely notice it.” – DANIEL SILVA (in his rather awful “The Messenger”, 2007)

“War On Terror, The Global” (GWOT)

“It’s a war, not a debate.” – MICHAEL LEDEEN

“So there's a global war, we're the main target of the aggressors, and our leaders don't see it and therefore have no idea how to win it. Any serious attempt to understand what's going on has to begin by banning the word stability, much beloved of diplomats and self-proclaimed strategists. If anything is fairly certain about our world, it's that there is no stability, and there isn't going to be any.” --  MICHAEL LEDEEN

“We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” – JOHN ADAMS (in 1800, when he was President and they were debating about whether to continue to pay crushing ransom to the Barbary pirate States, or going to war against ‘em)

“Half the Democratic Party doesn’t even think there is a Global War On Terror — and the other half thinks it’s our fault!” – RUSH LIMBAUGH (Wotta man! I actually heard him expostulate this, during the 2004 campaign, and, boy, was he right…)

" 'I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.'  With this profound understanding of politics and leadership, he (George W. Bush) declared war -- but against nobody in particular." -- ANGELO  M. CODEVILLA

"I've spent lots of time with our enemies and I respect them. That's why I know they have to be defeated, not courted." -- ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Paradoxically, opposition to the antiterror effort remains alive only because of that effort's success.” – JAMES TARANTO (Of and in the WSJ, in Sept. 2006. Think about it.)

“There is no limit to what lawyers can do. They wage wars better than generals, know medicine better than doctors and interrogate terrorists better than the CIA. We do not have enemies, just defendants.” – ALEX ISIDORO                                                                                            (a perceptive citizen from Yardley PA., in March 2007)

“This war ends when they stop coming here to kill us!” – RUDY GIULIANI (in May 2007)

“The phrase “war on terror” is an unfortunate choice of words. It is the terrorists who openly declared war on us.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“That’s it. They have martyrs, we have critical-incident stress-management sessions.” – TOM BETHELL

"Our main problem in this greater war we're in is that all too often we've treated terrorists like Americans and Americans like terrorists." -- ALLEN WEST (the ex-Army LTC and then outstanding GOP congressman from Boca Raton, FLA, in Dec '10)

“The U.S. (no longer) has strong options for interrogating and holding prisoners itself. If it could find another terror mastermind, or even a successor to Bin Laden, we might simply be forced to eliminate him with a Hellfire missile rather than running the risks of attempting to capture him. When terrorists are taken out by blunt force, our ability to exploit their phones, computers, and minds dies with them. The U.S. has chosen to unilaterally disarm itself in the war on terror.” – JOSE A. RODRIGUEZ, JR. (in his book “Hard Measures”)

“Americans will only believe the war on terror is over when they can stop taking off their shoes at airports.” – JOHN PODHORETZ

“George Bush shied away from the ideological war, which resulted in more than a decade lost, and Obama has peremptorily surrendered.” – JED BABBIN

“We all need to stop torturing each other over every little thing we say and get back to the important business of torturing Jihadis to find out what they say.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

“You cannot win a war against radical Islamic terrorists with an Administration unwilling to utter the words radical Islamic terrorists.” – TED CRUZ

"If the President and the other Democrats don't believe these radicals are really Muslims, why do they bend over backwards to treat them as Muslims when they're captured – and then release them into Muslim countries?” – DENNIS PRAGER

“The destruction of the enemy's armed forces is but a means – and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one – to the attainment of the real objective. The object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but to destroy his will.” – CPT. BASIL HENRY (“B. H.”) LIDDELL HART (the great twentieth century British author, soldier, and strategist.)

“Americans have to decide how they want to defend themselves against terror attacks or risk having that decision made for them. Do they want to wait for something to happen and treat it like a crime? Or do they want to be proactive and capture or kill the terrorists before they have a chance to act?” – JAMES E. MITCHELL (in his excellent book “Enhanced Interrogation”)

“Americans would once again die in their own country because of an ideology, and a faith, born of a region that most could not find on a map. The enemy could not be reasoned with or dismissed;  it could not be appeased by an American withdrawal from the Islamic world. America could leave the Middle East, but the Middle East would follow it home.” – DANIEL SILVA

"We're gonna keep on fightin' until they're sick of us and leave us alone." -- JAMES MATTIS

"The United States does not lose wars, it just loses interest." -- HUSAIN HAQQANI (A fabulous quote. And Sqquire Haqqani, who was Pakistan Ambassador to the US from 2008-11, was with the Hudson Institute in Dec '18 when he wrote it.)

“War is not a law enforcement operation. Trials are great—after the enemy has been beaten down and conquered to the point that they surrender. Until then...use the courts for criminals and B52s for enemy combatants.” – CHRISTOPHER HOLTON (“Vice President for “Outreach Center for Security Policy”, “Divest Terror Initiative”, “Shariah Risk Due Diligence Program”)

“We will win because Americans don’t realize we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.Large-scale attacks such as 9/11 were nice, but not necessary, and a series of low-tech attacks can bring down America the same way enough disease-infected fleas can fell an elephant. Jihad-minded brothers will immigrate into the United States and wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws until they are strong enough to rise up and attack. The brothers will relentlessly continue their attacks and the American people will eventually become so tired, so frightened, and so weary of war that they will just want it to end.” -- KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED (to his interrogator James E. Mitchell)

"At Dhahran International Hotel. Hell, how do they expect to have a war without a bar? This is a virtually intoxicant-free conflict, no weird concoctions circulating in these parts other than those brewed by a few enterprising GIs, or by Saddam's mad scientists. Maybe that's why in these first few days it's been a ticktock war, everything going off like clockwork, no one driving backward over the latrine or dropping ordnance on a hallucination." -- DENIS JOHNSON

"The Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it." -- ROBERT BAER (in 2002)

"We are at war in America and throughout the Western world, at war with an enemy with no infrastructure to attack, with no planes to shoot out of the sky, with no boats to sink to the bottom of the sea and precious few tanks to blow up for the amusement of the viewers of CNN. The only way to defeat such an enemy is by intelligence, by knowing what they plan to do next, and by being ready for them when they arrive. And the only way to gather such intelligence is by having the political will to let those who know how to learn secrets perform their jobs, no matter how murky the swamp is." --ROBERT BAER (in 2002)

“I never liked that term, "war on terror." Terrorism is a tactic; it is not the enemy we fought every day. The term has done more to confuse us than enlighten us. Our enemy was – and continues to be – individuals who take inspiration from a strict interpretation of Islam and employ terrorist tactics to press their cause.” – PETE HOEKSTRA (the excellent ex-GOP Congressman from Michigan, who, if I were in change of things, I would have made him head of the CIA. He wrote this in Sept. 2021)

"Bush declared war -- but against nobody in particular." -- ANGELO M. CODEVILLA (in April 2006)

“War On Women”

“Hillary Clinton is the War On Women” – KATHLEEN WILLEY

War, “People's”

"The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

War, Reasons for

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

"Democracies cannot win protracted wars." -- J. MICHAEL WALLER

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." -- GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER, USMC (In 1933. This guy was a legend even in his own time. An account of his life reads not unlike a surreal Denis Johnson adventure novel... The man did win a couple of Medals of Honor, but at a time when they were, sadly, given out rather cheaply -- his were for actions in Mexico and Haiti, and he tried to return his first one, but the return was refused and he was even ordered to wear it. He became a bit of a leftist/pacifist crackpot towards the end of his life, dying in 1940, but not before voting for the Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas, in the 1936 Presidential election) 

"The United States does not lose wars, it just loses interest." -- HUSSAIN HAQQANI (A fabulous quote. And Sqquire Haqqani, who was Pakistan Ambassador to the US from 2008-11, was with the Hudson Institute in Dec '18 when he wrote it.)

"What are the origins of war? At some point we decided fighting back was cheaper than running away." -- CHRISTOPHER COKER (A prof at the London School of Economics &"Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War")

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

"It is dramatically clear that we have offered up a myriad of ways to lose in this endeavor:  any time a tanker is hit, any time we fail to be fully successful against an attack on one of our warships, any time a bomb goes off in an airport or a government official is assassinated, we will be perceived as having lost. There is no definitive action that will be accepted as evidence we have won, or when our commitment will be viewed as having been successfully completed." -- JAMES WEBB

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

"The American people and are viscerally opposed to the idea of pre-emptive war. In the absence of a threat, pre-emptive war looks to them very much like naked aggression." -- NEAL B. FREEMAN (in June 2006. And I -- or my, ahem, good pal Jack Jolis -- addressed this very vexed matter in a, if I say so myself, excellent 14 January 2014 article in NATIONAL REVIEW titled "Preemption:Thankless Wisdom" -- that you should all immediately find on the dread Google....)

War Reporting

"I hate the sound of an AK-47. It's only the bad guys that use them. If you hear one, you are already too close." -- JANINE di GIOVANNI (a pretty intrepid war correspondress, and surprisingly and gratifyingly enough, not a lefty. And equally, surprisingly, she's American, and not Italian, as many people think.)

“The worst thing that you could ever do for that (the Iraq) war was having all these media people embedded in the units. Most Americans can't take the reality of war, and the reports they sent back didn't help at all.” – CHRIS KYLE (Having been in Vietnam – where we looked on the press as actual adjuncts of the enemy – I can well sympathize with The American Sniper, here –  but I know first-hand of exceptions... such as my daughter Anne for The Wall Street Journal in Afghanistan with a platoon of the 10th Mountain Division.)

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” – ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

“Experientally, war is mainly sound.” – JAMES VERINI (author of “They Will Have To Die Now” — and “sound” means “noise”, here, not “good”)

“War also consists largely of waiting for war.” – JAMES VERINI

"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) 

War, “Rules of”

“We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians”. – OSAMA BIN LADEN

“The kind of objectivity possible in congressional hearing rooms and salons of justice in Geneva is not reached in the murk of terrorist warfare. Rules of governing conduct in espionage and counterterrorist activity are not readily enunciated. “ – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY , JR.

“The reasons for a war may be highly principled. The conduct of a war can not be.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

"God does not allow the same warfare and temptations to this generation as he did formerly, for men are weaker now and cannot bear so much." - ST. ANTHONY THE GREAT (Egyptian monk, 251-356 AD)

War, (“Total”)

“War, it seems, is not the same as battle.” – TOM DONNELLY (of  the American Enterprise Institute.)

"In war, moderation is imbecility." -- LLOYD EVANS 

“War Toys”

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

War, Unconventional

“It is just as legitimate to fight an enemy in the rear as in the front. The only difference is in the danger.” – JOHN S. MOSBY (Confederate Cavalry Commander, aka The Gray Ghost)

“War Weariness”

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

“Warnings, Trigger”

«I am a Conservative: My trigger warnings involve actual triggers.» -- KURT SCHLICHTER

Warren, Elizabeth

“The difference between Elizabeth Warren’s partisans and the Tontons Macoutes is very little more than testosterone and time.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Because they think of themselves as a special enlightened caste, progressives care almost nothing about process. Process is for the little people. Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t care if a Supreme Court opinion read 'Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting, tang, walla walla bing bang' so long as it provided the result she wanted." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“If a fraternity at a big state university had made the kind of mockery of Native Americans that Senator Warren has, it would be kicked off campus — and no pleas about a vague and mysterious ‘Cherokee princess’ way back in the lost ages of the family history would save them.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"To hear Senator Warren speak is to see a picture of the future that is a trip to the vice principal’s office — forever." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Sen. Warren should keep in mind that her party already has proven itself entirely capable of losing to Trump by nominating an elderly white woman with an undistinguished Senate career, bad ideas, & the soul of a hall monitor." – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Elizabeth Warren is as authentically Native American as a Redskins jersey, without the gravitas.” – JIM TREACHER (on the Twoot)

"It is an axiom of American politics: If you value individual liberty and economic freedom, always pick the candidate with fewer ideas. So let's examine Warren's ideas. Just using the simple Weigh The Bullshit metric, Warren is 68% more alarming." – P. J. O’ROURKE

“Elizabeth Warren is a schoolmarm, and not the beloved "Our Miss Brooks" kind. Warren is the teacher who gives pop quizzes after lunch on Fridays, waits until 3 p.m. to announce the topic of 30-page papers due at 8 a.m. Monday morning, and assigns the complete works of Proust to be read by her students over spring break. She is also the national know-it-all, universal answer-pants, and self-appointed authority on everything and its brother. She talks like an encyclopedia... except listening to her is less like reading all 22 volumes of the World Book and more like having them dropped on your ear.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"Warren isn't just phony, she's creepy and alien and able to change form to play on your nightmares." -- KYLE SMITH

"Someone will ask Warren who her favorite member of the New England Patriots is and she'll say something like Eli Kaepernick. Warren's efforts to seem like a normal Earthling come across like C-3PO trying to convince us he's chill." -- KYLE SMITH

"Much of what Warren wants to do is impossible. She recently said she wants to be the last president elected by the Electoral College. That’s nice. Why not add that you want to be the last president bound by the second law of thermodynamics?" -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Warren, formerly a Harvard professor, subscribes to the influential academic theory that money grows on magic trees. On closer inspection, everything about Liz Warren is phoney – not just her bogus claims that she’s authentically Native American. She posts naff videos of herself drinking beer at home like a regular girls. She tells voters she’s Wall Street’s worst nightmare then tells bankers she’ll work with them. She’s a populist firebrand only for rich people. The best hope for actual left-wingers is that she’s just pretending to be fake.” – FREDDIE GRAY (the Deputy Editor of THE SPECTATOR, in Nov. 2019)

Warsaw Pact, The

“The Warsaw Pact was the only military alliance in history which attacked exclusively its own members.” – JACOB JANDA (the boss of something called “The European Values Center for Security Policy”)            

“Washington”

"We reject the conventional wisdom that Washington is broken. Our view is that Washington would do a lot less damage if it were broken." -- JAMES TARANTO

“You have to do your thinking before you come to Washington.” – HENRY KISSINGER

“Washington is a town where people don't take friendship personally.” – DANIEL OLIVER (this bloke was, among other things, the head of the Federal Trade Commission under Reagan)

“Washington — where nobody gets fired and everybody always eats lunch.” – CHARLES HURT                  (in the Washington Times, in May 2013)

“The only thing worse than Washington not getting along is Washington getting along.” -- DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Washington culture is a specialized expression of celebrity culture, and, like their counterparts in Hollywood, the denizens of the Imperial City and its media suburbs appear to be at once something more than human and something less. They are cartoon figures invested with Olympian powers. But they cannot quite put together a meaningful English sentence or express a normal human sentiment.” – 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

“Iowa makes food, Texas makes energy, California makes software, Michigan makes cars, DC makes it as hard as possible.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Everybody in Washington is a double half-cousin on Uncle Dad's side.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“There’s a perfect stillness at the heart of Washington. Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.” – DENIS JOHNSON

"In Washington, wealth is thought of something transferred, not created." -- TOM BETHELL

"In Washington, there is a caste system in regard to who will talk to whom." -- E. HOWARD HUNT

"In Washington, 'very rich' means just above the level a top-notch journalist." -- MEGAN MCARDLE           (the non-Leftist American journalist)

“The secret to having a successful career in Washington is to do your own Xeroxing.” – JACK VALENTI (Jack Valenti used to be a shady crony of Pres. Lyndon Johnson who the Senate turned down as a nominee to the Supreme Court but who ended up “quids in” as the long-time generalissimo of the Motion Picture Association of America)

Washington, D.C.

“Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

“90% of people who make a living in Washington DC could only make a living in Washington DC.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"DC, a town that produces nothing but problems for the rest of America yet is better off than anywhere else in America" – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Washington D.C. is a city of magnificent intentions.” – CHARLES DICKENS (He visited Washington in 1842, and did not like it one bit.)

“For most of the time you were in Washington DC you never really felt fully at ease.” – WILLIAM BOYD (As James Bombe, in his Bombe novel “Solo”)

"The Sunday political talk shows in Washington qualify as services of the church of information." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (Jack Kemp's press secretary, in 1990)

"Washington -- no place since high school where there was so short a time between turning your back and people saying what they thought about you." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (in his 1990 novel "Statute Of Limitations")

"Brandishing access, not necessarily possessing it, was the whole point in Washington." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (who's also Bill Buckley's nephew....) 

"Washington was full of people who made good money for achieving results that could not be measured and that they couldn't talk about." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“Washington is a city of snobbery down to its literal foundations, with all that ridiculous overblown architecture meant to help Americans reassure ourselves that we are every bit as good as the Belgians. (Brussels really does have some grand public spaces.)” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Washington, George

“He had a liking for all forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank whisky whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republic from them.” – H. L. MENCKEN

"He (George Washington) always knew he was onstage." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

Washington Post, The

“I’m not the kind of guy that is going to spend a lot of time in a garage with Bob Woodward. The last time I cooperated with the Washington Post, in any large degree, was in 1952, when I was a paper boy delivering the damn thing in Northwest Washington.” – PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

W.A.S.P.S.

"A good dictionary can often do duty for an encyclopedia. Under WASP, for example, we find: ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: an ethnic group.’ Surely the chief interest of this acronymous word (coined by E. Digby Baltzell in 1962) lies precisely in the fact that it does not merely denote ethnicity. Apart from its redundancies – after all, there are no JASPS or BASPS on the scene, and the P is hardly necessary – nobody would ever describe the late George Wallace as a WASP. Whereas the late William Buckley Jr. – who was both Irish and Catholic by provenance – had something quintessentially, shall we say, WASP-ish about him. It's a term of class and status, in other words, and needs a touch more work and subtlety than it gets here. In the same breath, or at least in a closely related one, I note sadly that Safire repeats the common error of describing the Irish Whig Edmund Burke as an English Conservative." — CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS,                                                                     ("Talking Politics," from TWS, July 14, 2008)

"WASPs, like some sort of Indian tribe with Champagne." -- MARK HELPRIN

"We WASPs are the last stop on the line. Like the Turks, we have our own culture, our own neighborhoods, our own organizations, and we are, to the new arrivals, the most mysterious of all, because we've been here longest, we have power, and we wear mauve-colored pants and canary-yellow blazers, which I'm sure scares them the way you might be scared by the regalia of a New Guinea headhunter. How the hell are they going to read somebody who dresses in madras and a boater? They can't. It's like the Rosetta stone without the Greek. The tribe is very strong, its powers unmatched and supreme. Pastels and madras are its plumage." -- MARK HELPRIN

"It was hard to tell with WASP males how old they were; they don't stop being boys." -- JOHN UPDIKE

Waste (and Time-Wasting)

“Waste not whatnot.” – NIGEL BARLEY

"Waste was death for things exempt from ordinary dying." -- LAURENCE HAMES 

“I estimated that I perhaps spent one per cent of my time doing what I had actually gone for. The rest of the time was spent on logistics, being ill, being sociable, arranging things, getting from place to place, and, above all, waiting.” – NIGEL BARLEY (heh, when I spent a week in the Arctic Circle in northern Siberia in Feb. 1992, just 2 months after the fall of communism there, I made a breakdown of how I spent my time there:           

                                                                                                % of Total Waking time

             Meals (and “toasting):                                                                     10.00

              Getting in and out of heavy Arctic clothing:                                    10.00

              Actual work accomplished                                                                 4.99              

              Ablutions and miscellaneous sanitary activity:                                 0.01

              Trying (unsuccessfully) to find a toilet                                             10.00

              Talking, b.s.-ing, “negotiating” and general palavering:               65.00 )

Watergate

"The ridiculous fuss over the Watergate ‘scandal’ allowed Brezhnev, a bungler, to look powerful and secure in the 70s.” — PAUL JOHNSON

"The media lynch mob tormented Mr. Nixon to the point where he felt he had to resign, after the biggest landslide in history in 1972. It’s been 51 years and we still don’t know what he did wrong besides infuriate the Beautiful People."-- BEN STEIN

" 'Watergate' was just Tricky speculating about doing stuff... that the Obamarroid Demo☭rats actually did -- and ten times worse than Tricky's worst imagination." -- JACK JOLIS

“I never liked Richard Nixon … until Watergate.” -- M. STANTON EVANS

"Watergate was a vivid and compelling drama for most Americans. But after a half-century of study, it is clear that no liberal Democrat would have been driven from the White House under the same circumstances. It is also clear that the biased, aggressive, and one-sided assault by parts of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches against President Richard Nixon bears striking similarities to the current war against President Donald Trump." -- NEWT GINGRICH    (in January 2024)

Water-Polo

"The single sport with which, over the years, I have felt any affinity, is water-polo. It seems to me to be the perfect nonspectator sport, and marvelously dumb from a lot of other aspects, therefore it fulfills a lot of my antipathies towards sports in general." -- WILLIAM STYRON

Waugh, Evelyn

“Evelyn Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be…while holding untenable opinions.” – GEORGE ORWELL

Wayne, John

“There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans,” – KINKY FRIEDMAN

Weakness

“History teaches that nothing is more perilous in the world than to be simultaneously rich and weak.” – COUNT OTTO VON HAPSBURG (pretender to the Hapbsburg throne. And he’s got a point, viz. his job title of “pretender”)

“They’re a weak lot some of them in Europe, you know; weak, feeble.” – MARGARET THATCHER

“Weakness is more provocative than strength.” – DONALD RUMSFELD

“When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set. - LIN YUTANG (writer and translator,1895-1976)

“Nothing invites aggression more than perceived weakness. (Unless it's actual weakness...)” – JACK JOLIS

"As a Muslim I have enormous respect for Christians. And I state this from a position of kindness. The universe has always ensured that the weak were conquered. Every weak nation. Every weak race. Every weak faith. Stop complaining about Islam and look in the mirror. If you do not stick up for yourselves. If you do not hold the proponents of your faith accountable for degrading it through "tolerance" If you allow yourselves to be constantly mocked. You will be crushed and replaced by Islam. I genuinely encourage Christians to stick up for themselves. Islam is not your enemy. Weakness is." -- ANDREW TATE (this guy is an obnoxious "uber-male influencer" buffoon, but this particular comment of his is not without some inadvertent merit.)

"Only the weak are good; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad." -- CHIEF COMORO (a local African chieftain, no first name recorded, in Gondokoro, in what is now South Sudan, to his good friend, the great British explorer Sir Stanley Baker, in 1871) 

"There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness." -- GEORGE WASHINGTON      (quoted by Mike Pompeo in his "Never Give An Inch")

Wealth

“At particular times a great deal of stupid people have a great deal of stupid money.” – WALTER BAGEHOT (The English economist, and I don’t know why he stipulated “at particular times” …)

“Accumulating wealth is like eating pancakes. The first one is delicious, the second one is good, the third O.K. By the fifth pancake you’re at a point when an infinite number more pancakes will not satisfy you to any degree. But no one stops earning money or striving for more money.” – DANIEL GILBERT (author of “Stumbling On Happiness”)

“The wealthy – an elastic category of anyone who makes more money than a liberal politician makes political sense.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“I desire to serve God and grow rich.” – JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

“He who dies rich dies shamed.” -- ANDREW CARNEGIE

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." – HENRY DAVID THOREAU (I’m not a big fan of this turkey, to put it mildly, but this is ok….)

“No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.” – MICHAEL PRITCHARD (The American “motivational speaker”)

“The more you suppress the opportunities to make money, the less constructive will be the means by which people strive to make it.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“The wealth of nations resides not in matter but in minds.” – GEORGE GILDER

"The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration,  you're rich." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

“The only point in making money is so you can tell some big shot where to go.” – HUMPHREY BOGART

“Greed does not create wealth. Barring luck and crime, wealth may only be created through satisfying the needs of others.” – DAVID MAMET

“Millionaires are a product of natural selection. If we find survival of the fittest distasteful, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest.” – WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (Yale social scientist)

“As Marxist despots and tribal socialists from Cuba to Greece have discovered to their huge disappointment, governments can neither create wealth nor effectively redistribute it. They can only expropriate and watch it dissipate.” – GEORGE GILDER

“Count yourself rich by the things you can do without.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY

“Wealth doesn't come from the stuff people own – the oil reserves, minerals, and real estate – but from the promise of a future earnings stream from those assets. And that earnings stream will run dry when it can be diverted by trial lawyers and corrupt politicians.” – F. H. BUCKLEY (a teacher at George Mason Law School, and author of “America's Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law”)

“Taking in one another’s washing is no way to create wealth.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million, but I was just as happy as when I had $48 million.” -- ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

“You have to be a saint to survive great riches.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

"The rich know how much money they have. The wealthy have so much, they're never wholly sure." -- DAVID MITCHELL     (the serious novelist, not the comic actor)
 

“Wealth has the character of a bully; whack it away and it turns out to be a very insipid adversary.” – JONATHAN RUFFER (the hedge-fund manager)

“Being rich is having money, being wealthy is having time.” – MARGARET BONANNO (the American science fiction writer who's, among other things, written a bunch of “Star Trek” novels)  

“Far from having the 21st-century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, the United States is characterized by a great deal of variation in income: More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives; 73 percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent, and 39 percent will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year. Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Making money is art.” – ANDY WARHOL

"Rich people never forget they are rich." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

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

“It is always your rich friends who cost you.” – KYLE SMITH

“Our riches did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea.” – DEIDRE NANSEN McCLOSKE (Author and economics, history and English prof  at the Univ. of Illinois,  Chicago.)

“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS

"The two hallmarks of almost every major figure in the Democratic party over the past quarter century are 1) being much wealthier than the average American and 2) denouncing the greed of 'the rich' and 'corporate America' as the root of all of the country’s problems. They speak as if they became rich by accident. They just set out to make the world a better place, with no interest in accumulating wealth, and just happened to end up fabulously affluent with multiple houses!" -- JIM GERAGHTY (in April 2017)

"Saying you don’t or can’t care about money strikes me as a more ostentatious display of privilege than being driven around in a Rolls-Royce." -- JIM GERAGHTY (in November 2022)

"Government Creates wealth the way ticks create blood." - GROVER NORQUIST

“Every society has rich elites. One of the beauties of free society is that the rich elites aren't just in the government.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“All the wealth we’ve accumulated is ultimately between our ears.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Almost all technological advances are first supported by the spendthrift rich – cars, electric light, plumbing, home-computing, washing machines, television, Teslas.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“Rather like The Laffer Curve, there is an optimal amount of wealth for anyone to have: if you have too little wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money. If, on the other hand, you have too much wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money.” – DAVID GRAEBER                              (described online as “an anthropologist and anarchist activist, a prof at the London School of Economics”.)

“There is a distinction between favouring the rich and favouring the creation of circumstances in which as many as possible have the chance to become rich, or at least becoming richer than they were before.” – SIMON HEFFER

“If women did not exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” – ARISTOTLE ONASSIS

" ‘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

"Why do we we get more exercised about CEOs' pay than about, say, actors' pay? The only salaries that cost us anything are those in the public sector, but we're oddly quiet about them." -- DANIEL HANNAN

“Money is made, and then it sets about dignifying itself.” – PHILIP  HENSHER

“Once you get money you find that you no longer need it.” – GUY BELLAMY

“When you’ve never had any money you don’t develop the tastes that only money can satisfy. Luxury remains a mystery.” – GUY BELLAMY

"In Washington, wealth is thought of something transferred, not created." -- TOM BETHELL

“There is something colossally depressing about contact with the very rich. What I want to know is why the hell don't they have more fun with their money?” -- PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR                                      (a somewhat legendary – to the Brits, at least – mid-twentieth century travel writer, heroic soldier, bon vivant, raconteur, lover of beautiful women and perhaps boys as well, and all-round global boulevardier)

“A millionaire is only an ordinary man grown rich, and sometimes all the more vulgar for having done so.” – ROBERT LYND (A Belfast-born left-wing Brit essayist of the 1930-40s)

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to" – DOROTHY PARKER

“Fortunes are not made with ‘thank you’ and ‘please’. I bet that when the wheel was invented, it rolled over someone.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

"The lives of the rich were hard to imagine; they involved a lot of not being home." -- JOHN UPDIKE

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

"One just had to stumble through January as best one could. Only the very rich can order the seasons like a succession of wonderful meals." -- BRYAN FORBES (the great English film director – who made two of my favorite movies: “Whistle Down The Wind” in 1961 and “The Wrong Box” in 1969)

“I’ve noticed that a certain amount of loot helps to invest even your most casual remarks with a certain significance.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS   (pretty self-evident, perhaps, but elegantly-enough put.)

"He knew he had what everybody else wanted, but he didn't really care anymore about having it." -- ROSS THOMAS (the American thriller writer. And I couldn't decide whether this should go under DECADENCE or WEALTH -- so I put it under both.)

(see also under“Work”, quote by Sean Hannity)

Wealth and Poverty

“The well-to-do do not want the poor to suffer. They wish them to be as happy as is consistent with the continued prosperity of the well-to-do.” – HUGH KINGSMILL

“Leftists would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich.” – MARGARET THATCHER

“Perhaps only the rich know the difference between rich and poor.” – JEREMY CLARKE

“One big fact of life: You do not make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.It’s like turning the ignition on in my car to start my neighbor’s car.” – BEN STEIN

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'.” – ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (The American science fiction writer, author of “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers”. He should have been an economics professor, as well.)

“If Leftwing redistribution actually lifted people out of poverty no one would be living in poverty. It's physics.” -- CARMINE ZOZZORA (some dude on the Twoot, who's got a picture of himself with Poppie Bush)

 "The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich are always under a strain." -- DENIS DIDEROT     (Froggie philosopher, 1713-1784)

"The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive." – COCO CHANEL

“The rich and powerful glamorize immorality; the poor and vulnerable bear its costs.” — ROBERT P. GEORGE

“He who dies rich dies shamed.” -- ANDREW CARNEGIE

"I am not so rich as to buy cheap things!" -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE     (a character in his 2005 novel "Snowleg") 

"What exactly would the rich take from the poor? How, exactly, does one get rich by taking things from the poor?" -- DEREK HUNTER (in TOWNHALL, June 2017)

"Only poor people are possessed by Demons you will never see a rich person rolling on the floor in Church" ~ ROBERT MUGABE     (The old Shona communist butcher at least got this one right....)
 

"If you want to see what's wrong with American society, you won't find the answers in society, you won't find the answers on the list of who is rich -- you'll find it in the account of who is poor, how they got that way, and why they stay that way." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The current progressive conception of justice holds that making the wealthy less wealthy is morally necessary and worthy even if doing so does nothing at all to make the poor more wealthy or to provide the government with additional revenue with which to offer services to those in need. Wealth itself is to be understood as a sinful vice, like smoking, to be punished and if possible reduced through vengeful taxation." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The United States does not suffer from having too many billionaires. If it suffers from anything, it is from having too many poor people, which, for some reason, we insist on importing in considerable numbers." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (in Jan. 2022)

“The Democrats, traditionally a party for blue-collar workers, now represents the well-educated and the well-off who don’t need low-income jobs. The Republicans are now the party of the working-class. 18 of America’s poorest 19 states are Republican controlled. The Democrats run the five richest state legislatures. The American poor aren’t socialist by instinct. They want jobs and better life prospects. Trump offers that, or at least appears to. The Democrats, meanwhile, are busy getting hung up on his ‘dehumanising’ proposals to prevent obligatory transgender lavatories in schools.” -- FREDDIE GRAY               (Deputy Editor of THE SPECTATOR, and Editor of THE SPECTATOR USA)

"Tolerating the rich can be the price you pay for helping the poor." -- KATE ANDREWS

“Poverty is a tragedy. Wealth is a problem. Being able to earn just enough money to make ends meet concentrates the mind wonderfully.” -- DAVID NOBBS

“One of the things about being rich: Even if you grew up in the city, you knew the names of trees and flowers and birds.” -- MARTYN HARRIS               (in his novel “The Mother In Law Joke”)

"Poverty is the natural human condition. Thus, there are not 'causes of poverty' -- only 'causes of wealth'. And to speak of 'causes of poverty' is to betray an ignorance of both economics and human nature -- which, (not coincidentally), happen to be closely linked." -- JACK JOLIS

"It's not poverty that's the phenomenon that needs explanation, but wealth." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"He especially admires two peculiar traits of the male rich: their ability to grow more and more polite as the object of their courtesy becomes more and more annoying, and their ability to wear shoes, not just moccasins, but loafers of fine leather, without socks. He, of humbler origins, is unable to conceal annoyance and to endure shoes, sticky and unclean, on his feet with socks, the thicker and woollier the better." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"This stupefying glaze of propriety, of that hopeless boringness special to the rich. The poor know boredom but always hope that things will change for the better, whereas the rich simply want things to go on just as they are, which is even less likely to happen." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“Rich people can be funny.  Poor people never.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

"In Washington, 'very rich' means just above the level a top-notch journalist." -- MEGAN MCARDLE           (the non-Leftist American journalist)

"There is just never quite enough money to forget about money, you can never quite look at Life's Great Menu without your eyes drifting towards the Special Offer Set Dinner." -- JAMES HAWES

Wealth, The Redistribution of                                                                                            

“It is a fallacy to imagine that the less money everybody else makes, the more there is for you.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES (he’s here describing “zero sum” meeting schadenfreude – a match made in hell…)

“We treat the rich like a constantly regenerating pinata, as if they will never change their behavior no matter how many times they get whacked by taxes. And we think everyone can live well off the treats that will fall to the ground forever.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Much better is this great irregularity than universal squalor. Without wealth there can be no Maecenas. The 'good old times' were not good old times.'" -- ANDREW CARNEGIE

“Making the rich poorer does not make the poor richer, but it does make the state stronger.” – SIR KEITH JOSEPH (one of Maggie Thatcher’s earliest consiglieres…..)

"You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." – ADRIAN ROGERS (The conservative American Baptist preacher)

“Politicians do precisely what we elect them to office to do: take the rightful property of one American and give it to another.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS (the distinguished black Economics Prof at George Mason University, in 2010)

“You can make a society twice as wealthy, but you can’t make everyone twice as wealthy as everyone else.” – RICH LOWRY

"It's the government's job to redistribute income." -- HOWARD DEAN (Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, 8 Feb 11. And, well..... there you have it, in a nutshell. Q.E.D. Meanwhile, of course, it's "hateful" and "divisive" to refer to these people as "socialists", good heavens, where's the "civility"?.....)

“That some would be rich shows that others may become rich. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.” -- ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“Like so many people, in so many countries, who started out to ‘spread the wealth,’ Barack Obama has ended up spreading poverty.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Tax the rich, feed the poor/ till there are no rich no more," – ALVIN LEE (The English leader of the rock band Ten Years After, in his 1971 song “I’d Like To Change The World”.)

"You can't be great if you're not rich." -- DONALD TRUMP

“If Leftwing redistribution actually lifted people out of poverty no one would be living in poverty. It's physics.” -- CARMINE ZOZZORA (some dude on the Twoot, who's got a picture of himself with Poppa Bush)

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the Common Good." – HILLARY CLINTON (in 2004)

"What exactly would the rich take from the poor? How, exactly, does one get rich by taking things from the poor?" -- DEREK HUNTER (in TOWNHALL, June 2017)

“There is no hope for a sensible discussion on inequality until we properly distinguish between wealth and income. The idea that you can reduce wealth inequality by taxing income no longer makes sense.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"We've become a culture where earning money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting it does. That is the essence of redistribution." – KEN BLACKWELL (the black ex-mayor of Cincinnati, and GOP candidate for Gov of Ohio in ‘06)

Weapons

“I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.” – FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

“In the sixteenth century, muskets were really little more than exploding sticks.” – BILL BRYSON

Weather, The (& Seasons, The)

“There is not bad news in weather, only the wrong clothes.” – DANNY BAKER                                                   (Danny was one of the jollier presenters on the BBC’s Radio 5 Live. Since sacked for political incorrectness.)

“There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” -- ALFRED WAINWRIGHT (the original of the above)

"It's so cold outside today that I saw a Democrat with his hands in his own pockets." -- CLINTON MICHAEL (an ex-SWAT cop -- on the Twoot -- in Jan. 2018)

"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." -- GEORGE SANTAYANA

"The reason I can bear the years ahead is that the seasons change." -- FRANCESCA KAY    (in her novel "The Book Of Days") 

“Extreme cold, like extreme heat, is conducive to introspective.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (“Introspection”, eh? Huh.  I distinctly remember, being under-dressed and freezing my ass off one night in the field in the winter of 67-68 at Ft. Dix NJ, during Advanced Infantry Training, practically paralyzed by the cold, saying to myself “No matter what else happens to you for the rest of your life, remember this: extreme heat may be debilitating and terrible, but it’s not as absolutely deadly and immobilizing as extreme cold. Extreme cold is the worst.”)

“You don’t expect it, but as soon as it starts, it’s been raining forever.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

“Who can look at thunderstorm and still not believe in God?” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"One just had to stumble through January as best one could. Only the very rich can order the seasons like a succession of wonderful meals." -- BRYAN FORBES (the great English film directors – who made two of my favorite movies: “Whistle Down The Wind” in 1961 and “The Wrong Box” in 1969)

“I am not a hot-weather person – am, in fact, strongly sympathetic to the folk-anthropological notion that vigorous civilization cannot arise in a seriously hot climate. How did people in hot places get anything done before air conditioning came in. Heat is another country. They do things differently there. Or rather, if they have any sense, they do nothing at all.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (my late dad – like Derbs, England born and bred – was once asked what in his opinion was the   greatest invention of the 20th century, and without the slightest hesitation said “air conditioning”.)

"The weather of Boston, New York and Washington is so bad that if the United States had been colonized from west to east instead of the reverse, the northeastern United States today would be populated as sparsely as North Dakota. The main cities would be somewhere else, and the northeastern area would be planted out in soy beans." -- PAUL FUSSELL (in his 1980 book "Abroad")

"As seems to be the norm with disaster, the baleful day was heralded by a spell of brilliant weather." -- WILLIAM BOYD

"I’m wondering what caused hurricanes before climate change. Was it racism? I bet it was racism." -- THOMAS GARRARD (an Iraqi Army vet on the Twoot, 27 Sept.2022) 

Weddings (See Marriage)

Weirdness

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON (the one guy on their side who I wish had been on our side.)

Welfare, (“Welfare”)

“Welfare dependency and crime built on each other. We tried to produce more for the poor and produced more poor. We tried to remove the barriers – and inadvertently built a trap.” – MICHAEL BARONE (the non-liberal political “pundit” and author, in 2004)

“I don't have to respect a person who lives off the state while expressing contempt for it, who doesn't plan for the education of his children in a rational way, and is constantly producing new little headscarf girls.” – THILO SARRAZIN (the German ex-Social Democrat minister-turned-bestselling author of “The Abolition of Germany”.)

“Laws mandating wages and benefits beyond market prices are political money laundering for unpopular welfare payments. They work brilliantly: Americans have a generally low opinion of welfare programs, but large majorities of us — including majorities of Republicans — support raising the minimum wage.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"There is a significant difference between government funding of services and government provision of services, which is why, for example, most Republicans have made their peace with Medicare but resist a British-style socialist-monopoly model of health care." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The Democrats are big with the very poor and big with college-educated government workers — i.e., the party of people who are enrolled in welfare programs and the people who administer them." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (April 2022)  

“The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.” – MARK STEYN

“Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"The term 'entitlement' is a left wing invention that makes welfare programs sound like Constitutional rights." -- JANIE JOHNSON     (and "welfare" itself is a left-wing invention to make "the dole" sound better)

“Welfare State, The”

“Unfortunately, the paradox of a welfarist society is that it weans people away from the familial impulse necessary to sustain it.” – MARK STEYN                  (here was here referring to how “welfare states” tend not to reproduce themselves enough to keep the whole ponzi scheme from going phutt!...)

“The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.” – AYN RAND

“Not to take away is more blessed than to give.” – ENOCH POWELL (His “First Law Of The Welfare State”. And why, as they keep proving most vividly in France, it’s so damnably difficult, not to say impossible, to cut back on the damn thing…)

"In the welfare state not to take away is more blessed than to give." – ENOCH POWELL

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." – THOMAS JEFFERSON

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

"The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“The modern welfare state is not antithetical to fascism but essential to it.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"My view of the social safety net is it should be a trampoline and not a hammock." -- TED CRUZ

“The welfare state was established to protect the needy from the consequences of their predicament. At some point during the 20th century that objective changed, and the system now seeks to protect all citizens, including the affluent, from the consequences of their vanity.” -- LLOYD EVANS

"The welfare state is supposed to be a modern nation acting like a big family or community, but families and communities have boundaries that make clear who's in and who's out." -- WILLIAM VOEGELI

"If the welfare state turns out to be the cure for which it has also become the disease, then it will be remembered as a disease without a cure." -- WILLIAM VOEGELI (I'm not even sure I understand this – but I am quite sure I agree with it...)

"The Scandinavian welfare states, which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whome one shares family ties." -- ALAN WOLFE                                                                                                                     (in his 1989 book "Whose Keeper?")

West, The

“Whereas Japan is Western but not European, Russia is European but not Western.” – STEVEN KOTKIN (And Greece is neither. Anyway, Kotkin is a Princeton Prof, and he wrote this in 2006)

“It should be clear by now that in today’s world the basic values of Western liberal democracy are, in fact, superior to those of ‘Islam’, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. The West’s ideals are not artifacts of the ‘white race’ but have evolved through its contacts with the rest of the world and have absorbed the useful within them to become the best of the world. Mankind should now agree upon this core global standard and urge universal conformity with it.” – PAUL BITA (a Kenyan-born writer, in July 2006.)

“People used to say he spent time in the West and so he can't be all bad or too crazy. I love this kind of horsehockey. You know who else spent time in the West? Lenin, Marx, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Sayyid Qutb, and Michael Jackson just to name a few. Now Michael Jackson may not have been a mass-murderer or advocate of murder, but he was Coo-Coo for Cocoa-puffs.” – JONAH GOLDBERG                                                                                                                    (he’d been talking about Kim Jong Un, but the greater point applies….)

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

«Too many on our side who'd rather die than kill our murderers. Will the West's Epitaph Be "We Were Better Than Them’?» -- BOSCH FAWSTIN (The fearless Albanian-American cartoonist who keeps drawing pedophile Mohammed and who won first prize at that Garland, Texas, do, in 2015)

"I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation." -- JORDAN PETERSON 

"I have come to the depressing conclusion that the white ethnicities that constituted the nations of Western Civilization have degenerated into such insouciance and stupidity that they have no possibility of survival. They sit mindlessly in front of TV absorbing their brainwashing and indoctrination.They can’t pay their rent, mortgage or car payments, but they pay endlessly for care of immigrant-invaders who are overwhelming their communities." -- PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS    (an Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan, in ZERO HEDGE on 29 Janury 2024) 

«This is the third millenium in the West that had previously been known as Judeo-Christian. This is proving to be one millenium too many, in the way that boxers have one fight too many.» – MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ      (the Froggie «provocateur» novelist)         

"Why does the West want to annihilate what it built in the first place? The real enemy of the West is the West itself." -- CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH      (The Guinean -- who I once heard a liberal American woman call "that African-American cardinal" -- the greatest Pope the world never had.)
 

“A West that denies its faith, its history, its roots, and its identity is destined for contempt, for death, and disappearance.” — CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH

West Indies, The

"No West Indian person can be certain of his or her pedigrees." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

“West Indians display an almost unrivaled hunger for absorption into societies other than their own.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (who of course was from Trinidad, but he de-assed that area, never to return, at the age of 18.)

West, “The Wild” (& the Great Plains)

"West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: 'Flee, all is discovered'." -- ROBERT PENN WARREN (cool.)

"He was in the middle of nowhere. The countryside around him was completely, endlessly flat, the only horizon a vague haze that prevented looking clear downhill to Chicago. The scene offered only two sensations, of levelness, and dryness. It was like a painting from (Bernard) Buffet -- straight lines, blurred by their parallels. And what worried him was the fact that there appeared not to be any town, any place, here at all." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY 

“Wannabe buckaroos always get it wrong: wrong hat, wrong length pants, wrong boots, wrong life, big pathos.” – TIM CAHILL (Who’s from Montana... and I like how he mentions “wrong length pants”, an important point with me....)

White People

“White northern people have never discovered an elegant means of wearing little in public. We look dreadful and behave as if this is an occasion for having fun, although we secretly know that it is just something unpleasant to be got through. Our street life becomes everything contained in that grim word 'vibrant'.” – CHARLES MOORE (An Englishman, clearly....)

“You cannot go on saying that white straight males are brutes without eventually annoying them (and even a significant proportion of what used to be called their 'womenfolk').” – CHARLES MOORE

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

“Only 5% of white Americans have a connection to slave-owners. Obama descends from both slave-owners and slave traders.” – LARRY ELDER

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

“Whites are the sole race the mainstream western media forbids to forge a sense of unity or to defend their own interest. The only identity whites are allowed is self-disgust. Whites who stray from ceaseless self-crit are moral degenerates.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 "Latterly, 'white supremacist' has become a synonym for white, full stop. That's right next door to completely meaningless." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"It is almost as though we're living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they've deemed lower-whites." -- REIHAN SALAM

“ ‘Whiteness’ is the modern-day Original Sin.” – ANDREW DOYLE (an English author, comedian, and the real-life “social media” sensation “Titania McGrath”)

“If you look at the list of the top 20 ways in which Africans die, other than at the hands of other Africans, you will largely find a list of ailments for which white people have found effective cures, palliatives or vaccines. None of this, none of it, should need to be said. It may be unfortunate and politically uncomfortable that just about every single medical advance made in the past 300 years has been by white people, but it is nonetheless true. For sure, colonialism helped to facilitate whitey’s ability to create large pharmaceutical companies and universities which provided the forum for research. The various African empires somehow did not have quite the same result.) But there is no doubt that in the area of medicine (and in many others too), whitey was and still is a savior.” – ROD LIDDLE (In July 2021)

"It is literally impossible to be racist to a white person." -- MANISHA KRISHNAN  (a wahine at VICE Magazine, in 2023)

"Every time I see a bald white kid, I secretly hope he has leukemia and do my own private little 'end-zone dance'." -- SARAH JEONG (of the NEW YORK TIMES Editorial Board. Charming.)  

“White Guilt”

“Trump has an absence of white guilt. He never apologizes. White guilt is killing us because it’s driving affirmative action and outcome equality, where all groups have to be equal based on their proportion of the population. He’s the antidote to that. Most Republicans have white guilt that makes it difficult even for those on the right to really defend America, and we on the right are still very, very fearful of being called a racist. Trump is not." -- TOM  KLINGENSTEIN (In Sept. 2022)

"The white race is the cancer of human history." -- SUSAN SONTAG     (in 1966 -- and maaan, Cultural Marxism has come a long way, baby!)

“White Privilege” (and "White Supremacy")

“White privilege = being held responsible for the acts of your ancestors by folks who accept no responsibility for the acts of their children.” – ALICE TELLER (A “traditional” lady from Virginia. Says her family's been there since 1638.)

“What is 'White Privilege'? It's a bullshit leftist term 'shut up because you're not a member of a privileged minority group'. It's reverse-racism of the highest order.” – BEN SHAPIRO

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

"'White supremacy' is only another in the progressive parade of horribles, up there with Islamophobia and transmisogyny, the terrible sin straight men commit if they forgo dating 'women' with penises and testicles. It is simply a rhetorical tool for transmuting disagreement into bigotry." – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The American left urges every race to organise, pull together, demand their rights if not special treatment, recognise their common experience, celebrate their people’s separate history and separate accomplishments – except one. If white people do the same thing, they’re bigoted and beyond the pale. That mixed-message platform isn’t politically saleable in the long-term, isn’t actually fair and is already backfiring big-time.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

"Latterly, 'white supremacist' has become a synonym for white, full stop. That's right next door to completely meaningless." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"Those 'white supremacists' whose definition has spread like maple syrup until now it's just a synonym for 'whites'." -- LIONEL SHRIVER    (Jan '24)
 

“Mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White. Math might as well be called 'whitemath', because curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”-- ROCHELLE GUTIERREZ                 (a “professor” of something called "Math Education" at the University of Illinois, in June 2018, and, well, … words fail me.)

"There are 330 million (American) citizens. If you gathered together all of the purported white supremacists, white nationalists, KKK members, neo-nazis, and any other white racist groups, you wouldn't find enough to fill-up a football stadium. There is no systemic racism in America today." ~ ALLEN SUTTON (A black American, of an outfit called STEWARDSHIP AMERICA, on 12 March 2021)

“If you look at the list of the top 20 ways in which Africans die, other than at the hands of other Africans, you will largely find a list of ailments for which white people have found effective cures, palliatives or vaccines. None of this, none of it, should need to be said. It may be unfortunate and politically uncomfortable that just about every single medical advance made in the past 300 years has been by white people, but it is nonetheless true. For sure, colonialism helped to facilitate whitey’s ability to create large pharmaceutical companies and universities which provided the forum for research. The various African empires somehow did not have quite the same result.) But there is no doubt that in the area of medicine (and in many others too), whitey was and still is a savior.” – ROD LIDDLE (In July 2021)

“Concepts like ‘white privilege’ are not intended to be taken at face value nor have any real-world impact. They are almost wholly performative. When the teenage son or daughter of an Anglo-Saxon power couple is told to denounce ‘whiteness’ and affirm that it is a toxic affliction responsible for all the injustices in the world, they are not being asked to forego their place a (top) university in favor of a student of color or prepare themselves for a life of atonement. On the contrary, they are being taught a kind of catechism that they’ll need to recite several times a day to preserve their privileged status. Think of it like joining an exclusive dining society.” – TOBY YOUNG (In Oct. 2021, and methinks Squire Young is being a touch complacent here....)

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

"America does not have a 'white supremacy' problem, it has a 'spoiled, unhinged white liberals' problem." -- KAYLEIGH McENANY

“These fabled white supremacists we hear so much about but so little from.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in November 2021)

"Traditional families is simply code for white supremacy." -- MIKE BARON      (an idiot who describes himself as "Creator of Nexus and Badger, writer for Marvel and DC") 

Will

“Too many on our side who'd rather die than kill our murderers. Will the West's Epitaph Be "We Were Better Than Them’?” -- BOSCH FAWSTIN (The fearless Albanian-American cartoonist who keeps drawing pedophile Mohammed and who   won first prize at that Garland, Texas, do, in 2015)

“The best intelligence in the world is meaningless without the political will to take action. It's really that simple, folks. No mysteries.” – JOHN SCHINDLER

“The object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but to destroy his will.” – CPT. BASIL HENRY (“B. H.”) LIDDELL HART (the great twentieth century British author, soldier, and strategist.)

"In War, the Chief incalculable is the human will." -- B.H. LIDDELL HART

“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.” – HENRY WARD BEECHER (the famous nineteenth century preacher and abolitionist)

Wilson, Harold

“We got enough pollution around here already without Harold coming over with his fly open and his pecker hanging out, peeing all over me.” – LYNDON B. JOHNSON (Upon hearing the unwelcome news, in 1966, that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to come to Washington to visit him. Although both men were well on the left politically, there was bad blood between them because Johnson wanted Wilson to contribute British troops to the Vietnam War effort, as Australia was doing, but Wilson refused.)

Wilson, Woodrow

“Woodrow Wilson, whose haughty arrogance surpassed that of even the most self-important of his contemporaries and whose seething bigotry stood out in a time when racism masqueraded as science among genteel, educated progressives.” – STEPHEN TOOTLE (a history professor at The College Of The Sequoias)

Wind (the); “Wind power”

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world's energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining enodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine – despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a percent worldwide.” – MATT RIDLEY

“If wind was going to work, it would have done so by now.” – MATT RIDLEY

“The hills and dales of Britain are being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain's needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass – their collective oomph wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding.” – BORIS JOHNSON (Pre-Prime Minister, in 2013. He's been mau-maued by the econazis into retracting that comment since becoming Prime Minister, but ol' BoJo had it right the first time.)

Winfrey, Oprah

“Oprah Winfrey, one of America’s greatest mysteries. But boy, does she have hauteur and dominion. It is very difficult for us to understand why the Yanks so revere the woman. She is an appalling interviewer, seemingly utterly incurious. There is no intellect on display, just a perpetual desire to paddle about in the shallows. It was rumoured she might one day run for office. I think she’d be perfect for the east and west coast voters, a conduit of witless acceptance of every meaningless liberal shibboleth to which those deluded people subscribe.” – ROD LIDDLE (in March, 2021, on the occasion of the Harry and Meghan shambles/embarrassment.)

“Oprah is  mini-tyrant on and off the set, who expects total subservience. She also knows how to turn on the charm and is a self-made billionaire black American female, which is no mean achievement.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (who actually appeared on her program – twice. First time satisfactorily, and the second... not so much. According to him, and I don’t doubt it.)

Winning (+ Losing)

"If you don't win, you're going to be fired. If you do win, you've only put off the day you're going to be fired." – LEO DUROCHER (the long-time manager of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, and the author of the famous “Nice guys finish last” quip.)

“There is always a dirty secret behind those who deny that 'winning' has a meaning: They don’t really want to win.” – IRA STRAUS (The executive director of “Democracy International” and an adviser to NATO)

"Never not winning!" -- JANE JOLIS

“Whatever Trump is, he is certainly not a good loser, and that appeals to those who feel, whether admirably or not, that they are no longer going to be, either. Good losers have the money and power to shrug off setbacks, those on the edge more often see failure in existential terms.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"Last year we couldn't win at home and we were losing on the road.  My failure as a coach was that I couldn't think of anyplace else to play.” -- HARRY NEALE (ex-coach of the Vancouver Canucks)

"You can't really win, but you can fight." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Usually it is wiser to ask why a side won rather than why its opponents lost." -- ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY (historian and author of "The Eagle And The Lion")
 

“Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners.” – LARA TRUMP (the President’s daughter-in-law, married to son Eric Trump)

Wisdom

“For me, wisdom includes distrust. The Bible says the beginning of wisdom is fear of God.  I think it starts with fear of man.” – NICOLAS-SEBASTIEN CHAMFORT

“Lust has taught me more wisdom than literature ever has.” – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"There is ... more to be learned from the ... questions of a child than the discourses of men" -- JOHN LOCKE

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

"Intellect is not wisdom." – THOMAS SOWELL (It sure isn't – in fact, Paul Johnson wrote a whole book on this very subject...)

 “One can revere youth or wisdom, but not both.” – DENNIS PRAGER

“For example, unlike the Left, those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self- esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind.” – DENNIS PRAGER

"Wisdom begins with the fear of God." -- DENNIS PRAGER (a wise chap)

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T.S. ELIOT

"Fear is the beginning of wisdom." – WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

“You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.” – WILLIAM BLAKE

“A fool learns from his experience. A wise person learns from the experience of others.” – OTTO VON BISMARK

"The better part of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at." – WILL ROGERS

“Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.” –  PHILIP STANHOPE,  THE THIRD LORD CHESTERFIELD  (1694-1773)

“Wisdom comes through suffering.” – AESCHYLUS 

“Old men don't become more wise. They just become more careful.” – SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER (My old Alpha Delta Phi brother, and great pal, in 2017)

“Going to school is not the same as getting an education, of course, much less finding wisdom.” – CHARLES KESLER (prof of government at Claremont-McKenna College, and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in NR, in May 2018)

«Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad. » – MILES KINGTON (one of my favorite funny English journalist/authors, who died in 2008)

"An intelligent man can memorise the tube map. A wise one knows when to take a cab." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.” – HENRY KISSINGER                                                                (in July 2018)

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” ― ALBERT EINSTEIN

"Wisdom is platitudes gussied up." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (in his 2020 novel "Utopia Avenue") 
                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“I was born knowing everything. Meanwhile, you don’t know anything.” – DION DIMUCCI      (the great American rock and roller, in an interview in 2020, at the age of 80)                         

“Wisdom is what we use to wave the smell away.” – JOHN UPDIKE 

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” --  LEO TOLSTOY

"One might think young men could easily consider their fathers and grandfathers a most precious resource, aside from allowance and inheritance. Since it is not that way and wisdom finds no markets, old men spend much time talking to white walls." -- MARK HELPRIN

Wishful Thinking

“Happy talk and wishful thinking are for children, fools, and leftists. We are conservatives. We know better. At any rate, we used to.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 "If he had any bread, he'd have a ham sandwich. If he had any ham." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it’s going to be bad.” –GEN JAMES MATTIS

“The liberal mind, preferring an ideal world to the real one, is satisfied with good intentions and waves off unintended consequences. Rarely can liberals see beyond their own wishful thinking.” – TOM BETHELL

“People don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.” – FRIEDRICH NIETSCHE

“His wishes continued to father his thoughts. It was a fatal disjunction.” – ALAN JUDD

“The problem of course is that woke liberals see the world not how it is, but how they wish it to be – and when reality comes along and demonstrates how incalculably wrong they are, their worldview begins to disintegrate.” – ROD LIDDLE

“For as a man wishes so shall he also think” – DEMOSTHENES

Wit

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

“You can pretend to be serious, and you can even pretend to be wise – but you can’t pretend to be witty.” – SACHA GUITRY                                                         (The Russian-born French actor, who was a big deal from the 1920s through the 1950s, although he got himself into a bit of collaborationist bother during the German occupation, for which he was eventually exonerated.)

“A room full of half-wits could look like a room half-full of wits.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER (This is even cleverer when you realize he was speaking of Greenwich Village when he said this)

Witches

"I know witches aren't real. That's why I'm afraid of them." -- TRACY KIDDER

“Woke”

“Liberals understand that people in history acted with the knowledge they had at the time, and that the task of those looking back is to look on it with understanding, not least in the hope of being understood in turn. The woke mind abhors this. It knows that it is right, and that everybody before this year zero was a bigot.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (and he here uses the word “liberals” in the “classical” sense, i.e., what we Americans understand as conservatives.)

"Most people are pretty tolerant, but they've had enough of the endless indoctrination, the gay police cars and transgender pelican (pedestrian) crossings, the 'awareness raising' and, frankly, being lectured by a lot of deranged people." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“Out: The United States of America In: The State University of America.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE (on 27 July 2020)

“My advice: the working class won’t buy a woking-class paper.” – KELVIN MACKENZIE (the veteran tabloid newspaper editor)

“A West that has heated debates over whether men can have periods has no business telling Belarus or whatever how to govern itself.” – SOHRAB AHMARI

“There's nothing more woke than woke jerkoffs pretending not to know the meaning of ‘woke’." – JACK JOLIS

"Under the 'woke' Demo☭rats, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are nothing but an Ivy League faculty committee disguised as Christmas trees." -- JACK JOLIS 

“The Department of Sanitation is obviously discriminatory. There's much more trash on the streets in poor neighborhoods than there is in neighborhoods where the affluent live. There is also clear discrimination in who the Department of Sanitation hires... Garbage pickup day is a trigger warning for me. It is hurtful to see very few people like myself – in their 70s and wearing coats and ties – emptying garbage cans into sanitation trucks. True, I can't lift a garbage can. But many other municipal agencies hire people who can't do their jobs. Why should the Department of Sanitation be different? Next, the Department of Sanitation causes pollution of the atmosphere – you can smell it! It harms the Earth's ecology by dumping dirty garbage into the ground. ‘Landfills’ are nothing but land filled with dirty waste... And studies show that the Earth is losing dirt at a rapid rate due to rising sea levels from climate change... causing dirty oceans. Funding for the Department of Sanitation could be reallocated to community programs such as ‘sanitation counseling’ where teams of trained trash experts promote and support households with the goal of reducing waste output through ‘smart garbage’." – P. J. O’ROURKE (in August 2021)

“Woke stories don’t last because they aren’t true.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

“We all live on campus now” - ANDREW SULLIVAN   (2018 -- and it's sad but true)
 

“Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero.” – RICHARD DAWKINS (the famous atheist.)

“My pronouns are ‘fuck you’.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"The longer they go without telling you, it's not a white male." -- ANN COULTER    (16 Feb 2024)

"Woke is the revenge of the dullard on the wit, of the wallflower on the whirling dancer." -- JULIE BURCHILL (me, I just think "woke" is a trendy euphemism for "leftism", but OK, Julie's trying....)

"The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side..." -- JULIE BURCHILL

“Wokeness is literally passive aggressive narcissism as state ideology. Abusers pretending to be victims. Powerful people pretending to be vulnerable. It's 100% resistant to duty, responsibility, obligation of any kind, to anyone else whatsoever. Totalising bourgeois narcissism.” – AIMEE TERESE (the co-host of the “What’s Left” podcast, on 3 May 2021)

«Imagine Big Brother running the department of human  resources in the voice of an especially insistent yoga instructor. Imagine a future in which your boss feels you’re not productive enough, so he sends you to online therapy to make you a better worker, and receives reports on your innermost emotions.» – DOMINIC GREENFIELD (in Apr!il 2021, and here he’s describing what I’d call «The New Tyranny»)

“You know what ‘woke’ means? It means, you're a loser! Everything woke turns to shit!” – DONALD TRUMP (in August 2021)

"People who kneel during the national anthem are showing contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life." -- RUTH BADER GINSBURG (Well how about THAT sports fans? This was said to Katie Couric, who cut out the words when she made the interview public, aided and abetted by fellow Establishmentarian-RINO-lefties like David Brooks)

«This is a national security issue. When the Woke dingbats take over literature departments, it's a shame. When they take over biology and physics, it's national suicide.» – MIKE DORAN (An American «Senior Fellow» at the Hudson Institute. In Dec. 2021.)

«The new woke orthodoxy is the method as well as the weapon that has replaced the Stalinist midnight knock. With this orthodoxy as the attacking cavalry, mass immigration, institutionalized anti-white animus, and tech censorship serve as the occupying army.» – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (in November 2021)

"Woke is literally Maoist ideology." -- WARREN PLATTS (on of my Twoot pals, and a chap who Knows)

"The current generation gives us a complete inversion of the old fairy stories in which the actor in each were obviously fictitious but the moral real and immutable. In the current fairy stories the people are real enough, but the lessons wholly fictitious." -- ROD LIDDLE (in December 2022)

"I’m wondering what caused hurricanes before climate change. Was it racism? I bet it was racism." -- THOMAS GARRARD (an Iraqi Army vet on the Twoot, 27 Sept. 2022) 

"Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations -- it's all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its own backside." -- LIONEL SHRIVER 

"Being woke is more than being pretentious about how much one cares about a social issue. Wokeism is used as a weapon to bludgeon people, thoughts, and policies that do not comport with the neo-Marxist ideologies of today’s progressives." -- MARK HYMAN (American investigative reporter and author)

"This dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and everyone likes us.” -- SAM  BANKMAN-FRIED (the disgraced ex-billionaire woke fraudster and Democrat donor, on 30 Nov. 2022)

" 'Woke' is a form of Cultural Marxism. It's a war on the truth." -- RON DESANTIS (in June 2023)

"At its heart wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful.It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel armored in false virtue." -- ELON MUSK

"The 'S' in ESG stands for Satanic." -- ELON MUSK

" 'Wokeness' gives people a shield to be means and cruel, armored in false virtue." -- ELON MUSK

"If one complained about every example of woke, one would send oneself mad and everyone else to sleep." -- CHARLES MOORE

"WOKE, Definition: A totalitarian ideology that imposes Identity Politics, Social 'Justice', Thought Policing, Climate Hysteria, Queer Pedagogy and Socialist Equity, using a statist/corporatist system to enforce it." -- JIM HANSON (President of WorldStrat & former Army Special Forces Weapons guy. Author of Winning the Second Civil War: Without Firing a Shot and The Myth of White Fragility)

"I love how the traditional has become the new radical." -- MARK MILLAR (in October 2023)

"What is 'woke'?  It's Marxism with American characteristics."  -- JAMES A. LINDSAY    (He of the great "Grievous Study" hoax -- a great, fearless dude.)

"Up until this point, woke has won the day. As an ideology, it is remarkably resistant to criticism. It reminds me of the Maoist youth in the 1960s who rebelled against their elders for not being radical enough. These people are merciless and they have no sense of humor. It’s very hard to have a rational conversation with them. When I bring up concepts like due process, they say things like: ‘Well, it’s like the French Revolution. Some heads have to roll. It’s tough'." -- JOHN R. MACARTHUR (President and Publisher of HARPERS Magazine, in May 2023)

Women

“As a rule of thumb, when creating a psychologically plausible female character, all you need to do is imagine she’s a male one and then remove all reason and logic.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (English author and  TV critic)

“Our civilization is superior to theirs (Islam); just look at the way they treat women.” -- SILVIO BERLUSCONI

“Where there are no women there are no manners.” -- JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (no wonder everybody just calls him “Goethe”)

“Women in supermarkets always seem surprised when it comes time for them to pay.” – JACK JOLIS

"All women look better sitting in the driver's seat of a car."-- JACK JOLIS

“Toutes des salopes!” – ALAN JOLIS (oh Alsie, you’re such a joker... My late kid brother....)

“Of all life’s pleasures women enjoy undivided attention the most.” – LEAH McLAREN (a Canadian journalist, in July 2002)

“Women are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and prying in their glasses, like Apes.” – JOSEPH SWETNAM (all I know about this gallant and perspicacious chap is that he was English and wrote this sometime in the 17th Century.)

“Women are apparently the equals of men in every possible way except their special ‘vulnerability’ to ideas they don’t like.” – STEPHAN THERNSTROM (Prof of history at Harvard, though how he got this job – much less manages to keep it, if he does -- is utterly beyond me….)

“Women have no intellect but only instinct, very little humour, and hardly any sense of honour or truth.” – DAME MARGOT ASQUITH (the wife of the British Prime Minister. Figured prominently in  the whole “Forsyte Saga” saga.)

“A single woman in this society is a useful as a single shoe in a wardrobe.” –  “MOLL FLANDERS” (I use “” marks around her name because I don’t know whether to credit them to DANIEL DEFOE who wrote “Moll Flanders”, or to CLARE LUCKHAM who wrote those lines in her 1993 stage musical production, or to the actress JOSIE LAWRENCE, who spoke them….)

“It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.” – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA (ouch!)

“Women like to believe there is a cult of sisterhood, but when it comes down to it, it’s a big fat myth. What women do best when they get together without men  is bitch about each other.” – JANINE DI GIOVANNI

“One must choose between loving women and understanding them.” – HENRI DE MONTHERLANT (in his novel “Pity For Women”)

“I have a grueling 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. If he ever decides to extricate himself from Italia, he ought to run for mayor of Las Vegas. Though not San Francisco...)

“Conservatives have a problem with women, in the same way that everybody has a problem with women.” – HUGO RIFKIND

“It must be tough being a woman. They have to have stuff around them, a room and furniture. They're all needs and wants and wishes and the only real trade they have is going to bed. No wonder they make up that love crap. It's their way of getting drunk and forgetting their troubles.” – RICHARD McKENNA

“Most women need time for themselves. God knows what for. To meditate on the state of their wardrobe, maybe, or jot down feminine insights into a hardbound notebook from Pier One Imports. 'Private space' I believe what Dr. Joyce Brothers and others of her ilk call this phenomenon.” – ROBERT PLUNKET             (the author of “My Search For Warren Harding”, a not-bad book, by the way....)

“Women do not need leaders as much as men. If they are given a simple object they pursue it with great resolution, and often will continue to do so in spite of leaders. Their regard for leaders is as feeble as their discipline is bad.” – JOYCE CARY                                                                                                    (Mr. Carey is one of that long line of distinguished Englishmen with girls' names, such as Evelyn Waugh and Leslie Howard. He wrote “The Horse's Mouth” which was a fine movie starring Alec Guinness and one of the best novels on Africa ever written, called “Mr. Johnson”.)

“A woman will endure discomforts, and make sacrifices, and go without things to a heroic extent, but the one luxury she will not go without is her quarrels.” – SAKI

"A lot of women are dog lovers. No amorous woman will admit to owning a cat -- with good reason. a pet is an alter ego that reveals how you relate to others. A dog is a son. A cat is a mother-in-law." -- LLOYD EVANS 

“The world of the soap opera is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose but creating mischief.” – FREDERIC EXLEY                                                (American novelist, author of among others, “A Fan's Notes)

“Women are the only things that cannot hurt me that I am afraid of.” – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“Sorry, Donatello's David, sorry, gay men: You're outvoted, you lose. Women are what the world goes round, and we have going round them since the Venus of Willendorf.” -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

“Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.” -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

“Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster around them.” -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

“Money makes women horny.” -- ROBERT STRAUSS                                                                                                          (Almost certainly the long-time 20th century Democrat “power broker”, rather than the American movie actor who starred in “Stalag 17)

“If your wife is beautiful don't bother to tell her because she knows it already. Tell her rather that she's intelligent, because she hopes she is.” -- FRANCIS DE CROISSET (1877-1937. Belgian-born French playwright and opera librettist)

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

“Women – can’t live with ‘em, pass the beer nuts.” – GEORGE WENDT                                                       (the fat guy who played “Norm” in “Cheers”)

“It's surprising how many ladyparts sound like Japanese car models” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.” – WILL ROGERS

"As far as sex is concerned, patience is a virtue. In the words of Marcel Proust, and this applies to any woman in the world, if you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is, that they come up with, 'til ten past four in the morning -- you're in." -- PETER COOK (in his 1967 film masterpiece, "Bedazzled") 

"Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

“There are some people who don't understand what an explanation is, never have, never will. Funnily enough they all seem to be women.” – KINGSLEY AMIS (from “The Folks That Live On The Hill”)

"Women make up the past as they go along. You know, like communists." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

"If you did exactly what women wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, and if you ever stood up to them you were resorting to cold-war tactics and pursuing imperialistic designs and interfering in their internal affairs." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

"You ask her a question and instead of answering she asks why you asked it, as if nothing can be straightforward, not even a simple question -- nothing is what it is, it's always something else." -- KINGSLEY AMIS (about his ex-second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard)

“Never promise anything or agree to anything while a woman’s crying.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

“When your wife asks you 'Is that what you're wearing?' before you head out, it's not really a question.” – JAMES PETHOKOUKIS

"And the principle is to at all times always give to a woman slightly more than she ever asks for." -- J. P. DONLEAVY 

"You don't understand. In order to keep one woman, you got to have two. And jesus I'm learning fast that if you want to go on keeping two, you've got have three." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

“The thoughts inside a woman’s head are one tangled mass of cooked spaghetti. The noodles wrap all around one another, and it’s tricky to pull one long strand from the bowl without getting lumps of marinara on the place-mat. Everything connects to something else. It’s hard to set boundaries, boxes, or even perforated lines around the things we think and feel, because most of us don’t usually think and feel in a linear, organized fashion.” – TRICIA LOTT WILLIFORD (An American author, here in the PJM in June ’15. And I believe she’s right—women think differently than men, and have difficulty with mental “compartmentalizing”.)

"If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, How come they can't have a headache and sex at the same time?" – BILLY CONNOLLY

“She liked people looking at her, but she could not bear to be looked at.” – JOSEPH CONNOLLY

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." --  TALLEYRAND (Charles, Count Talleyrand)

 "Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." -- HOJATOLESLAM KAZEM SEDIGHI (This genius -- whose scientific aptitude would seem to make him a good candidate for honorable membership in the Congressional Black Caucus -- was personally appointed to be "Official Leader of Friday Prayers" throughout Tehran, by Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei. Me, I   think it's fine -- at least he doesn't blame any earthquakes on fracking.…)

«FIRST BLAST OF THE TRUMPET AGAINST THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN» -- ALEXANDER POPE (Actually directed against Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth and all the other Catholic queens — and those are his caps)

«Meeting up with girls, in my experience, is a lot like having sex with girls. I always get there first.» – KYLE SMITH

"Women are stupid. But if women weren't stupid the world wouldn't go round." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

“There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 450SL." – LYNN LAVNER (American comedienne)

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

«Woman (n.), peculiar creature with no opinion about what she wants for dinner but fixed, violent opinions about what she doesn't want.» – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late twenties or thirities. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children." -- BRIAN SEWELL (the late English poofter art critic who fellow columnist and art critic Sarah Vine called a "misogynist queer")

"It's easy enough to get along with women if you don't care for them." -- E. B. WHITE

“Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.” – IAN FLEMING

"Those who always speak well of women do not know them sufficiently; those who always speak ill of them do not know them at all" – CHARLES-ANTOINE GUILLAUME PIGAULT-LEBRUN (1753-1835 – a Frog roué, casanova, novelist, playwright and soldier)

"It was not until I got married that I needed anything... I realized that if there were no women, there would be no economy." – PAUL JOLIS

“85% of women think of nothing but money.” – STEVEN TYLER (The long-time frontman of AEROSMITH, as quoted by one of his good lady pals –  a French woman who I also happen to know.)

“A woman of the world doesn't have friends – she has lovers and acquaintances.” – JOHN GALSWORTHY (in his “The Forsyte Saga”)

“Women, true to their Freudian stereotype, are castles betraying themselves, never more vulnerable than when most fortified, yearning for their enemies.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (in his 1980 novel “Jack Be Nimble”)

"What women want from men in exchange for sex is loyalty, reliability and commitment. Women in dangerous situations with a male partner have figured out that the sexual bond can usually keep the idiot in line." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"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)

“Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.” – IAN FLEMING

"She likes what she calls 'romance'. To her that means candles, rose petals, and a bathtub. I don't understand what this thing is that women have about candles. All I can say is that there must've been a hell of a lot of sex in the eighteenth century." -- MARK HELPRIN

“Ruminating on my own pathetic history with this species called woman, and reflecting on my three 'bad' (ok, 'failed' marriages) where I was held up by ex and judge alike as 100% responsible for everything gone wrong (and fuck all of them to hell for that), I suddenly realized that I am to woman as squirrel is to man.  When in the presence of womenfolk, I cringe, avert my eyes and scamper quickly away knowing, like a squirrel, that while they may throw a nut your way they more likely will unleash their 'pets' (dogs) upon you.  And so, while we eye their tits, they eye our wallets.” – SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"We know fully well what a woman is -- a life support system for a vagina." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER (in response to Democrats and other leftists pretending not being able to define "what a woman is" in April 2022) 

"When women kiss, it always reminds one of prizefighters shaking hands." – H. L. MENCKEN

"Doubtless research has shown that women employees have more problems that need to be sorted out than men." – KEITH WATERHOUSE

“A woman should have a trim waist, a good ‘up top’ and enough ‘down the bottom’.” -- PRINCE ANDREW (on the eve of his marriage in 1986 to to the air-headed but lubricious Sloane, Sarah Ferguson)

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." — TIMOTHY LEARY

“Women will love you for you who are. They just won’t marry you for who you are.” – COSMO LANDESMAN (a British-based American-born journalist and editor. With his then-wife Julie Burchill and friend Toby Young, he founded the magazine The Modern Review)

“A woman is like a spider. She has her web. She likes to feel the different threads vibrate.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance. Why? Why, in the days of my youth, did girls permit themselves to be seized and clumsily pushed about by sweating, overexcited, embarrassed boys? Not only did they permit it, they dressed themselves in taffeta and tulle and strapless bras to encourage its happening, and wept when it did not. For tears to be invoked, the importance of dances – school, country-club, Saturday-night, tea, square – as a means of gauging female desirability and mateability must be firmly established in feminine nervous systems.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on – the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"There were layers to all women, he was discovering; the trick was to find the layer where you were welcome." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“Women have no conscience. Never their fault. The serpent beguiled me.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“If women were fastidious, the species would go extinct.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“A woman was a circle whose center was slightly elsewhere." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“There is this to be said for cold women; they stick.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“If women did not exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” – ARISTOTLE ONASSIS

 "The first thing I look for in a woman is good calves." -- MICHEY MANTLE     (as quoted by Tom Wolfe, and I must confess I can find no trace of this quote anywhere else, so... caveat emptor...)

“His philosophical researches had revealed that there were no female philosophers, no Mrs. Kants, no Daphne Spinozas or Gladys Wittgensteins.” – DAVID NOBBS

“Women have strange tastes in men.” – DAVID NOBBS

 “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

"Most women want to own everything. They want to own your mail. They want to own your future. They want to own your fantasies. 'How dare you want to fuck anybody other than me, I should be your fantasy. Why are you watching porn when you have me at home. They want to own who you are." -- PHILIP ROTH

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

“It’s one of the most chilling, but also enchanting things about a woman, they way they will discard their previous lives for love.” – MARTYN HARRIS

"Women cannot resist men who obviously like women." -- RACHEL JOHNSON (Boris' lefty sister.)

“Women are a lifetime’s study.” – WILLIAM BOYD

“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior and always have been. Whatever you give a woman she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she will give you a baby. If you give her a house, she will give you a home. If you giver her groceries, she will give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she will give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges all that is given to her. So if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!” – WILLIAM GOLDING (1911-1993, the British author of the great “The Lord Of The Flies”)

“Every woman is a match-maker at heart.” – WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

“Every woman is a missionary at heart. She always wants to reform her man.” – DAVID LODGE

"Women were born spooks, and could smell betrayal before it happened." -- MICK HERRON

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” – EDGAR ALLAN POE

“All women were attractive for the first hour: the flaws emerged slowly.” – GUY BELLAMY

“All a woman wants nowadays is ‘someone to tell me  what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about... what to believe it, who to vote for, and who to love and how to tell them’.” – PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE (The English actress, the star of a TV show called “Fleabag”, in 2020)

“You (men) cannot really talk with a woman unless you make love with her. Your conversation is unfinished.” – ALAN JUDD                                         (this is spoken by a woman character in his great 1989 novel “Tango”, and I hasten to mention that I personally don’t think this is true – but it seems memorable enough to include here.)

"The contents of the refrigerator were minimal, but there was yogurt. there's always yogurt. What is it with women and yogurt?" — NELSON DEMILLE

"At our worst, we want everyone to get along. We're natural comunitarians; we fancy consensus. We don't like conflict. We're risk averse. We aim to please; we want to be liked. We yearn to be regarded as good and kind and nice. Craving moral approbation, women are easily suckered into the progressive competition over who can be more concerned for the less fortunate, more allied with that mythical 'tight side of history'." -- LIONEL SHRIVER 

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

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

"The age of consent thing is really a feminist social construct. Do we really believe you have to be 18 years old in order to consent to sex otherwise it's rape? It's really about artificially increasing the marketplace value of older women." -- NICK FUENTES (This guy Fuentes is really a repulsive character, and I only include this bit of nastiness to show how lefty trendiness can be used against itself)

“Seeking clues to female motives is like fishing in a whirlpool.” – PETER DEVRIES

"Girls who went to private schools always managed to work that into the conversation within fifteen minutes of meeting you." -- TOM WOLFE 

“I do declare, that you women are so giddy, so giddy, that you’d wear a feather stickin’ out of your ass – if it was in style!” – J. GOLDEN KIMBALL            (1853-1938, an American Mormon bigwig.)

“Women are herrings with ideas.” – JOSEF STALIN

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

"Women are, on average, more risk averse than men, which means they're less hesitant about jettisoning hard-won liberties to reduce the likelihood of various worst-case scenarios materialising, whether it's locking us in our homes to 'protect' us from a flu-like respiratory virus or forcing us to drive 20mph to avoid thermogeddon." -- TOBY YOUNG

"Women to me are like elephants. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one." -- W. C. FIELDS

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." -- GEORGE ORWELL

"It is a well-known fact that women only start to get interested in you when other women are forming an orderly queue to get into your pants." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist) 

"There are two things that women, however brilliant, fail with great charm to understand: one is the International Date Line, and the other is third down and ten. Ask Lillian Hellman about third and ten and see what you get." -- GEORGE PLIMPTON 

“Women love wordplay; for us wordplay is foreplay – how else do you think Woody Allen could get laid?” – KATHY LETTE (the British-Australian author)

"Women are Sabines. They instinctively sympathize with the enemy. A country run by women is fated to disappear." -- MICHAEL WALSH (I tried to look it up, but I remain a little confused about this matter of the Sabine women's legendary, alleged culpability... still it makes a nice quote which, incidentally, he wrote in July 2023)

"Women will always defect to the enemy when they feel their own men cannot or will not protect them. Which is to say the very qualities they regard as "toxic" in their own men they subconsciously regard as protective and seek out in others." -- MICHAEL WALSH

"The worst enemy of women is always other women." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Women’s Liberation”                                                                                             

“The mistake all these women’s libbers make is in assuming that any man is the slightest bit interested in them from any point of view whatever. Indeed, if I was as unattractive to look at and listen to as the majority of them, I’d keep very quiet indeed.” – CHRISTOPHER MATTHEW   (The terribly funny English writer, here from his “The Crisp Report”)

“Women’s Studies”

“’Women’s studies’ are a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparatchiks, dough-faced party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopians and bullying sanctimonious sermonizers.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA

"Instead of exhorting young women to prepare for a variety of technical subjects by studying science, logic, and mathematics, Women's Studies students are not being taught that logic is a tool of domination, that the standard norms and methods of scientific inquiry are sexist because they are incompatible with 'women's way of knowing'." -- NORETTA KOERTGE (writing in "Skeptical Inquirer" magazine in 1995)

"If your philosophy dismisses all that as patriarchal domination, so much the worse for your philosophy. Perhaps you should stay away from doctors with their experimentally tested medicines and go to a shaman or a witch doctor instead. If you need to travel to a conference of like-minded philosophers perhaps you'd better not go by air. Planes fly because a lot of scientifically trained mathematicians and engineers got their sums right. They did not use 'intuitive ways of knowing'. Whether they happened  to be white and male or sky blue-pink or hermaphrodite is supremely, triumphantly irrelevant. Logic is logic is logic, no matter if the individual who wields it also happens to wield a penis. A mathematical proof reveals a definite truth, no matter whether the mathematician 'identifies as' female, male, or a hippopotamus. If you decide to fly to that conference, Newton's laws and Bernoulli's principle will see you safe. And no, Newton's Principia is not a ‘rape manual’, as was ludicrously said by a noted feminist philosopher." -- RICHARD DAWKINS (the famous atheist)

Women Writers

"As for the new lady novelists, they can by divided into those who shriek because some one has seduced them and those who shriek because no one will seduce them." -- J. M. BARRIE (The Peter Pan chap, 1860-1937, in a letter to his friend Robert Louis Stevenson. Barrie died in 1894, so this was written before then, at least.)

Words

“She goes on: ‘We are being proactive and we are progressing the claim as quickly as the circumstances allow us to.’ The word ‘proactive’ fills me with dread, as does ‘progressing’. Proactive is no way to describe a yogurt, never mind a legal battle. And you can be sure that when someone tells you they are ‘progressing’ something it means that they are trying very hard to make it go backwards or stand still.” – MELISSA KITE

"I've been vaguely aware for some time that the word 'unsafe' carries mystical powers." -- MELISSA KITE (in 20 February 2021)

“'Wellbeing' is one of those nonce words that has been either appropriated or invented by progressives to mean whatever they want it to mean – like 'grooming' or 'community' or 'resilience'.” – ROD LIDDLE (“nonce”, by the way, is Britspeak for “a word coined for a single occasion”.)

“There was a study, a couple of years back. It reckoned that conservatives use nouns more than liberals do. I have no idea what the hidden implication of that is.” – ROD LIDDLE (On 25 May 2019)

“Words we are not allowed to use any more now include ‘cultural Marxism’. Banning the use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is about as culturally Marxist as it is possible to get.” – ROD LIDDLE (in Feb. 2020)

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”  – CONFUCIUS

"Everything is a word, if you have a big enough dictionary" — DAVE BARRY                                                                     (I love Brother Dave, but this is less clever than it sounds. In fact, all you need is to be familiar with the word «neologism»)

“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound / Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.” – ALEXANDER POPE (English pote 1688-1744)

“Words are the only things that last forever.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while, they dry up." -- STEPHEN CLARKE

“Any word can become bedraggled with use.” – DOT WORDSWORTH (this aptly-named lady is the language columnist of the UK SPECTATOR, in 2015) 

"I don't think super helps much when used as a synonym for very. Most uses of very are already unnecessary. Very interesting is no more interesting than interesting and super-interesting is less." -- DOT WORDSWORTH 

"Words matter, but they don't matter all that much." -- SAM LEITH (hotshot young  English columnist, of PUNCH, THE DAILY MAIL, and THE SPECTATOR)

“The language of the left is a truly transformative grammar. There are words which, when uttered by a leftie, lose all sense of themselves – such as 'diverse' and 'vibrant' and 'racist'. It is not simply that these words can mean different things to different people – it is that when the left uses them they are at best a euphemism and at worst a downright lie.” – ROD LIDDLE

"No one wants to be called 'feisty'. That's what a rapist says when his victim fights back." -- LLOYD EVANS

“ ‘Unintimidating’ is code for self-censorship.” – LLOYD EVANS

"All politics is, at some level, a vocabulary contest." -- IAN TUTTLE

"'Controversial', the wonder word that makes something innocuous sound criminal and makes something criminal sound innocuous." – DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

“The word ‘anxious’, which is one of those wonderful cosh words like ‘defensive’ or ‘unprofessional’ or ‘inappropriate’ which smack you right down with no possibility of reply.” – MARTYN HARRIS

“What should be appreciated here is that the elevation of ‘gender’ over ‘sex’ — the elevation of the interpretative and metaphorical over the physical and literal — is an ideological project, one that should be resisted.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Most people who deal in words don’t have that much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough, and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.” – HUNTER S. THOMPSON

“What has happened to the word ‘very’? It seems to have been completely supplanted by ‘incredibly’. Nothing now, for example, is very difficult: it is always incredibly difficult. There are two good reasons why this should cease. First, short words are always better than long words. Second, ‘incredibly’ means ‘unbelievably’, and most of the things to which ‘incredibly’ is applied are eminently believable.” – NIGEL LAWSON (the ex-British Chancellor of the Exchequer – one of Mrs. Thatcher’s, actually – in August ‘20)

“The smartphone version of Scrabble is the best argument yet against the internet existing at all.” -- JEREMY VINE (English TV’s version of Jerry Springer)

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cellar door’ and ‘Kuala Lumpur’... Two of the most forgotten words in the English language are ‘loving kindness’ and ‘helpmeet’.” -- LAWRENCE DURRELL (from “Justine”, which he wrote in 1957 in six weeks in his mother’s attic)

"Words are diamonds, the writer is the diamond cutter." -- WILBUR SMITH

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." -- RUDYARD KIPLING

“All dictionaries are translations.” -- PETER JONES (The British “clacissist”)

"The most important weapon in my arsenal is the dictionary." -- JOSEPH STALIN

"Words are all we’ve got. Try explaining how to build a nuclear reactor without words—take my word for it, it’s hard. Longest game of charades, ever!" -- JONAH GOLDBERG (in March 2023) 

"Words describe reality—accurately or inaccurately—but they don’t create reality." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

" 'Cute' (is) an abbreviation of 'acute' -- meaning sharp." -- LAURA GASCOIGNE     (a sharp observation which I was tempted to leave out because in her same article Ms. Gascoigne trashes one of my favorite moves of all time, "What's New Pussycat?")

"Words are the source of misunderstanding." -- ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY (“Pas merde”, Antoine. The author, of course, of the impossibly twee "Le Petit Prince" which, unaccountably, I once, briefly, enjoyed in my childhood)

“Women love wordplay; for us wordplay is foreplay – how else do you think Woody Allen could get laid?” – KATHY LETTE (the British-Australian author)

" 'Sensitivity' is one of those words that's changed meaning. It was once used mostly to refer to sore teeth and gums. But just as 'community' now means people complaining and 'activist' now means sitting at home swearing on the internet, to be sensitive simply signifies you're politically progressive." -- JULIE BURCHILL (in April 2022) 

"I so wish the people wouldn't use the word 'seed' unless they're talking about gardening." -- JULIE BURCHILL

 " 'Cannot' is a word that sovereign governments should ignore."-- DOUGLAS MURRAY

" 'Centered' to describe a child, it can mean anything from 'has scads of grade-A munis in his trust fund' to 'takes less drugs than his peers'. When the term 'high maintenance' is used to describe a woman, it can mean anything from 'sensitive' to 'high strung' to 'coke-snorting bitch'. And the term 'vulnerable' can mean anything from 'probably gay' to 'read way too much Sylvia Plath in college'." -- JOE QUEENAN

"There is no English phrase or idiom to describe the feeling to which I refer, so here I will take the liberty of coining the term scheissenbeauern. This words, which literally means 'shit regret', describes the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one had hoped it would be." -- JOE QUEENAN

"I find 'partner' now one of the most erotic words of the English language -- it suggests a sexual union without revealing whether the speaker is shagging a man, a woman or a goat." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the English comic novelist, in 1999)

"Luxury as in luxury condominium, anywhere is a bad sign, but perhaps most notably when associated not with a car but with a motor car, where archaism comes to the assistance of pretentiousness. Other words to beware of around auto merchandisers are CELEBRATION! (sometimes, more honestly, SELLABRATION!) EVENT! Experience has also shown that words like Fine Foods and Spirits seldom fail to suck in the pretentious and the illiterate. Like the word realty for land and houses. How bogus British can you get?" -- PAUL FUSSELL

"The line between playing with words and fouling the atmosphere is a fine one." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (Hmmm… that great novelist P. N. Gwynne should take these words to heart.)

"When I am Imperial Censor of the Written Word, my first action will be to forbid anyone to use breakthrough on pain of being sentenced to read the whole of Proust, backwards." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)

"There is something almost awe-inspiring in the way in which our age can deny reality, redefine things and try to make everyone agree to the new definition, only then to not go along with it. See also 'woman' (noun)." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

"We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence. In this, they have much in common with the Iranian Ayatollah." -- BARI WEISS (in August 2022)

"People will go mad about words while ignoring literature." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

"He could never remember what one did with parameters." -- TOM WOLFE

"This word paradigm absolutely drove him up the wall. The damned word meant nothing at all, near as he could make out, and yet it was always 'shifting', whatever it was. In fact, that was the only thing the 'paradigm' ever seemed to do. It only shifted." -- TOM WOLFE

Work

“I was never given a job by someone who was poor” – SEAN HANNITY

“There are no worthwhile occupations other than farming and fighting.” – SHANG YANG (A Chinese philosopher. Of course, he said this in the 4th. century B.C., when there weren’t any other occupations than farming and fighting….)

“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” – OSCAR WILDE  (Having his way with Karl Marx’s famous killjoy teetotalist maxim)

“The real minimum wage is zero.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“Most of the world's work is done by people who don't feel very well.”  – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Work is of two kinds. First, altering the position of matter at or near   the earth's surface relatively to other such matter. Second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid. The second kind is pleasant and highly paid." -- BERTRAND RUSSELL (In 1932, long before he completely lost his marbles and ended up a doddering senile old leftist crank  presiding over a "US War Crimes in Vietnam Tribunal" in Stockholm in 1967)

“I have seen the future, and it does not go to work.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 "I love work. I could sit and look at it for hours." -- JEROME K. JEROME

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – THOMAS A. EDISON

“Being a generalist – or a renaissance man or woman – is charming in theory, but a truly efficient economy will be one where no one can understand anyone else’s job any more.” – ALAIN DE BOTTON (the English author).

“After a while you're so late for work people think you're dead. You almost hate to disappoint them, which explains some people's driving.” -- JAMES LILEKS

“The work you do is the rent you pay for the room you occupy on earth.” – ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN MOTHER (thass right – the jolly old Queen-Mum herself)

“Watching others toil is a favorite pastime of the British.” – FRANK NORMAN                                   (a British Cockney ex-con who later went on to become a successful writer.)

“No man ever listened himself out of a job.” – CALVIN COOLIDGE

“Conservatives really like work. Liberals really like 'jobs'.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“When the desirable jobs are spending other people's money, reporting on spending other people's money and lobbying to spend other people's money then you know that the society is fucked.” – TIM WORSTALL (the English author, economic blogger, contributor to TCS and occasionally the Philadelphia Inquirer, and, would you believe, Press Officer for UKIP. He lives in Portugal. Also a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute)

“If it takes more than 10 seconds to explain what you do for a living, you're a con artist.” – DAVID “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"Anyone who  can't explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan." -- WILLIAM BOYD (he wrote this in 1987, and whether or not he was the inspiration for the Iowawhawk's entry, above, they both make good points.) 

“The most beautiful profession in the world is to be a librarian – in a public library in a small town in Brittany.” – CHARLES DE GAULLE

"I do not like work even when somebody else does it." -- MARK TWAIN (This reminds me of a great old one-line insult which some of you may be familiar with in which the phrases "I wouldn't" and "with your" figure prominently in the punchline....)

“Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.” – STEVEN WRIGHT

“Work is more fun than fun.” – NOEL COWARD

"The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.” -- G.K. CHESTERTON                                                                                                                                                        (in 1918)

“Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses create jobs.” – HILLARY CLINTON

“One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.” – PETER DRUCKER

“All anyone has ever needed in their workplace is a clear job description, a mastery of their own space and a lack of any emotional hindrance, such as a 'team' that is 'on your side'.” – LIAM MULLONE (an amusing fellow writing in the SPECCIE in April '16)

“Only do the things you love... is great advice on how to never make more than $30,000 per year.” – MARK YOUNG (author, investor)

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

"You know what the trouble is? We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we's just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." -- FRANK SOBOTKA (the "Polack" Baltimore longshoreman union boss in "The Wire", as played by FRANK  BAUER, quoted in Episode 11 of Season Two, an episode written by the celebrated crime-writer GEORGE PELECANOS.)

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

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called Everybody, and they meet at the bar." -- GEORGE CARLIN (The dyspeptic, amusing-if-liberal Mr. Carlin is amply quoted elsewhere, so I don't do so much in the Compendium -- but I like this one...) 

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

“As I always advise young people: 'Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at, and be quite good at those things.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“If you see someone performing a poorly-paid job, you can be confident that they are doing something worthwhile – people don't build walls or collect rubbish for fun.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Work is for grown-ups."-- PETER COOK (the great, self-described "indolent" English comic) 

"Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing  what you're doing." -- ALAIN DE BOTTON

"Doubtless research has shown that women employees have more problems that need to be sorted out than men." – KEITH WATERHOUSE

"What is the moral difference between being carried as a passenger on a cargo boat and being carried as a passenger on a pleasure cruise? There is no difference! You remain passengers, whether those around you are working or not!" – KEITH WATERHOUSE

"Job happiness is directly proportional to the distance you are from the home office." -- NELSON DEMILLE (Maaan, I for one always found this to be true...)

“Men like to work. It’s a funny thing, but they do. They may moan about it every Monday morning, they may agitate for shorter hours and longer holidays, but they need to work for their self-respect.” – DAVID LODGE

“You don’t want to get too sentimental about the operatives, you know. They’re a pretty crude lot. They seem to like dirt.” – DAVID LODGE

“You don’t work too hard. That’s what I like about you. Get some high-pressure team of kids working to build something up and they all work too hard. They worked themselves dry – they start to make mistakes. I’ve seen it happen.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (from his very funny 1967 novel, “Towards The End Of The Morning”)

“What did his father do? He vanished in the morning, he reappeared in the evening. Vanishing and reappearing seemed a full-enough job description for all practical purposes.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (in his 2002 novel “Spies”)

"At least at work you are not expected to enjoy yourself." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

"It isn't work if you don't get tired."-- MARK HELPRIN

 “We live in a truly odd time where nobody can be fired for actually being inept at their job but everyone can be fired for a clumsy social media post.” – DENNIS MILLER (In January 2019)

"You do very little actual work, but you spend all your free time doing the things for yourself that it's too much trouble for other people to do for you." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

“It has always been difficult for the self-employed to convince the rest of the world that they work quite hard because they are spotted relaxing at unconventional hours.” – GUY BELLAMY

"Laws of employment: 1/ The more unpleasant the job, the earlier you start in the morning. 2/ Pay increases as work decreases." -- GUY BELLAMY

“Work?  I don’t mind physical work.  But having to work at anything or ‘having to go to work’ or ‘having a job’ are completely unacceptable frameworks for my life.  The avoidance of ‘having’ to do anything is, for me, a nonnegotiable basic principle of existence.  ‘I prefer not to’ is my credo.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER (my old ADPhi brother and grate pal)

"Work banishes those three great evils, boredom vice and poverty." -- VOLTAIRE

“The most stressful part of working is not the worthwhile work itself but the accompanying worthless bustle.” – MATTHEW LESH (the head of The Adam Smith Institute)

“If you’re a half-way decent human being you’ve probably been sacked from something in your time.” – STEPHEN FRY (being English, of course he means fired – not a quarterback knocked on his ass. Arse.)

"If you're working off your inbox, you're working off the priorities of others." – DONALD RUMSFELD

“There is virtually nothing – indeed nothing I can think of – at the level of the individual employee that clearly drives revenue and so forth. There are far too many steps in the chain.” – PETER CAPPELLI (a professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business, and this is damn bad gnus for the individual, what...)

"He took his new job with all the seriousness of an idiot stringing beads." -- ROBERT PLUNKET

“Work-From-Home”

"There are two ways to become richer. One is to earn more. The other is to spend less on things you are forced to buy. And the freedom to work remotely is an instant 20% pay rise." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

" 'It is vital that we see a return to face-to-face meetings to foster the dynamic collaboration that creates breakthrough ideas.' All true, I'm sure. But what you're describing here isn't an office: it's a pub." -- RORY SUTHERLAND 

"Studies show that the average corporation actually saves money when employees stay home, inasmuch as when they come to work, they spend the bulk of their time stealing office supplies and faxing jokes to international subsidiaries." -- DAVE BARRY (he wrote this in the 90s, sometime, so on top of everything else, the great Dave Barry was a prophet.)

“Working from home turns out to be... work. A question that could have been shouted over the top of a cubicle divider and answered in 10 seconds turns into an e-mail thread as long as the works of Proust. Reply All. There's no going ‘out’ for lunch – which should be good for our waistline if we weren't ‘in’ all day raiding the refrigerator.

The whole household is underfoot. The kitchen sink is the water cooler, but the kids don't have any good gossip and flirting with the dog is pathetic. Furthermore, there's no 9 to 5... Coworkers are scattered around time zones and across the International Date Line. When it's time for an after-work drink in New York, it's already tomorrow morning in Singapore.
Plus, drinking alone is also pathetic. Which brings me to the one upside of working remotely – no one can smell your breath in a Zoom meeting, so I fill my entire coffee mug with scotch.” – P. J. O’ROURKE                 (21 Dec 2020)

“Working Class”

"I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of." – DALTON TRUMBO (American Communist, Screenwriter – “High Noon”)

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

“Workshops”

“The funny thing about workshops: there’s never any ‘work’ being done, and it certainly isn’t a shop because there’s never anything worth buying. Generally a workshop involves fingerpainting, or something like fingerpainting. Followed by hugs.” – GREG GUTFELD

“Everything that has gone wrong with the world since World War II can be summed up in the word ‘workshop’.” – (SIR) KINGSLEY AMIS

“World-view”

"The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world." -- ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (1769-1859. The father of geography)

"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 "A Tutor's Tale", in 1927)

World War

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN

World War I

"A phenomenon of such extended malignancy as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age." -- BARBARA W. TUCHMAN

“World War I often seems as close to being about nothing as any war can.” – PAUL BESTON (associate editor of NY’s “City Journal”)

“God grant we may not have a European war thrust upon us, and for such a stupid reason too, no I don't mean stupid, but to have to go to war on account of tiresome Servia beggars belief.” – QUEEN MARY (“QUEEN-CONSORT” OF KING GEORGE V) (in a letter to her aunt, Princess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 28 July 1914)

"The Left should defend and rejoice over World War I. It was the fulfillment of their dreams. No single event has done more to advance the power of the state and of state socialism. Britain barely had a state before 1914. By 1918 it was one of the most tightly governed and bureaucratized patches of soil in the world. The Russian revolution would never have happened had there been no war in 1914. The great Christian and conservative empires of the world would probably all still exist. War also brought about the sexual, social, and cultural revolutions that are still convulsing what used to be Christendom." -- PETER HITCHENS

“From a military point of view America is a nothing.” – EDWARD VON CAPELLE                            (A German Naval Minister, before “The Yanks came”.)

“I read about the first world war all the time, and the more I read, the more it strikes me as an unfathomable international suicide.” – JEREMY CLARKE

"Who would ever have dreamed that the assassination of an Austrian archduke whom no one liked much anyway would have wrecked Western civilization for generations. But who would have dreamt that a few bullets from a lunatic’s pistol would lead to Bolshevism, Nazism, a second World War? Who would have dreamed such horrors as the Holocaust would follow?" -- BEN STEIN

“Prince Rupert Ludwig Ferdinand zum Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg chatting up Princess Thing-of-Thing and Count-the-Spoons borrowing a fiver off the Duke of What’s-it-called – that place-with-the-Big-Clock-in-the-middle-of-the-Town – and the Archduchess going on at the Archduke because he hadn’t had any time off, as he promised, and what about a few days in this place called Sarajevo?” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

"That worst-of-all-infantry-wars." -- TOM WOLFE

"In the end, we (Italy) lost interest in staying aloof, because we wanted the Alto Adigo from the Austrians far more than we wanted Corsica from the French. What could we have done with Corsica? Sardinia is enough of a problem." -- MARK HELPRIN

"On occasion, along a stretch of less than a kilometer, five thousand men might go over the top, and within a few minutes suffer a thousand instantly dead, a thousand wounded who would die slowly on the ground, a thousand grievously wounded, a thousand lightly wounded, and a thousand who were physically untouched but spiritually shattered for the rest of their lives, which, in some cases, was merely a matter of weeks." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Now we are all fighting for absolutely nothing. No one knows what he's preserving, and nothing is being preserved. A million men die attacking and defending a piece of ground that was inconsequential before the war and will be inconsequential afterward. We are fighting neither for an idea nor for survival. The governments on either side are the same. We enjoyed each other's company before the war, and will do so after." -- MARK HELPRIN 

"Fighting for patches of mud the size of Hyde or Central Park, six million soldiers were killed." -- PETER O'TOOLE (who helped to win it as "Aurens" of Arabia)

"The great military expert, Professor Taki, is adamant about one thing:  had America not entered the great conflict in 1917, there would have been no communism in Russia nor Nazism in Germany afterwards." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (well this, in the words of my brother Paul, the ex-Green Beret, ought to separate the men from the sheep....)

"A continent which makes such an exhibition of itself is not to be taken seriously." -- NORMAN DOUGLAS (famous British – Scot, actually -- travel writer, 1868-1952 – he said this in 1917)

World War II

“The only way to bring this unhappy business to a conclusion is to kill a great number of Germans.” – EVELYN WAUGH

“The chief use of this war is to cure artists of the illusion that they are men of action.” – EVELYN WAUGH (in 1943)

“World War II was the last government program that really worked.” – GEORGE WILL

“There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (In his 1946 “Fulton” speech)

“I’m not exactly sure which country we’re in, could be Belgium, Luxembourg, France or even Germany; we’re at a place where they more or less come together. I don’t know what time it is, what day or what country. I’m not even sure of my own name. Next thing they’ll be making me a general.” – WILLIAM WHARTON         (the American writer recalling his experience in The Battle Of The Bulge)

“Only when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 did the second world war ‘end’ for countries behind the Iron Curtain.” – IAN THOMSON (the author of, among other books, “Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End”)

"The Germans are the only decent people left in Europe. If it's a choice between them and the Russians, I prefer the Germans. We may have been fighting the wrong enemy all along. But while we're here (on the border of the Soviet-zone), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually." -- GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR. (on 21 July 1945, and perhaps it's not surprising that he was murdered shortly thereafter...)   
 

"As a famous man once said, the Second World War was won by English courage, American money and Russian blood. I believe the author of that remark was Winston Churchill, a man in a good position to know." --JOE QUEENAN (I believe Yank and Brit blood had something to do with it too -- and a lot of that Russky blood was shed by their own side firing on their own side, mais passons....)

World War II (Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-41)

“At least now the enemy will be in plain view.” – EVELYN WAUGH

Worry

"I worry that the number of things to worry about keeps growing." -- GARY A. KLEIN (Professor and author and "cognitive scientist", and this appeared in a book called "What Should We Be Worried About", edited by John Stockman)

"The best worries are always creative ones." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

"I've given up worrying. I merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me... and marvel stupidly." -- TERRY GILLIAM (American Monty Python and maker of many films, most notably, “Brazil” and one of the best movies of all time, "Time Bandits", and of this our old pal John Derbyshire commented "I'm not sure one can float on a tsunami -- not without worrying, at any rate, but I envy Mr. Gilliam his tranquility.")

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” ~MARK TWAIN

"I rarely worry -- and sometimes that worries me." -- MICHAEL W. FREEMAN (a fellow who's with Freeline Media, in Orlando, FL) 

Wrestling (professional)

"Wrestling is like a TV drama with all of the athleticism of gymnastics and dancing thrown in together." -- ALEX DAVIES-JONES (A Labour Party member of the UK Parliament from Wales)

"Soap opera in spandex" -- STEPHEN MERCHANT (the very tall English comic actor -- the guy from their "The Office")

"A spectacle of excess, on a par with the theater of ancient Greece." -- ROLAND BARTHES (the French philosopher, 1915-1980)

Writing/Writers

“Writers attract bores the way booze attracts writers.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (In my own experience as both a boozer and a writer, I’ve found that bores are almightily attracted to both….)

“Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.” – TOM ROBBINS

“Fiction has to be believable. Nonfiction only has to be true.” – JAMES TARANTO

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." -- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“There’s something about a broken heart that makes people becomes writers.” – PETER FARRELLY (ok, let’s see….that’s broken heart, added to O’Rourke’s booze…. Yeah, yeah, we getting’ there, we getting’ there… expect “self-pity” next.... And Peter is one half of the famous movie-making Farrelly Brothers… and he himself wrote a very funny novel called “Outside Providence”.)

“Books don’t get written by one’s strolling around a lake.” – NOEL COWARD

“In Washington or in Hollywood, you don’t have to be a writer to be an author.” – THEODORE OLSON (Solicitor-General of the U.S. under George W. Bush)

“If there’s anything good that comes out of war, it’s the books”. – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Inside every fatuous man there’s a slim volume struggling to get out.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY (waink, waink waaaaiink! Ba-da-BOOM!. This is actually a double-pun – a hard trick to pull off.)

“It isn’t a writer’s business to be liked.” – MIRANDA FRANCE (an English critic, in 1999)

“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.” – OSCAR WILDE

“If I didn't need the money the only thing I'd ever write again would be my signature on a cheque.” – J. P. DONLEAVY (he actually said this to my late brother, the writer Alan Jolis, who at the time was acting as Donleavy’s son’s legal advisor)

“Fictional characters don’t have to exist in our reality, but they have to exist in their reality.” – MARK STEYN

“If every publishing house were this very minute to cease its work f or ever, how long before the world ran out of good reading? Thousands of  years.” – LLOYD EVANS (Theatre critic of the UK SPECTATOR)

“Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.” --  S. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

“The only writing that should be the same at twenty-six and forty-three is your signature.” – RALPH SHOENSTEIN

“Cigarettes are a relaxant, and writers are the unrelaxed. They can’t accept the way things are so they are constantly thinking about how different they might be. – MARTIN AMIS

“Once the first days of creation are over (once life has been assigned to various hunches and inklings), writing is decision-making.” – MARTIN AMIS

“Contrary to popular impression, writers, unlike pole vaulters, do not know when they have done their best.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“In all my writing I tell the story of my life. Only dilettantes try to be universal.” – ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists that who are more intelligent than their works should change professions.” – MILAN KUNDERA (wiseass – then ALL novels would be great….)

“I write when I am inspired and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” – PETER DEVRIES

“Great writing is often great borrowing.” — RICHARD BROOKHISER 

“Most writers have the egotism of actors with none of the good looks or charm.” – RAYMOND CHANDLER

“The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” –  RAYMOND CHANDLER (an American born in Chicago, but educated at Dulwich College in England — the same school, incidentally, attended by C.S. Forester and P.G. Wodehouse)

“I was driven into writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated man could make a decent living. I am not complaining about the wages. They always seem to me disproportionately high. What I mind so much is the work.” – EVELYN WAUGH

"The writer's only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own." -- EVELYN WAUGH

"Style alone can keep the writer from being bored with his own work." -- EVELYN WAUGH

“ ’Journalist’ is a term of contempt employed by writers who are not read to refer to writers who are.” – ERNEST NEWMAN (of the TIMES of London)

“The pomposity of a book is usually proportionate to the ugliness of its jacket.” – LINSEY McGOEY (in the UK SPECTATOR in November 2007)

“There is no such thing as ‘writing talent’. Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a ‘third ear’, not for words but for human nature.” – FLORENCE KING

“There are two things that can't be described. One of them is a sunset.” – FLORENCE KING

“I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer, too, but ‘tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.” – FRANK O’CONNOR       (actually, of course, he was quoting some unknown geezer he just met, in Kinsale, in Ireland.)

“Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.” – J. P. DONLEAVY

"What's the point of being a writer if you don't get paid?" -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"Just because something is true, it doesn't mean that it is interesting." -- TOM STOPPARD (the justly-celebrated Czech-born English playwright) 

“All writing is a process of imitation: you like reading, you read a lot, you find yourself attracted to a particular kind of subdivision of literature, you reach a stage where you begin to think perhaps you can contribute something of that kind yourself. That is probably what is meant by a tradition.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

“There’s little point in writing if you can’t annoy somebody.”- KINGSLEY AMIS

“If you are using an adverb, you’ve got the wrong verb.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS

"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, ahem, humorous writers....)

“Just keep the sentences short. Just occasionally put in a longer one. Strong verbs. Few Adjectives. Forget about adverbs, unless essential to the meaning. Short quotations, if any. (!!! sic) Beware of subjunctives. All writing is a series of tricks and the great thing is to master all the best tricks of others, then invent some of your own.” – A.J.P. TAYLOR (the noted old lefty historian's advice to the then-younger, definitely less lefty, historian PAUL JOHNSON)

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy, then an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public." – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

"Bad writing is not the fault of bad writers. It is the fault of those making you read it." -- DON PATERSON    (in the SPECTATOR, Dec. '23)

"The qualities of the rhinoceros are the qualities you need in order to write a novel. hysical robustness, four feet on the ground, eyes straight ahead, the horn." -- TOBY LITT (of the University of London)

 “It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” – ROALD DAHL

“A drinking problem is like a little Latin – sooner or later, it will find its way into your writing.” – WILLIAM STYRON

“Reporting is like hunting. Writing is like cleaning the thing you killed.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“One of the most attractive things about Socrates, and for that matter, Christ, is that neither of them ever wrote anything.” – THOMAS W. HODGKINSON (writing in the UK SPECTATOR, and, by the way, the same could be said of Elvis Presley. And also by the way, I’m pretty sure that this fellow is a different fellow journalist, who goes by the name of “Tom Hodgkinson”)

“Writing is terribly uncommodious. There is not always a lot of dignity in it. Writers are really no more than blocked drains.” – MELISSA KITE

“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....)

“I’d like to see more novels not written by people who have all the time in the world to write them.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR

"To write a book you have to be obsessive. You have to be prepared to destroy everything around you.) -- MICHAEL FRAYN  (I say, steady on…)       

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

"It is always a mistake to know an author." -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"Writing is easy:  all you have to do  is sit at the typewriter and bleed." -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” – ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“Not all writers are depressed. Some are dead.” -- VINCENT CASIMIR                                                 (Some cheerful cove from Chicago, on Twitter)

"People who don't write books don't know what an unending, unyielding ass-ache they are." – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” – T.S. ELIOT

“While many critics are failed writers, so are many writers.” – T. S. ELIOT

“The essential ingredient of any best-seller is self-pity.” – ANTHONY POWELL (the great English novelist)

«If it sounds like a writer wrote it, rewrite.» – ELMORE LEONARD

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

"In a secular society, fiction is one of our few means of enquiry into how to live and die well." -- MIA LEVITIN (author of "The Future Of Seduction")

"One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane." -- GEORGE ORWELL (Even he didn't believe this, but it makes a nice epigram)

«All writers are vain, selfish and lazy.» – GEORGE ORWELL

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness." -- GEORGE ORWELL

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

"Novels are closer to gossip than to art." -- MARY McCARTHY

"No man but a block-head ever wrote, except for money." -- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

«The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.» – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"Expecting an author to 'be interesting' is like requesting Gutenberg to 'say something in movable type'." -- DAVID MAMET

«A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.» - ISAAC ASIMOV

«Writers are the last people one should entrust with the writing of a book. They are prone to peotic paragraphs evoking the passage of seasons. They believe that sexual acts should take longer to describe than perform. Their characteristic weaknesses make them uniquely unsuited to their chosen profession. Egocentricity, procrastination, irrationality, hysteria, self-pity, self-delusion, pretension, prolixity, alcoholism – these are handicaps in most professions. For writers, they're qualifications.» – JON CANTER               (the very funny Endlish novelist and screenwriter)

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

«Writers are united in their hatred of their mothers. » – GEORGES SIMENON

"In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end." -- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

"It's as if all one had to d to do to write a novel is pick up a big box of stuff in one room and move it into the next." -- PHILIP HENSHER (in his novel "To Battersea Park")

"The novel as a form is a fundamentally capitalist enterprise. It was invented at the same time as capitalism. No rigid feudal society has managed to create an effective school of novelists, and I would say that systems dedicated to forcible equality also struggle." -- PHILIP HENSHER


"Everyone knows it is harder to write a short book than a long one." -- SARA WHEELER (I don't know this, Sara. Anyway, Sara is an English travel author)

"You do not get a pass on bad writing just because your characters are idiots." -- KYLE SMITH

“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” – ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

«So few writers ever do more than one decent book. The fact is, practically every author is a damned amateur. They have one good book in them and can't repeat. The test is, can you write three ?» – P. G. WODEHOUSE

«I started churning out the stuff at the age of five. What I was doing before that I don’t remember. Just loafing, I suppose.» – P. G. WODEHOUSE

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

"The secret of writing good prose is knowing what to leave out." -- P. G. WODEHOUSE

«Writers as a group are, typically, over-endowed with ego and willing to commit almost any transgression for a good sentence or line.» – TIBOR FISCHER

"Creative writers rarely invent things: they simply change names to avoid getting sued or beaten up." -- TIBOR FISCHER (the British novelist and short-story writer)

"Writing. It's easy work. the equipment isn't expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don't have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It's not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie." -- DENIS JOHNSON

“A brilliant writer is one who creates a problem where none existed.” -- JAVIER CERCAS                              (A Spanish/Catalan professor and novelist/screenwriter)

"Writing is the one accomplishment we do not share with Neanderthals and our other ancestors." -- WALTER STEPHENS     (in his book "How  Writing Made Us Human")

"People who  rely on writing will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." -- PLATO

“Writing is re-writing.” -- MICHAEL WALSH

"The best thing about people you know reading your books is that they never recognize themselves. It's extraordinary how un-self-aware most of us are.

The worst? How often people misrecognize themselves, pointing out the witty, charismatic seducer with a raised eyebrow: 'Wait a second -- is this me?'." -- CELIA WALDEN (Paris-born English journalist and author -- her dad was a Conservative Minister in Thatcher's government and she is married to Piers Morgan)

"He had long held to one of the most fundamental of all literary convictions, that the world owed him a living." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"Writing won't keep you. If a writer makes money, a good writer, he makes it when he's dead. Widows sometimes benefit." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY    (I don't know if I'm a good writer or not, but as a 5-time novelist, I can vouch for the rest of this…)

“Winning the greatest prize on earth – being paid to write.” -- JULIE BURCHILL

"I so wish the people wouldn't use the word 'seed' unless they're talking about gardening." -- JULIE BURCHILL

“The primary motivation for writing books are: With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.” -- AUBERON WAUGH

“The difference between Fiction and Reality?   Fiction has to make sense." -- TOM CLANCY

 "A biographer is a novelist under oath.” -- LEON EDEL (the American/Canadian biographer... of Henry Jamezzzzzzzz)

“Create a villain and you become a villain.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

“To write a thing down is to control it.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

"One should never turn resentment into fiction." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

"Fiction is not made out of ideas. If poems are made out of words, novels are made out of people." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

“Many people become writers when there’s nothing else they can do. It’s a kind of last resort for the educated unskilled.” – JACK JOLIS

"Adverbs are second only to exclamation points as killers of good writing." -- JACK JOLIS

"Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test." -- C. S. LEWIS

“To be a really lousy writer takes energy.” – CLIVE JAMES

“Alas, when a writer asks for sympathy, the one who usually needs it is the reader.” – HERMIONE EYRE

"Writers are such terrible narcissists. We not only expect complete strangers to be fascinated by our every though: we want them to pay for the privilege." -- MARK MILLAR (the Scottish creator of, among much else, "Kick-Ass" and "Kingsman")

“Accountants invented writing, to keep track of goods shipped and received, but priests soon took it in hand.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“I am given to understand that for every reader on this planet there are three would-be writers.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"If any grandchild of mine expresses theambition to be a novelist, I will advise them first to become a fully qualified plumber." -- LAURIE GRAHAM (a much-published novelist who's nevertheless fallen on hard times. With very few exception, one cannot make a living writing fiction.)

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." ~DICK GUINDON                        (The American cartoonist)

“If I write, it is because I have to; because there is nothing else I can do. I write out of necessity. I do not regard literature as a genteel pastime.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

“We are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time.” – PHILIP ROTH

"Words are diamonds, the writer is the diamond cutter." -- WILBUR SMITH

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to child bearing.” – NORMAN MAILER (where that leaves the legions of lady authors I’m not sure....)

“My first great disappointment was in the reception of my first (novel). I remember how I looked forward to its publication, and pictured the sensation I thought it would make. It fell flat. Nobody seemed to notice it or care for it.” – STEPHEN CRANE

“Given that you can put anything you like in a novel, why do we go on putting in the same thing? Why is the vol-au-vent always chicken?” – D. H. LAWRENCE

“The most important piece of equipment for a writer is a large piece of sealing wax with which to affix his posterior to a chair.” – ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882)

"I've yet to meet a writer who enjoys the process. It is... agony." -- JEFFREY ARCHER (in 1887)

Wyoming

“Wyoming. The entire state is a small town with long streets.” – TIMOTHY EGAN (a NY TIMES reporter, and he’s wrong. I’ve been there, and what it is is a few small towns with nothing in between…)

“No, multiculturalism might sound good, but I'll take Wyoming any day. It is a mostly white state with low crime and two Republican senators. It is a bit far away, so I've done the next best thing. I've bought a farm outside Gstaad, and am rebuilding the chalet that stands alone on top of the hills.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“ ‘I’ve never met anyone from Wyoming.’

‘Not many people have. Not many there and not many leave it’.” – ALAN JUDD (in his 1989 comic caper novel “Tango”)