X-Y-Z
“X” (see Twitter)
XI, JINPING
"If we assume the worst about China’s Xi Jinping, we would still underestimate his maliciousness and ability to inflict harm." -- GORDON G. CHANG
“Of the dozens of world leaders I met, Xi was the most unpleasant. He was dour. While Putin can be funny and mirthful, even while being evil, Xi was not so serious as dead-eyed. I never once saw an unforced smile. He is a quintessential Communist apparatchik: heavy in the abstract, light on the issues under discussion, and always eager to impose his views, even while he pretends to be listening to you ” -- MIKE POMPEO
"And then there was Xi Jinping and the CCP. Few times in history has such a dangerous colossus bestrode the world." -- MIKE POMPEO (Trump's superb SecState and CIA boss -- the only guy to ever hold both those positions)
"China is Xi Jinping" - EDWARD N. LUTTWACK
YACHTS
"There isn't a thing to do on yachts except sit there and roll with the waves. I've had more fun waiting for a subway train." -- ROBERT PLUNKET (Yale University)
YALE UNIVERSITY
"Yalies, like vampires, can recognize one another in the dark." -- NELSON DEMILLE
YALTA
"We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had been praying for: The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far seeing, and there wasn't any doubt in the mind of the President, or any of us that we could live and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine." -- HARRY HOPKINS (FDR's closest advisor, of course -- and a hell of an admission.)
“YELLOW VESTS”
“European politics is still mostly about immigration. If you live in a cosmopolitan city, you will wonder why politicians who reflect this aren’t immediately voted from office, or outright removed for malpractice – because you are unlikely to know a single person who thinks this way. The yellow vest protesters do think this way. They may even be a majority. They have to wear hi-vis vests because they are lo-vis people.” – CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
YEMEN
"It is one of the odd characteristics of the Aden climate that it is practically impossible to remain both immobile and conscious." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in 1930)
YOGA
“Surely, if God had meant us to do yoga, he would have put our heads behind our knees.” – ROD STEWART (Yeah, and if God had meant for us to be liberals, he would have put our heads up our asses.)
“For a year she’d been training to be a instructor. A year? How much preparation could a yoga instructor possibly need? It was stretching, with a little bit of chanting, for God’s sake. He’d thought she was joking when she told him the classes cost $1,500 a month. He’d laughed out loud and she’d stamped off. He hadn’t gotten laid that night.” – ALEX BERENSON (in his 2008 novel “The Ghost War”)
YORKSHIRE
"I admire Yorkshire people for their bluntness. If you want to know your shortcomings you won't find more helpful people anywhere." -- BILL BRYSON
YOSEMITE
“The thing is, Yosemite does not belong to the bears, or the ground squirrels or the rattlers, or even the backpackers. It belongs to the rangers.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS
YOUTH
“The young may look prettier than we do, but they are also tremendously boring and talk nothing but rubbish.” – AUBERON WAUGH
“Teenagers spend a ridiculous amount of time looking in the mirror as their facial structure convulses, rises and sinks like a pot of boiling porridge. When all this is covered with strategically placed veneer of pimples, you have the reason why most children never smile between the ages of thirteen and nineteen.” – MICHAEL CAINE
“The grown-up world was no different from school; it was a world where bullies came out best, where excuses satisfied no one, least of all oneself, where cowardice corroded one's soul and left one sick.” – BRIAN MOORE (The Northern Irish novelist who lived in Canada.)
“One can revere youth or wisdom, but not both.” – DENNIS PRAGER
“The world must remain an oyster for youth to open. If not, youth will cease to be young, and that will be the end of everything.” – JOHN BUCHAN
“Getting my daughter and her friends to a movie makes me dream of a world in which teenage girls' sense of time was as keen as their sense of outrage.” – JAMES LILEKS
“The problem with youth isn’t that they’re passionate about Things and Stuff; that’s the nature of being young and ignorant of the interminable line of history stretching back to the first day some hominid stood up and another one clouted him with a rock for being privileged. The problem is the hoary old liberal notion, born in the ‘60s, that passion confers authority.” – JAMES LILEKS
“The younger generations have been cosseted by welfare, are awarded university degrees regardless of knowing next to nothing, spend their days preening on Facebook or texting friends on their iPhones while turning up their noses at the jobs on offer and producing an unstoppable flow of fatherless children – all the time moaning that society owes them a living.” -- MELANIE PHILLIPS (star columnist for the UK Daily Mail, in July 2013)
“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
"They are daft, teenage boys; filthy-minded, but also sensationally innocent." -- DEBORAH ROSS (fim critic of THE SPECCTATOR)
"Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and more grandiosity untouched by experience. — or, of course, the age of total insouciance." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE
"It is stunning how little money it takes to ruin a young man." -- ROBIN MAUGHAM (author of "The Servant")
"America’s most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility. The social ideal was to look 23 and dress 13.” -- TOM WOLFE (in his 2000 book "Hooking Up")
"The old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer if they disregard the record of the past. Those who glorify the young today do them a great disservice, when this sends inexperienced young people out into the world cocksure about things on which they have barely scratched the surface. Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: 'What were you doing for the last twelve years before you got here?'." -- THOMAS SOWELL
“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” -- THOMAS SOWELL
"His early dreams of good outstripp'd the truth, / and troubled manhood follow'd baffled youth." -- LORD BYRON
"You were young – but that was scarcely to your credit...." -- PHILIP LARKIN
"I've been twenty-one -- you've never been seventy-eight." – LOU HOLTZ (iconic American football coach)
"Is it really just me getting old or is it actually the case that all people under the age of thirty are basically now about ten years old?" -- BILL BRYSON
“It requires huge balls, massive intellectual security and bravura precocity for a teenage to articulate genuinely right-wing positions, because the current of the culture is so against them.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE
“What I object to is that the mere state of youth is being used as a substitute for argument. And I really don’t want to live in a world where I have to go around hating kids just because they’ve been trained up, like the Red Guard or the Young Pioneers, to strut round making themselves objectionable with half-baked, second-hand political opinions.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE
"It's almost impossible to appall a boy of nineteen." -- MARK HELPRIN
"One must not treat the young as a separate category. One is young, and then one ceases to be so." – CHARLES DE GAULLE
“Most young people couldn’t care less about the past: for them the present moment and its so-called pleasures are all-important. No, all-important is not quite the word, for it implied an awareness, albeit subliminal, of something other than the present moment. In fact, young people these days don’t even know there had been a past: the world began with them, and each moment was unconnected with any other.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (in his 2017 short story “Bildungsroman”)
"We've begun to behave as if young people are special: more virtuous and wiser than adults. It's wrong and it's creepy and we've got to stop it -- not for our sake so much as for theirs." -- MARY WAKEFIELD
«If you can’t envy the sex lives of the young, what is the point of them?» – COSMO LANDESMAN
«Generation Z complain that they feel ‘frustrated’ and ‘ignored’ because no one pays attention to their generation, and they’re right – at least till Greta Thunberg and OK boomer turned up. There is a good reason for this. A curious cultural change has taken place : for the first time since the 1960s, older people no longer envy the young.» – COSMO LANDESMAN (in THE SPECCIE in Nov. 2019)
"A permanent state of war exists between me and anyone under the age of 16. Kids are allergic to me. Every time they're in proximity to me they break out in bruises." -- TONY HANCOCK (the GREAT English comic)
"They say you know nothing at 18, but there are things you know at 18 that you will never know again." -- ANDREW O'HAGAN (Très cryptic. The author of the novel "Mayflies")
"Everyone talks about leaving a better planet for our kids..... let's try to leave better kids for our planet." -- AVA ARMSTRONG
“In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” -- OSCAR WILDE
“Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough." – PHILIP STANHOPE, LORD CHESTERFIELD (1694-1773)
“It is better to waste one's youth than do nothing with it at all" – GEORGES COURTELINE (French playwright, 1858-1929)
“When we are growing up, are we ever in possession of the full facts?” – DEBORAH ROSS (Hell – are adults? Anyway, Deborah, the UK SPECTATOR’s movie critic, said this in Den. 2021)
"You don't ever want to be a pretty child, sir." -- MICHAEL ARDITTI (that's actually a character -- a prostitute, as it happens -- speaking, in his novel "The Young Pretender")
“What else do we know about this 18 to 24 population? … They are stupid!” -- KAMALA HARRIS (On 29 June 2024, and it's the only true -- or even coherent -- thing I've ever heard come out of her mouth.)
YUGOSLAVIA (and EX-) (see also: BALKANS, THE)
“We tried to find the mayor. His secretary said he was at home. His wife said he was at the office. In Italy or France this would mean His Honor was having an affair. In Chabarovice it probably meant he’d run off to be a busboy in Stuttgart.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (“Chabarovice” is in what is today Serbia. At the time PeeJay was there it was, I think, “Serbia-Montenegro”. Unless it was Bosnia.)
“I’d like to be re-incarnated to somewhere warmer; Italy or Spain, or somewhere. As long as I don’t come back bald or in Bosnia, I don’t mind.” – KENNY EVERETT
“Despite constant predictions to this effect, the Bashi-Bazouks of Islam show a curious reluctance to tangle with the Serbs, perhaps the nastiest, most glass-eating and militaristic nation on earth apart from the Vietnamese.” – BORIS JOHNSON (a” Bashi-Bazouk” was technically an “irregular soldier of the Ottoman Army”, and more popularly, ahem, for example in Tintin comic books, meant an “undisciplined bandit”.)
“Montenegro is just a big traffic jam on a strip of road along the Adriatic coast. Montenegro has been Roman, Venetian, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Italian and Serbian, but never for long has it been just Montenegro. Nor will it be now.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (in Aug. 2013)
“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)
"There are three problems with Serbia: Communism, communism, and communism." -- VUK DRASKOVIC (Vuk Drašković is a writer, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement and was once Serbian Deputy Prime Minister)
YUGOSLAVIA (THE WAR IN EX-)
“The war in Bosnia was run exclusively on alcohol. Skirmishes and strategies were ordered according to supplies of slivovitz and vodka.” – STEPHEN FRY (in 1994)
ZEAL
“Not all competition is good. When determination rather than skill becomes the deciding criterion for success, you may end up favouring the dumb and energetic – arguably the worst people of all.” – RORY SUTHERLAND
"Zealots confuse their own fears and lusts with the interests of the cause they serve. Their judgment is clouded." -- WILL WILES
“ZEITGEIST, THE”
“The contemporary mood touches everything and everyone, like the light of the declining sun spreading the same glow over faces, houses, trees, (motor)-cars, slag-heaps and pylons.” – MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE (in 1940)
“There really isn’t such a thing as the ‘Zeitgeist’. In the expression ‘where it’s at’, the word ‘it’ doesn’t stand for anything.” – TOBY YOUNG (The Brit author of such gems as “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” and “The Sound Of No Hands Clapping”, and definitely not one of the KINKS’ notorious “Dedicated Followers of Fashion”….)
ZEN
“Effortlessness is hard.” – SARAH SANDS (A Brit lady journalist, and grande dame at the Beeb. And I don’t know that this precept is technically “Zen”, but it sounds zen-ish to me....)
ZERO
"Never trust any movement that employs the word 'zero', an obliging advertisement of fanaticism." -- LIONEL SHRIVER
“ZERO -BUDGET”
"It's called 'Zero-budget'. And it's when the boss fires everyone, writes a Mission Statement on a blackboard, calls in a few advisers & asks: 'OK--what's the absolute minimum we need to accomplish that (taps blackboard)? Who do we start with? Were there ANY good ones in the...'." -- JACK JOLIS
“ZERO-SUM”
“No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down” – JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so others can have more.” – MICHELLE OBAMA (in 2011 — not surprisingly, an utter economic imbecile)
“ZERO-TOLERANCE”
“It's evident to anyone paying attention that zero tolerance equals 100 percent stupidity. But you have to understand that zero-tolerance rules aren't about protecting kids. They exist to protect the adults who are too cowardly to make judgments.” – MICHAEL GRAHAM
ZIMBABWE
“If you think some people wouldn't welcome a return of imperialism, you might take a trip to Zimbabwe and see what the starving folks there have to say.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE
«Robert Mugabe is said to have produced the most rapid and severe contraction of any economy in modern history.” – ANTHONY DANIELS
ZOMBIES
«What do the living dead have against the living living? Why do they always want to bite their faces off? Why can't they just eat pizza and chips?» -- DEBORAH ROSS (the movie reviewer for the UK SPECTATOR)