Politics
Woody Allen “People get the government they deserve. Unfortunately, I get the government they deserve too.”
J. K. Rowling “I’ve never voted Tory before ... and they keep on reminding me why.”
Machiavelli “A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.”
George Bernard Shaw “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most dread it.”
Edmund Burke “The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients.”
Edmund Burke “All it takes for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”
Benjamin Franklin “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Herb Stein: "Things that are unsustainable always come to an end."
History
George Santayana – Philosopher and Poet “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
William Faulkner: “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”
Arthur Schopenhauer: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self evident.”
Lifestyle
Michael Howard “Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking altogether.”
Bertrand Russell “The triumph of stupidity” 1933: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are always cocksure and the intelligent are always filled with doubt.”
Milton Friedman “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
Oscar Wilde “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
Sir John Betjemen “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now,”
Talmud “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
Thomas Watson: founder of IBM “If you want to be more successful, increase your failure rate.”
Culture
Clive James on J. K. Rowling’s success “...the average book doesn’t sell even a thousand copies in a year. The average book is lucky to sell a hundred in its lifetime. The average book doesn’t even get published.”
Elvis Costello “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do”
Arnold Toynbee: Civilisations proceed, from bondage to spiritual faith
Spiritual faith to courage
Courage to liberty
Liberty to abundance
Abundance to selfishness
Selfishness to apathy
Apathy to dependency
Dependency to bondage
Intoxication
Pierre Kopp “Political economy of illegal drugs” p1 “There is never a drugs debate that does not very quickly begin to discuss the pros and cons of prohibition.”
Mark Twain “Giving up smoking is easy; I’ve done it lots of times.”
John Wayne “Republic...it means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose.”
Churchill “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me”
International Relations
Trotsky “You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.”
Frank Zappa: “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”
Dag Hammarskjold “The United Nations was not created to take humanity to heaven, but to save if from hell.”
Hedley Bull “to make war less frightful may be to make it more probable.”
