Quotes by British Authors - Page 129

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists
G.K. Chesterton
If money is all that a man makes, then he will be poor — poor in happiness, poor in all that makes life worth living.
Herbert N. Casson
The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.
C.L.R. James
The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live!
Benjamin Disraeli
No, its the poor I tell you, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor. Don't think to come over me with th' old tale, that the rich knows nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds..." Chap. 1, p. 12
Elizabeth Gaskell
If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you’d be miserable poor.
Glen Duncan
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation
Samuel Johnson
They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn't steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.
Terry Pratchett
When the middle classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats—their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, more animalistic. No classical music for us—no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in means, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor—that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now—for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. You must never, never forget when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad post code. It's a miracle when someone from a bad post code gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.
Caitlin Moran
Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn't care for such things, but when they argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face...
Robert Galbraith
The astounding natural beauty of the USA is offset by its extremely poor social security system that is clearly apparent when driving around the country.
Steven Magee
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.
George Orwell
Poor men ... always make love better than those who are rich, because, having less to care about, and not being puffed up with their own consequence, they are not so selfish and think much more of the lady than of themselves.
Frederick Marryat
One advantage of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries
A.A. Milne
I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
David Attenborough
... the irregularities of the motion of Uranus...in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it.[John Couch Adams on how he began to discover Neptune.]
John Couch Adams
The discovery of an interaction among the four hemes made it obvious that they must be touching, but in science what is obvious is not necessarily true. When the structure of hemoglobin was finally solved, the hemes were found to lie in isolated pockets on the surface of the subunits. Without contact between them how could one of them sense whether the others had combined with oxygen? And how could as heterogeneous a collection of chemical agents as protons, chloride ions, carbon dioxide, and diphosphoglycerate influence the oxygen equilibrium curve in a similar way? It did not seem plausible that any of them could bind directly to the hemes or that all of them could bind at any other common site, although there again it turned out we were wrong. To add to the mystery, none of these agents affected the oxygen equilibrium of myoglobin or of isolated subunits of hemoglobin. We now know that all the cooperative effects disappear if the hemoglobin molecule is merely split in half, but this vital clue was missed. Like Agatha Christie, Nature kept it to the last to make the story more exciting. There are two ways out of an impasse in science: to experiment or to think. By temperament, perhaps, I experimented, whereas Jacques Monod thought.
Max F. Perutz
The trouble with science geeks, as you call them, is that hey put discovery before anything else. It was a science geek who discovered the atom bomb. He didn't intend to cause mass murder, but he did nonetheless.
Gemma Malley
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges -- Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!
Rudyard Kipling
A few years after working on Mauna Kea, I discovered that I had radiation sickness
Steven Magee
The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
Beryl Markham
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
Isaac Newton
Most of them had not understood Blackberry's discovery of the raft and at once forgot it.
Richard Adams
You do realize that if anything happens to you, my son will be devastated?”Ella’s throat closed. She really didn’t want to think about James, not when he was in so much danger. She nodded. “I know.”“Then make sure nothing happens to you. This Kingdom needs a Queen who can show these men we’re not all delicate little flowers.
Michelle Smart
Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing––poor women waiting to see the Queen go past––poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War––tut tut––actually had tears in his eyes.
Virginia Woolf
Because: Love Never Dies, What is Within is More Important than What is Without, The Best is Not Always the Most Obvious and Once You've Loved Truly, Thor, then You Know the Way
Cressida Cowell
There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?
Michael Morpurgo
If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
G.K. Chesterton
There is a fine line deep within the mind that makes self-belief and confidence, the defining elements of success and failure in any circumstance. How we learn to activate them without running the risk of lying to ourselves is the key that unlocks the superhuman lying dormant within us.
David Amerland
Identity and self-belief: a courage that swells from within, borne of waters drunk deeply.
Fennel Hudson
He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!
Ford Madox Ford
Writing is a leap of faith. But how wonderful that the person you're putting faith in is yourself.
Jessie Burton
Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, his head bent to the vibrating string and his lips slightly open, breathing quickly, as over the body of a lover.
Ann Wroe
Oh how warm it makes one to know that there is one person in the world to whom one is everything. A lover is the most precious, the most marvelous possession.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Lovers die inward that their flames conceal.
John Webster
Our whole family thrives under pressure. It's like our family motto or something.Apart from my brother Peter, of course. He had a nervous break down. But the rest of us.
Sophie Kinsella
Your job is obviously very pressured.""I thrive under pressure," I explain. Which is true. I've known that about myself ever since...Well. Ever since my mother told me when I was about 8.
Sophie Kinsella
It's always nice being fancied. It's always nice being wanted. Even it it's by the wrong person.
Tabitha Suzuma
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
Graham Greene
What could a fool be thinking but further foolishness?
Silvia Hartmann
It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
Matt Haig
Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.
Matt Ridley
I had entered a world that no one with an evolved sense of joie de vivre would touch with a barge pole - it's called "Joining the Property Market" and it trumps war for stress!
Tyne O'Connell
It's called joining the property market - and it shits on war for stress
Tyne O'Connell
I don’t think you’re going to start a riot, but until you prove you have more survival instincts than a seriously stressed out lemming, you’ll stay at the bar.
Kim Dare
Being under pressure is great, if it's all in the right place.
Benny Bellamacina
Stop – Unplug – Escape – Enjoy.’ This is the message of the Priory, and the key to enjoying a peaceful and rewarding life.
Fennel Hudson
It is possible to escape the complexities, challenges and pace of modern life. All we have to do is close our eyes and picture a quiet world where time moves slowly.
Fennel Hudson
The speed of modern life is an oppressive thing, and the corporate world is quick to punish those with an honest heart.
Fennel Hudson
Isolation serves as the ideal antidote to the bone-aching stresses of work.
Fennel Hudson
The ever-increasing weight of responsibilities that enmeshes our lives keeps us locked into the system. We become the pulse that keeps the beast alive, but the cost is our own lives. The natural world around us shrinks, crushed beneath the suffocating might of work.
Fennel Hudson
In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten.
Agatha Christie
... When you're living like that, I think time can seem to stretch out for ever. Matters only change when you start fretting about all the things you need to get done. The more stuff you try to force into it, the less accommodating time becomes.
Gavin Extence
The new disease of our age is being OK doing everything at exactly the same time.
Nigel Cumberland
Evolution has geared the human stress response to last about thirty seconds. It's enough time to facilitate fight or flight. Evolution has not adapted our brains or bodies to handle weeks or months of prolonged stress.
David Amerland
A combination of fine tea, enchanting objects and soothing surroundings exerts a therapeutic effect by washing away the corrosive strains and stress of modern life. [... It] induces a modd that is spiritually refreshing [and produces] a genial state of mind.
John Blofeld
it’s a terrible feeling when you first fall in love. your mind gets completely taken over, you can’t function properly anymore. the world turns into a dream place, nothing seems real. you forget your keys, no one seems to be talking English and even if they are you don’t care as you can’t hear what they’re saying anyway, and it doesn’t matter since your not really there. things you cared about before don’t seem to matter anymore and things you didn’t think you cared about suddenly do. I must become a brilliant cook, I don’t want to waste time seeing my friends when I could be with him, I feel no sympathy for all those people in India killed by an earthquake last night; what is the matter with me? It’s a kind of hell, but you feel like your in heaven.even your body goes out of control, you can’t eat, you don’t sleep properly, your legs turn to jelly as your not sure where the floor is anymore. you have butterflies permanently, not only in your tummy but all over your body - your hands, your shoulders, your chest, your eyes everything’s just a jangling mess of nerve endings tingling with fire. it makes you feel so alive. and yet its like being suffocated, you don’t seem to be able to see or hear anything real anymore, its like people are speaking to you through treacle, and so you stay in your cosy place with him, the place that only you two understand. occasionally your forced to come up for air by your biggest enemy, Real Life, so you do the minimum then head back down under your love blanket for more, knowing it’s uncomfortable but compulsory.and then, once you think you’ve got him, the panic sets in. what if he goes off me? what if I blow it, say the wrong thing? what if he meets someone better than me? Prettier, thinner, funnier, more like him? who doesn’t bite there nails? perhaps he doesn’t feel the same, maybe this is all in my head and this is just a quick fling for him. why did I tell him that stupid story about not owning up that I knew who spilt the ink on the teachers bag and so everyone was punished for it? does he think I'm a liar? what if I'm not very good at that blow job thing and he’s just being patient with me? he says he loves me; yes, well, we can all say words, can’t we? perhaps he’s just being polite.of course you do your best to keep all this to yourself, you don’t want him to think you're a neurotic nutcase, but now when he’s away doing Real Life it’s agony, your mind won’t leave you alone, it tortures you and examines your every moment spent together, pointing out how stupid you’ve been to allow yourself to get this carried away, how insane you are to imagine someone would feel like that about you. dad did his best to reassure me, but nothing he said made a difference - it was like I wanted to see Simon, but didn’t want him to see me.
Annabel Giles
Come back!" the Caterpillar called after her. "I've something important to say."This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again."Keep your temper," said the Caterpillar.
Lewis Carroll
I was at Gatwick and I was a mess: breathlessly excited, horribly nervous and hoping, praying, that this might be it. That the man who was belted up preparing for touchdown would be the man I would spend the next sixty years picking up from airports, missing him, loving him, feeding him and, all things going well, having a fair bit of sex with him.
Lucy Robinson