Quotes by British Authors - Page 14

What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.
Gwynne Dyer
DAD (Decide-Announce-Defend) remains the order of the day, with only a few inspiring models of EDD (Engage-Deliberate-Decide) available to us to demonstrate how very different things could be.
Johnathon Porritt
Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.
Mary Renault
If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Aldous Huxley
-I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy
William Golding
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.
John Stuart Mill
This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.
Tariq Ali
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston S. Churchill
It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it.
Alexander McCall Smith
Two other highly vocal FMSF Advisory Board members are Dr Elizabeth Loftus and Professor Richard Ofshe. Loftus is a respected academic psychologist whose much quoted laboratory experiment of successfully implanting a fictitious childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall is frequently used to defend the false memory syndrome argument. In the experiment, older family members persuaded younger ones of the (supposedly) never real event. However, Loftus herself says that being lost, which almost everyone has experienced, is in no way similar to being abused. Jennifer Freyd comments on the shopping mall experiment in Betrayal Trauma (1996): “If this demonstration proves to hold up under replication it suggests both that therapists can induce false memories and, even more directly, that older family members play a powerful role in defining reality for dependent younger family members." (p. 104). Elizabeth Loftus herself was sexually abused as a child by a male babysitter and admits to blacking the perpetrator out of her memory, although she never forgot the incident. In her autobiography, Witness for the Defence, she talks of experiencing flashbacks of this abusive incident on occasion in court in 1985 (Loftus &Ketcham, 1991, p.149)In her teens, having been told by an uncle that she had found her mother's drowned body, she then started to visualize the scene. Her brother later told her that she had not found the body. Dr Loftus's successful academic career has run parallel to her even more high profile career as an expert witness in court, for the defence of those accused of rape, murder, and child abuse. She is described in her own book as the expert who puts memory on trial, sometimes with frightening implications.She used her theories on the unreliability of memory to cast doubt, in 1975, on the testimony of the only eyewitness left alive who could identify Ted Bundy, the all American boy who was one of America's worst serial rapists and killers (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991, pp. 61-91). Not withstanding Dr Loftus's arguments, the judge kept Bundy in prison. Bundy was eventually tried, convicted and executed.
Valerie Sinason
I have interacted with the police complaints and internal affairs division twice and both times I came away with the opinion that I was dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.
Steven Magee
We need rules when we are young but once they are instilled we can have sensible leeway
Frank Healy
I am the rightful khan of the nation. I am the gur-khan. My word is iron and my word is law.
Conn Iggulden
Corrupt utility companies require a corrupt legal system to protect them from their own sickened workers and the masses.
Steven Magee
When it is a law abiding common person versus the police internal affairs regarding a corrupt or incompetent police officer, the statistics show that it is the common person that most frequently loses.
Steven Magee
Arguably insane utility workers that blatantly harass law abiding customers is likely to become more frequent as the long term effects of biologically toxic radio frequency (RF) radiation exposures from their transmitting smart meters continues to emerge.
Steven Magee
Labor law violations are alive and well in the USA.
Steven Magee
The police frequently do not enforce the rule of law.
Steven Magee
I am far more fearful of the police than I am of North Korea.
Steven Magee
A state which savagely represses or persecutes sections of its people cannot in my view be regarded as observing the rule of law, even if the transport of the persecuted minority to the concentration camp or the compulsory exposure of female children on the mountainside is the subject of detailed laws duly enacted and scrupulously observed.
Tom Bingham
Ryan was a nose away from the tallest cake on display, a six-foot-high chocolate masterpiece Jesse and I had created for this year's fairs. Detailed water nymph's interspersed with insects and toadstools, all sculpted by hand in rich dark chocolate.
Anouska Knight
We are all Clapping Monkeys, but while some of us smile, others look around to see if anyone has noticed.
Fennel Hudson
The problem with car insurance is that you never know how bad your policy is until you are involved in a car crash. At that point enlightenment begins.
Steven Magee
Might there come a timeWhen we stand over a graveAnd mourn ourselves?Mourn the past, a previous life?Shall we weep for the passing of time?Shall we grieve for unfulfilled dreams?In my naivety; in my beliefIn immortal youth, I sleep walk through life.Someone... wake me up.Please.Wake me up.
Samantha Young
On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.
Neil Gaiman
Hypotheses like professors, when they are seen not to work any longer in the laboratory, should disappear.
Henry Edward Armstrong
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
C.S. Lewis
Blood was the mortar that cemented the kingdom
Jocelyn Murray
A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.
Salman Rushdie
The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.
Christopher Fowler
I don't want to sacrifice myself for something. I don't want do DIE for something. I don't even want to walk in the rain up a hill in a skirt that's sticking to my thighs for something. I want to live for something instead- as men do. I want to have fun. The most fun ever. I want to start partying like it's 1999, nine years early. I want a rapturous quest, I want to sacrifice myself to glee, I want to make the world better in some way.
Caitlin Moran
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Charles Dickens
Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which civilization claimed to be based. The bargain, Rivers though, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies were founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.
Pat Barker
Emeth came walking forward into the open strip of grass between the bonfire and the Stable. His eyes were shining, his face was solemn, his hand was on his sword-hilt, and he carried his head high. Jill felt like crying when she looked at his face. And Jewel whispered in the King's ear, "By the Lion's Mane, I almost love this young warrior, Calormene though he be. He is worthy of a better god than Tash.
C.S. Lewis
I'm goin past factories. Boxes of metal with people inside. Souls bein ripped apart.
Ian Ayris
A hallowed frequency withinThat, even in your darkest hour,You can always turn to.
Scott Hastie
The important concept of the solar wind is that Space is not empty. It is an energy and particle filled environment that interacts with whatever is in it! Astronomers call this 'Dark Energy'.
Steven Magee
Kublai went on as if he had not spoken.“Before you all, in the lands of my enemies, I declare myself great khan of the nation, of the khanates under my brothers, Hulegu and Arik-Boke, of the Chagatai khanate and all others. I declare myself great khan of the Chin lands and the Sung. I have spoken and my word is iron!
Conn Iggulden
Most of us, at some time or other, get sucked into the lifeless vacuum of work; the cogs of the corporate machine that we keep turning until one day, when we depart this Earth, we may earn the word ‘lubricant’ on our headstone.
Fennel Hudson
Obviously, a lot of people involved with Volkswagen's emissions were aware of the diesel car software cheat. One has to wonder how many of them tried to stop it and perhaps were demoted or lost their jobs over trying to prevent the secret Volkswagen car emissions fraud?
Steven Magee
A healthy person that uses medical oxygen to perform their job on a daily basis should expect to eventually become a sick person.
Steven Magee
Working for OSHA is a horrible job to have. You have to ignore the whistle blowers and send them illegal letters saying that you cannot find any problems. I have a lot of those fraudulent letters, as I have been through OSHA twice. Once as the utility company employee and once as the utility company subcontractor employee. It is a disgusting & blatently corrupt system.
Steven Magee
He shall never know how I love him
Emily Brontë
The strange thing about falling in love is, we know what it looks and feels like. But we can’t really explain why it occurs and where all the madness it brings with it comes from.“Or why it just seems to happen like magic between two particular people but not others.”“The appearance of love seems totally irrational, inexplicable and without reason. Yet, when it happens it feels like the only thing that makes any sense. True love, I guess, is when it keeps on making sense after you actually get to know the other person.
Charlie Maclean
I laughed at him as he said this. “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me—for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.
Charlotte Brontë
Perception does not define who we are, but it does define where we are limited, and where we are not yet free.
Georgi Y. Johnson
The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.
John Shearman
When you love someone deeply,Say it with a flower,And seal it with a kiss.
Anthony T.Hincks
Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit."] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record of the logical relations between the missing items. -- From The Devil's DP Dictionary
Stan Kelly Bootle
Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, and being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch.
J.B.S. Haldane
If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.
Jez Humble
To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.
Alain de Botton
The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.
Evelyn Waugh
In the imposition of a unitary and homogeneous popular culture, disseminated now throughout the world by the spread of Western technology and communications, is to be found one of the central features of modernity's distinctive way of achieving the priority of the one over the many. Homogeneity derives from the creation of an undifferentiated social or other reality...It is not therefore the priority of the many that distinguishes modernity from other cultures, but the shape the priority of the one takes in practice. Thus both the ancient and modern eras, in so far as they can be distinguished in the way often attempted, share in a tendency to elevate the one over the many: to enslave the many to the heteronomous rule of the one. The pathos of the modern condition is that, after rejecting what it rightly sees to be the oppressive forms of unity deriving from the past, it has itself succumbed to various false universals that replicate or even exacerbate the bondage from which it had hoped to free itself.
Colin E. Gunton
Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.
Nick Harkaway
While doubt cannot be expelled, it can be subdued.
Richard Baxter
In the era of angry and aggressive policing, it is an honorable service to your fellow citizens to video record police officers interactions with the common people.
Steven Magee
I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.
Wilkie Collins
Don't cling to your self-concept purely because your will demands it. Demand that your environment aligns as much as possible and change what you must about yourself when the outer world can’t be changed. Mental health is about mental fluidity, mental illness stems in rigidity.
Oli Anderson
The Holy Ghost is no temporary gift, He abides with the saints. We have but to seek Him aright, and He will be found of us. He is jealous, but He is pitiful; if He leaves in anger, He returns in mercy. Condescending and tender, He does not weary of us, but awaits to be gracious still.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon