Quotes by British Authors - Page 16

Saying of the Prophet.Ink and Blood:The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr.
Idries Shah
Surrender is no guarantee that an armed police officer will not shoot you.
Steven Magee
If I'm me.And you're you.Then who's this in the mirror?
Anthony T.Hincks
You think that I'm different.You should look in the mirror sometime.
Anthony T.Hincks
There will always be someone better looking; better off; smarter; richer; thinner; taller; shorter; have more friends than you; a better car and a better house.You might not have what they have, but when you look in the mirror, that's you!And that's something that they don't have and will never have!
Anthony T.Hincks
In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.
Thomas Gold
Cowards never dare to love.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Harry then did something that was both very brave and very stupid
J.K. Rowling
And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,’ said Coraline to the cat. ‘It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’"‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave
Neil Gaiman
Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.
R.C. Robertson-Glasgow
Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone
Wilkie Collins
What am I doing here?” she demanded, bewildered.“You’re having dinner,” her little brother said.“Stop it! I’m not hungry. Stop it!”John held the spoon in front of her. His cherubic face was dark with anger. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.”“What are you talking about?” Mary demanded.“You said you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t leave me alone,” John said. “But you tried, didn’t you?”“I don’t know what you’re babbling about.” She noticed Astrid then, leaning against a filing cabinet. Astrid looked like she’d been dragged through the middle of a dog fight. Little Pete was sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth. He was chanting, “Good-bye, Nestor. Good-bye, Nestor.”“Mary, you have an eating disorder,” Astrid said. “The secret is out. So cut the crap.”“Eat,” John ordered, and shoved a spoonful of food in her mouth. None too gently.“Swallow,” John ordered.“Let me—”“Shut up, Mary.
Michael Grant
Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.
Agatha Christie
I was always on my oddy knocky.
Anthony Burgess
If you do bad stuff and don't repent, you go to hell," Orc said, like he was begging for a refutation."Yeah, well, you know what? If Howard's in hell, I guess we can all have a big get-together soon enough. a
Michael Grant
You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get
Angus Wilson
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled.
Christopher Hitchens
Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is because baptism is a real insertion of human beings into the ascended manhood of Christ that the Church is Christ's own body, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones.
E.L. Mascall
Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.
Thomas Henry Huxley
There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
If you don’t know the difference between theology and religiousstudies, then you’re a theologian.
Brian Bocking
Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.
Charles Williams
No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.
John Wesley
An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost.
Colin E. Gunton
To so many people, the Lord is in danger of being no more than a patron saint of our systematic theology instead of the Christ Who is our life.
W. Ian Thomas
He recounted how, after the last of Charlemagne's forty-seven victorious campaigns, when he was returning from Saxony, a comet flashed across the sky and the Emperor's horse shied and threw him to the ground. The great Frankish Emperor had fallen so violently that his sword belt had been torn off him and the Spear, which he was clasping in his left hand, had been hurled some twenty feet away from him. At the same time there were earth tremors in the Royal Palace at Aachen, and the word "Princeps" had mysteriously faded from the red ochre inscription high up on a central beam in the Cathedral, which had formerly read 'Karolus Princeps.' Charlemagne himself had taken little notice of these portents, which his courtiers had taken to be a prophecy of his imminent death. In Einhard's own words: 'He refused to admit that any of these events could have any connection ith his own personal affairs.' Yet the 70-year-old Emperor drew up his last will and testament just in case these portents were correct. And they were!
Trevor Ravenscroft
Altogether forty-five Emperors had claimed the Spear of Destiny as their possession between the coronation in Rome of Charlemagne and the fall of the old German Empire exactly a thousand years later. And what a pagentry it was! THe Spear had passed like the very finger of destiny through the millenium forever creating new patterns of fate which had again and again changed the entire history of Europe. ... According to the legend associated with the Spear of Longinus, the claimant to this talisman of power has a choice between the service of two opposing Spirits in the fulfilment of his world historic aims -- a Good and an Evil Spirit.
Trevor Ravenscroft
In other words, Hitler's soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him. During the following six months during a series of irregular meetings and discussions with Hitler, Walter Stein was to witness a maturing soul development in this enigmatic character through which he became more and more a conscious and responsive tool of the world-shattering purposes of the demonic Spirit which overshadowed him. 'I move like a sleep-walker where Providence dictates,' said Adolf Hitler at a press interview.
Trevor Ravenscroft
Like some translucen latterday Cassandra, the prophetess of doom, (Heila the Comptesse von Westarp, the former secretary of the Thule Gesellschaff) rose up from the bosom of the limp and slumbering medium (Dr. Nemirovitch-Dantchanko) to give a warning that the man who was even now preparing to assume the leadership of Thule would prove himself to be a false prophet. Assuming total power over the nation, he would be responsible one day for reducing the whole of Germany to rubble and its people to a defeat and moreal degradation hitherto unknown to history.
Trevor Ravenscroft
I smiled: I thought to myself Mr. Rochester is peculiar — he seems to forget that he pays me £30 per annum for receiving his orders."The smile is very well," said he, catching instantly the passing expression; "but speak too.""I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves to inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and hurt by their orders.
Charlotte Brontë
I remember laughing at that moment, and I remember my son frowning at me in puzzlement. What I remember best of all, though, was the sudden certainty that the gods were with me, that they would fight for me, that my sword would be their sword. ‘We’re going to win,’ I told my son. I felt as if Odin or Thor had touched me. I had never felt more alive and never felt more certain. I knew there would be no more mistakes and that this was no dream.I had come to Bebbanburg and Bebbanburg would be mine.
Bernard Cornwell
I'm starting to understand that attempting to be perfect has been the goal of my life. Our lives. Attempting to be this fault-free, smiling person in this loving, happy family that fits so perfectly in this pretty, inoffensive little town. What was so bad about that goal after all? Only that I couldn't do it. That I let everybody down. I've been so down about it, so depressed thinking about all the balls I was trying to juggle that I've dropped, and now the cogs are turning toward total apathy toward it all, everything and all I can think about is that I am a shell of a human being. I'm a pushover. I'm to blame.
Abigail Tarttelin
A little politeness might smooth the way ahead. Knowing it was his turn to be dispatched, the best he could hope for was as swift a death as the one Massetti had so thanklessly received.
Victoria Lamb
I guess you could say I'm allergic to sunlight. If I'm exposed to it, it could kill me.
Lee Thompson
When she was living one of her fantasies she felt like a bird, the freedom of its wings letting her soar without earthly boundaries, enabling her to look on to her vividly imagined scenes from a great height.
Wendy Anne Gibbins-Lekkou
We all know that 97% of the money in the world doesn't exist and that's thanks to Fractional Reserve Banking, or should I say fictional reserve banking." He grinned at his own joke, his smile partly hidden by his hair, "Money is no longer attached to the Gold Standard, therefore, it isn't based on anything. So when it says, 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand ten pounds,' I have to ask, ten pounds of what?" Silence. "The world is owned by the rich shareholder, the rich superstar, the rich industrialist, the rich aristocracy." He was now marching around the stage, "It doesn't matter who or what they are, if they're rich then they own a part of the world, but they only own it because they've got lots of money. Which means they own part of the 97% of the world’s fictional money, the pretend money that only exists on a computer." He stopped abruptly and stared out at the audience, "Which means that if they cashed in their fictional nonexistent money they'd get something like this ten pound note offering to pay the bearer the sum of ten pounds of nothing." He held the note aloft, "Which means the rich have managed to buy the entire world with paper nothing that has a value of nothing and we've let them do it.
Arun D. Ellis
All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatised injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex.
John Stuart Mill
The sad truth about bigotry is that most bigots either don't realize that they are bigots, or they convince themselves that their bigotry is perfectly justified.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Hate obscures all distinctions.
C.S. Lewis
Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.
Robert Winder
All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.
Robert Winder
After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?
David Mitchell
If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
Salman Rushdie
Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' q
David Mitchell
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
Christopher Hitchens
... drink levels all mankind. It is the ultimate democrat
Terry Pratchett
Americans talked about voters the same way Russians talked about Stalin. They had to be obeyed.
Ken Follett
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