Quotes by British Authors - Page 4

do you reckon to win the everlasting laurels without a conflict?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Conceit is to be dreaded, but so is cowardice
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Sneaky and underhanded, the Federal Reserve has been sucking the life blood out of the United States since 1913. Like a black widow spider, it weaves a web of corruption and deceit. Unknown to its prey, the FED's bite is poisonous, deep, long-lasting and brings financial upheaval and misery to Americans.
Jim McCarthy
The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.
Johann Hari
If God created everything, and if man is created in God's image, and if man can dream a fate greater than the one set out for him by God, could God dream a fate greater than his own?
Michael Anthony
Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?
Christopher Hitchens
In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait had, by virtue of a massive deployment of military force, become a part of Iraq. We were not to know that this act—and the name Saddam Hussein—would dominate international politics for the next decade and more, but it was still possible to witness something extraordinary: the sight of Mrs. Thatcher publicly inserting quantities of lead into George Bush’s pencil. The spattering quill of a Ralph Steadman would be necessary to do justice to such a macabre yet impressive scene.
Christopher Hitchens
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
Christopher Hitchens
British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.
Christopher Hitchens
There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.
Christopher Hitchens
In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.
Christopher Hitchens
Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.
Christopher Hitchens
Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything.
Christopher Hitchens
A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?
Christopher Hitchens
Lefever describes his financing plan with modesty:"'Our detailed budget is realistic, but does not take into account the inflation that may occur before September 1983. The one place it could cut or reduce is item 7, the simultaneous interpreter services, if these services could be provided gratis by the U.S. government.'""In other words, the only way to make a saving on a U.S.-subsidized project is to take money out of another U.S.-subsidized column.
Christopher Hitchens
[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation—if one may be blunt—is for latecomers.
Christopher Hitchens
I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.
Christopher Hitchens
Far too many people—many of them academics, many politicians—continue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two coun
Peter Hitchens
I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like a 'gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.' Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
Winston S. Churchill
With faith one attains and realises peace and harmony. With doubt one destroys and gains freedom to move ontowards.
Fazal Inayat-Khan
What rights are those that dare not resist for them?
Alfred Tennyson
I never think of myself as an attacker, only as a defender - usually of rights - mine and others.
Jay Woodman
Humans have too many rights and not enough responsibilities.-Aras
Karen Traviss
The same touchy sense of personal honor that is at the root of Achilles' wrath still governs relations between man and man in modern Greece; Greek society still fosters in the individual a fierce sense of his privileges, no matter how small, of his rights, no matter how confined, of his personal worth, no matter how low. And to defend it, he will stop, like Achilles, at nothing.
Bernard Knox
You told me once that freedom was my right.” I held his gaze. “Maybe you should do something with it.
Samantha Shannon
Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you’re getting old.
Jeanette Winterson
A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.
Alan Ryan
It's people with obsessions who do the real harm in the world.
Dick Francis
If someone even mentions his name it is like a little present to me - and I long to mention it myself. I start subjects leading up to it, and then I feel myself going red. I keep swearing to myself not to speak to him again - and then an opportunity occurs and I jump at it!
Dodie Smith
With the help of fanzines and close attention to the text of the game you can actually learn to speak Tsolyanu while wondering why the school still makes you learn French–it's not like you're going to use it.
Mark Barrowcliffe
The obsession with the afterlife is born of a panic at not having memories of a before-life.
Dean Cavanagh
I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.
Peter Ackroyd
Don't be so obsessed with stardom that you miss out on success
Rasheed Ogunlaru
See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.
Ian McEwan
It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines.
Matthew De Abaitua
... I fell in love with him even more, because I realized I was not just falling in love with Taymour but also with generations of him that connect through history, traits that had been passed down from one generation to the next. I was in love with his ancestry that stretched out for centuries.
Saleem Haddad
An obsession is where something will not leave your mind
Eric Clapton
And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.
Ian Fleming
It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.
Olivia Sudjic
Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?
William Boyd
All these men who loved Emma, I think. For all her problems, men were fixated on her. Will anyone ever feel like that about me?
J.P. Delaney
Nobody's bought this land. And no one's going to want it either. It's dying land, lonely land.""Like me, then," I said."Yes, like you." You chewed the corner of your lip. "You both need saving.
Lucy Christopher
...an obsession is a way for damaged people to damage themselves more.
Mark Barrowcliffe
I don't believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.
Rosamund Lupton
It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...
Zoë Heller
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
Virginia Woolf
We need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.Yet, every decade, global consumption continues to increase relentlessly.
Stephen Emmott
Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.
Morrissey
We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
George Orwell
As you get to thirty, the main thing is to not be sensible.
Mark Steel
It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
Malcolm Gladwell
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
P.G. Wodehouse
Writing is a team sport.
Chris White
My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie....
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited
Virginia Woolf
How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.
Terry Pratchett
One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.
Chloe Thurlow
Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase.
Robert Galbraith