Quotes by British Authors - Page 668

It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
T.H. White
War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular.
T.H. White
This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
H.G.Wells
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Perhaps ... To R.A.L.Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,And I shall see that still the skies are blue,And feel one more I do not live in vain,Although bereft of you.Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet,Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,Though You have passed away.Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,And crimson roses once again be fair,And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,Although You are not there.But though kind Time may many joys renew,There is one greatest joy I shall not knowAgain, because my heart for loss of YouWas broken, long ago.
Vera Brittain
There is one fairly good reason for fighting - and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a great wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them.
T.H. White
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon
There's so many different worlds, so many different suns. And we have just one world, but we live in different ones.
Mark Knopfler
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.
Winston S. Churchill
It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.
Terry Pratchett
Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
T.H. White
It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.
Alan Moore
Those with the least always lose the most in war.
Joe Abercrombie
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Winston S. Churchill
In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.
T.H. White
I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.
Warsan Shire
There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.
Mark Lawrence
In War: Resolution,In Defeat: Defiance,In Victory: MagnanimityIn Peace: Good Will.
Winston S. Churchill
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
George Orwell
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
H. Havelock Ellis
I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.
Sebastian Faulks
A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.
Winston S. Churchill
If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run- Yours is the earth and everything that's in it, And-which is more-you'll be a man my son.
Rudyard Kipling
War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
Patrick Ness
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Terry Pratchett
Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.
Joe Abercrombie
The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.""I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.""You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
John Fowles
War is over ... If you want it.
John Lennon
The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.Was Rorschach.Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?
Alan Moore
There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
Neil Gaiman
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
Lewis Carroll
It has been my personal experience that the government engages in a wide range of frauds with the common people.
Steven Magee
Police officers are among the most corrupt people that I have encountered in life.
Steven Magee
History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.
Tony Hendra
History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.
Tony Hendra
You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.
Tony Hendra
I independently produce scientific advancements to share with everyone, and that is over seven billion people!
Steven Magee
All things die,' she told him. Such a truism, it was the trite utterance of any street-corner philosopher, but coming from Inaspe Raimm it sounded different. 'All things reach the end of their journey, be they trees, insects, people or even principalities. All things die so that others may take their place. To die is no tragedy. The tragedy is dying with a purpose unfulfilled.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
The world, I tell you, is bored -- bored now to the explosive pitch. It's bored by all this incessant war preparation. It is bored by aimless violence, now here, now there. It is tired of hatred politics. It's tired of fresh murders every day. It is not indignant, not excited; it is bored. Bored and baffled..."I don't believe a man begins to know anything of politics until he realises the immense menace of mental fatigue, of world-wide mass boredom. It accumulates. It makes the most frightful convulsions and demoralisation possible. It makes them at last inevitable. Nobody wants fundamental changes in a world where hope and interest prevail. Then people accept their careers, settle down to them, rear children. But throw them out of work, in and out and no sense of security, deprive them of bright expectations, regiment them in masses, underfeed them, bore them with organised mass patriotism, and they begin to seep together into a common morass of discontent and impatience. Almost unconsciously..."They're like that now.
H.G.Wells
The legal system has been designed to rob the bank accounts of the common people.
Steven Magee
The legal system is blatantly rigged against the common people.
Steven Magee
Driving your car through deep pools of flood water is a great way of making your car unreliable. Smart people turn around and avoid it.
Steven Magee
While police officers who blatantly shaft the common people believe that they are God, they are the Devil to those that they wrong.
Steven Magee
For many people, a western lifestyle equates to living in a toxic home, working a toxic job, eating toxic food, being sick from your thirties onward and eventually dying from preventable disease.
Steven Magee
The people who work with solar photovoltaics (PV) tend to be sick, I've worked with many of them. They were showing classic symptoms of Radio Wave Sickness (RWS).
Steven Magee
Publishing is definitely something you do because you enjoy educating or entertaining people.
Steven Magee
Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.
J.K. Rowling
[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.
Andrew Wilson
If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.
Andrew Wilson
A lot of people, especially psychoanalysts, assume that happiness can only be found in a couple - but not all of us are made for a relationship.
Stephen Grosz
No amount of community policing will cause the common people to accept a known corrupt police department.
Steven Magee
People feeling the need to live inside of Faraday cages is a sad reflection on modern society that humans are devolving into living inside of safe spaces.
Steven Magee
I am not a fan of sealed up sterile homes or Faraday cages and their use in human health, although I do understand that some people do feel relief in these environments.
Steven Magee
[Patricia Highsmith] was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn't her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her.It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn't know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room.
Andrew Wilson
Utility smart/AMR/AMI meters, cell phones and wi-fi are problem for people who do not want to get cancer, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) sickness, or Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) in the future.
Steven Magee
It is the common peoples duty to police the police.
Steven Magee
Working a 40 hour work week is a very shallow and unfulfilling experience for many people.
Steven Magee
Very few people in the USA realize that a nuclear war was waged with nature in the southwest by their own military.
Steven Magee