Quotes by British Authors - Page 8

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. … Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; … [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. … A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.
G H Hardy
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf
As someone who has spent the last decade training young men and women for Christian service, I have been keen to help them see that the best kinds of ministry are, more often than not, long term and low key. I have tried to prepare them for a marathon, not a short, energetic sprint. In other words, to help them have a lifetime of sustainable sacrifice, rather than an energetic but brief ministry that quickly fades in exhaustion.
Christopher Ash
An unhappy woman with access to weed killer had to be watched carefully.
James Ruddick
I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.
Eddie Campbell
Police intentionally murdering a mentally unstable person will always be unacceptable when there are numerous other non-lethal options available to them.
Steven Magee
While police internal affairs is allowed to protect corrupt police officers that engage in unethical behaviors, illegal activities or murder, there will always be a genuine mistrust by the common people.
Steven Magee
The house-cat is a four-legged quadruped, the legs as usual being at the corners. It is what is sometimes called a tame animal, though it feeds on mice and birds of prey. Its colours are striped, it does not bark, but breathes through its nose instead of its mouth. Cats also mow, which you all have heard. Cats have nine liveses, but which is seldom wanted in this country, coz' of Christianity. Cats eat meat and most anythink speshuelly where you can't afford. That is all about
Helen Exley
There is no equality while privileges enjoyed by the many are denied to the few.
Robert Cubitt
I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her -
Sarah Waters
Besides, immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control things.
E.L. James
And then there was
Dianna Hardy
People with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) are known to put their computer equipment several feet away from them with a large monitor on a big font and they use a wired USB keyboard and mouse to control it.
Steven Magee
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
George Orwell
In daylight and up close, he was merciless, all smiles and freckles, the brightest, boldest flame a moth could wish for.
Alexis Hall
When people who remember her better than me talk of her, she is always described as headstrong and irresponsible, which, if you think about it, are just different words for untameable. The wind is untameable, and so are rivers, and there is something poetic in that.
Claire Wong
Inspector Milne's suspicious prying appeared to have awakened her inner Bolshevik, and so I discovered my own lady mother is not above quietly circumventing the law.
Elizabeth Wein
Said by Colin the dragon:"It's somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you (humans)think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed, when in reality you're all all tiresomely similiar in outlook, needs and motivation, and differ only by peculiar habits, generally shaped by geographical circumstance.
Jasper Fforde
Humans would become very sick without natural radio frequency (RF) exposures.
Steven Magee
There's a bit of kitten in all of us.
Anthony T.Hincks
Knowledge comes by revelation through the study of the Scriptures
Pedro Okoro
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
George Orwell
The Industrial Revolution appears to be in its final stages and it will be remembered as a time where industrial stock markets were at historic highs at the same time that many natural processes were shutting down, including the next generation of humans.
Steven Magee
Some think that they are incredible but are actually un-credible. Do you work, master your craft...
Rasheed Ogunlaru
A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
Os Guinness
The Church, like her head, has a glory, but it is concealed from carnal eyes, for the time of her breaking forth in all her splendour is not yet come.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Adams dealt him so sound a Compliment over his Face with his Fist, that the Blood immediately gushed out of his Nose in a Stream. The Host being unwilling to be outdone in Courtesy, especially by a Person of Adams's Figure, returned the Favour with so much Gratitude, that the Parson's Nostrils likewise began to look a little redder than usual.
Henry Fielding
Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
Jasper Fforde
Sometimes all we need to soothe our soul and ease our burdens is the loving hand of a friend gently touching our heart and lifting us towards love
Mimi Novic
Overall, becoming a carbon-neutral country would involve changes in our behaviour, but these are modest compared with the changes that will be forced upon us if we do nothing.
Caroline Lucas
If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, 'tall' and 'short' would come to have just as precise a meaning as 'bird' or 'mammal'. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to 'put down' a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might 'put down' a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.
Richard Dawkins
Perhaps it is weariness that causes seers not to act on what they see; for whereas the wisdom of the world can be vast, it includes the many futilities. Ideas do not have legs with which to run and hands with which to craft. They are wisps of smoke floating into a universe of pain and ignorance that overwhelm the capacity of one small human body and the mind trapped inside it.
Kate Horsley
Empowerment is the intentional absence of negativity.
Stephanie Lennox
I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.
Brian Eno
In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call "maximising utility". The ultimate objective of mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production. Effects upon the planet itself are mere "externalities" to the model, with no reckoning of the cost - at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis appears factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning. What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our basic needs for shelter and food have been met, these factors may be the most important of all.
Carne Ross
The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.
David Harvey
For capitalism to develop, customary ties between people and the land must be severed, and communal obligations among people disrupted.
David McNally
The principle locations of exploitation have moved, through the mechanism of 'globalisation', to where most of us can't see them and don't really care about them if we do.
David Smail
In a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it.
Sally Wentworth
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
Christopher Hitchens
Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,Remember only this of our hopeless loveThat never till Time is doneWill the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one
Edith Sitwell
Safe sex? Does such a thing exist?
Garry Crystal
If you are not appetisers, main course and dessert, you are dating the wrong diner...
Virginia Alison
Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.
Richard Llewellyn
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
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
Harry then did something that was both very brave and very stupid
J.K. Rowling
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
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
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