Quotes by British Authors - Page 99

Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said good things. A few real dirtbags like Carrie Johnstone lost their jobs.tAnd then, well, the good apples turned out to act pretty much exactly like the bad apples. Oh, they had reasons. There were emergencies. Circumstances. It was all really regrettable. tBut there were always emergencies, weren’t there?
Cory Doctorow
What humanity wants most is crude sensation.Really? I thought what humanity wanted most was dignity.
Christopher Fowler
The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
G.K. Chesterton
We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is.
Kazuo Ishiguro
She saw that supreme dignity - and love - lay in tolerance.
Antonia Fraser
A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.
Jonathan Glover
It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.
Mark Lawrence
There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.
Charles Dickens
Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.
George Eliot
The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The dignity of man was everywhere tissue-paper thin.
Dick Francis
A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a 'bundle of facts.' Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the 'law' because they act in that way.
Joseph McCabe
For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]
C.P. Snow
The ocean is six miles deep.
Joe Dunthorne
The true business of the philosopher, though not flattering to his vanity, is merely to ascertain, arrange and condense the facts.
John Leslie
To speculate without facts is to attempt to enter a house of which one has not the key, by wandering aimlessly round and round, searching the walls and now and then peeping through the windows. Facts are the key.
Julian Huxley
You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza."That brought a smile to the corner of her mouth. The corner he couldn't see. "Well. Facts are facts.
Joe Abercrombie
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...
George Orwell
Some things never change
Jeffrey Archer
Men often fall in love at first sight
Jeffrey Archer
Have a seat with me,” Caine said, hopping down from the wall. “How have you been, Taylor?”“Life’s one big party,” she said.He laughed appreciatively at her joke. “Things must be pretty bad for Edilio to send for me, huh?”“Things are always pretty bad,” she said. “We’re at a new level of bad. I saw those bugs.”Caine mustered all his sincerity. “I have to go and fight these creatures. But I don’t know much about them.”Taylor told him what she knew. Caine felt some of his confidence drain away as she laid out the facts in gruesome detail and with complete conviction.“Well, this should be fun,” Diana said dryly. “I’m so glad we came back.
Michael Grant
Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Celia Green
Lord Peter Wimsey: Facts, Bunter, must have facts. When I was a small boy, I always hated facts. Thought they were nasty, hard things, all nobs. Mervyn Bunter: Yes, my lord. My old mother always used to say... Lord Peter Wimsey: Your mother, Bunter? Oh, I never knew you had one. I always thought you just sort of came along already-made, so it were. Oh, excuse me. How infernally rude of me. Beg pardon, I'm sure. Mervyn Bunter: That's all right, my lord. Lord Peter Wimsey: Thank you. Mervyn Bunter: Yes indeed, I was one of seven. Lord Peter Wimsey: That is pure invention, Bunter, I know better. You are unique. But you were going to tell me about your mater. Mervyn Bunter: Oh yes, my lord. My old mother always used to say that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, and they generally run away. Lord Peter Wimsey: By Jove, that's courageous, Bunter. What a splendid person she must be. Mervyn Bunter: I think so, my lord.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.
Richard Hughes
There's nothing more stubborn than a fact. That is why you hate them so much. They offend you.
Tom Rob Smith
These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.
Lavie Tidhar
There’s no such thing as ‘not enough time’ out here in the woods. I don’t even have a watch. Time is my own, categorised as nothing more than ‘morning, afternoon, evening and night’.
Fennel Hudson
Essential to time-management is a change in focus, a change from being ‘busy’ to a focus on outcomes
Tony Buon
Don't waste time with people who waste time. Time is precious, fragile as a butterfly wing, meaningful as an orgasm.
Chloe Thurlow
No wife wants to hear that her husband is less than perfect.
Sophie Kinsella
Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.
Elizabeth von Arnim
They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife - but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!
Margaret Rome
She wisely reasoned that my chosen husband was no ordinary man, that his whole life was absolutely dedicated to God and His service, ad that I must never, never hinder him by trying to put myself first in his heart.
Susannah Spurgeon
When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.
Thomas Hardy
Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?
Hilary Mantel
Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg? I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the street and ask him which he’d sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see what he says!
P.G. Wodehouse
Drink from the cup of life, you will be fulfilled.Yet...drink from the milk container in the fridge,and your wife will make you wish that you had drunk from the cup of life.
Anthony T.Hincks
When you break rules, break 'em good and hard
Terry Pratchett
To dream in doctrines, how tidy!
John le Carré
Children with autism are constantly testing and pursuing truth. They are a bundle of contradictions. They love order and routine, yet often have the most amazingly inventive and creative minds. They may appear to follow rules, but are also the most likely people to come up with a revolutionary new idea. They feel emotion intensly, but often seem to struggle to read facial expressions.
Adele Devine
Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
Niall Ferguson
As I went through all these experiences, I began to compile a list that wasn't written down in any book, only inscribed in my soul. To me these were as universal, dependable, and invariable as the laws of nature. Together they constituted The Forty Rules of the Religion of Love, which could be attained through love and love only.
Elif Shafak
On the battlefield there are no rules.
Joe Abercrombie
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.
George Eliot
The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom.
Marcus Buckingham
Unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules.
Charlotte Brontë
The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.
Christopher Hitchens
Rules? You don't even know what game we're playing, mister.
Peter Milligan
Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.
Richard Dawkins
It was all my fault. I'd let them in, I'd broken my rules, and I was back at square fucking one!"- Jocelyn Butler
Samantha Young
I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.
W Somerset Maugham
But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.
Lionel Shriver
Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
Neil Gaiman
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game
R.D. Laing
...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice--that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.
Malcolm Gladwell
You are one brave woman," he whispers, "I am in awe of you.
E.L. James
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.
Terry Pratchett
The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.
Banksy
There are enough cowards in the world without killing a brave creature for so little reason.
Brian Jacques