Recent Entries in Quotation of the week
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"Big changes as if under anaesthetic"
The British have a habit of going into their big changes as if under anaesthetic. —Lord Richard Wilson, former Cabinet Secretary When making this quote, which I discovered whilst reading Peter Hennessey’s latest brilliant offering, The Secret State, Lord Wilson had in mind two major policy decisions of the last 40 years: Britain’s accession to the European Community in 1973 and devolution plus human rights legislation in the 1990s. To this, I think we can...
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Quotation of the week, coalition edition
My apologies for not blogging much over the last few weeks. The most ridiculous combination of events has conspired to prevent much else other than work. There are no signs that this will change soon, but fortunately my esteemed and brilliant fellow blogger Phil is keeping us going. In the meantime, how about this quote from a Lib Dem Minister, when asked what he would do about taking messages he was getting from party members...
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General McClellan on (in)action
I'm not sure why, but this quote from General McClellan - a sort of antihero in the American Civil War - stood out for me when I read it a few days ago: It has always been my opinion that the true course in conducting military operations, is to make no movement until the preparations are as complete as circumstances permit, & never to fight a battle without some definite object worth the probable loss....
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Quotation of the week
To know enough about many things is vital. It is how we stay broad in our vision while building intellectual capital and deepening the conversation[.]. But it also means being painfully aware that behind the level of insight we need to have there is so much more we would love to be able to understand and explore. — Matthew Taylor, writing on his continually excellent blog...
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Quotation of the Week (Big Society edition)
Sometimes politicians talk as if government and society were in a zero sum game: more government necessarily means less society, and less government means more society. — Geoff Mulgan (writing about the Big Society here)...
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Quotation of the week (cuts edition)
How we deal with these things will affect our economy, our society - indeed our whole way of life. The decisions we make will effect every single person in our country. And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps decades to come. — David Cameron. (It is at this point in time that I'd like to point out it's David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg making these decisions that...
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Quotation of the week (#ge10 edition)
If you wanted to talk to the Lib Dems about electoral reform they were absolutely open to the conversation. If you wanted to talk to them about public service reform. If you wanted to talk to them about the hard issues on the economy. If you wanted to talk to them about the difficult questions that government is actually about. They weren't up for it. That was the problem. Electoral reform doesn't change the nature...
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Quotation of the week (return of the master)
[O]n the economy, they seem to be buffeted this way and that, depending less on where they think the country should be, than on where they think public opinion might be. — Tony Blair, speaking on the Tories during a speech he gave in Sedgefield this week. Marbury picked this particular line up, and he's right to emphasize the key distinction between responding to public opinion and shaping it....
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Quotation of the week
[O]f course, I had to take this decision as Prime Minister and it was a huge responsibility then, and there is not a single day that passes by that I don't reflect and think about that responsibility, and so I should. But I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we would still have had to have dealt with him, possibly in circumstances where the threat...
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Quotation of the week
Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can't believe in the mumbo-jumbo. — Clement Attlee...
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Quotation of the week
I checked the Oxford English Dictionary to get a definition for both words. It defined progressive as "favouring change and innovation". For conservative, it said, "averse to change or innovation". — Phil Watson MP on 'progressive conservatism' (via John Rentoul)...
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Quotation of the week
When a man has great studies[,] he must of course give up seeing much of the world. — George Eliot (in Middlemarch)...
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Quotation of the week
Chris Addison on politics and media in his Evening Standard column: When I was growing up in the 1980s one of the national playground pastimes was to approach some innocent and ask, "Are you a bummer tied to a tree?" On receiving the inevitable answer "No," you would then career round the playground, yelling "Bummer on the loose!" This is what I’m reminded of most of the time when I watch televised political interviews.
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Quotation of the week
I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to intercourse with plain working men. — Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England...
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Quotation of the week
The problem with our society is there aren't enough positive drug rituals. I said this to the Archbishop of Canterbury the other night — the Church of England should introduce some sort of ecstasy communion. — Will Self...
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Quotation of the week
I can't help thinking that, while the problem of Mr Brown for Labour is his apparent unelectability, the problem for the country is that the party likely to form the next government is not being subject to the scrutiny from which both it and we would benefit. — Matthew Taylor on his RSA blog...
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Quotation of the week
Frankly, the idea that such an investigation could be conducted without doing damage to our relationship is from cloud cuckoo land — which is, after all, the natural habitat of the Liberal Democrats. Tony Blair, 13 June 2007 (Hansard entry)...
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Quotation of the week (!)
And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. — Terry Pratchett, in Maskerade....
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Quotation of the week
Boris doesn't despise Dave, but it is true the two men find each other baffling: Boris can't work out why an intellectual lightweight has got to the top ahead of him, while the control freak in Dave cannot fathom why people fall for the incontinent shambles that is Boris. — Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph...
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Quotation of the week
I think it is very wrong that, in recent times, people have been comparing politicians to bananas by saying that they start out green, soon go yellow and that most of them are bent. This calumny must be stopped forthwith. — The gist of a recent letter to the Independent...
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Quotation of the week
It is true that we had 10 years of record growth when I was Prime Minister. I have, unfortunately, come to the conclusion that it was luck. — Tony Blair. See my last post for a related question: "Does Brown believe in God?". This is quite an amazing quote, and obviously does Gordon Brown no favours. However, David Cameron and the Conservatives still need to turn the quotation, and the prevailing economic conditions, so that...
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Quotation of the week
The problem isn't that [Gordon] Brown is bonkers. It's that our political system not only expects its politicians to be always in control, but thinks it normal when they appear to be. — Chris Dillow, at Stumbling and Mumbling...
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Quotation of the week
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair (via Stumbling & Mumbling)...
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Quotation of the week
There is a fundamental economic illiteracy about British politics that contradicts the idea that Lady Thatcher brought about a revolution in attitudes in this country. Profit is still too often a dirty word. Just as it is still almost universally expected of politicians that they should provide "affordable housing". Yet when the market suddenly provides lower house prices, the cry goes up for politicians to make housing less affordable again. — John Rentoul, as picked...
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Quotation of the week
Oh shit, no. I had a shower last night, though. — Chris Tomlinson, British long jumper, after being asked by his wife if he'd had a shave before he met the Prime Minister....
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Quotation of the week
[T]he Tory chuntering class is as stupid and ill-read as its Hampstead lefty counterpart. Neither wishes to test the rectitude of their own tired prejudices against evidence or literature. — Chris Dillow, at Stumbling and Mumbling...
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Quotation of the week
He is now quite addicted to alcohol, smokes and has spent a great deal of time over the last nine months asleep. That's Mrs Gardner on her son during his first year at university. She had assumed her son would be "fully engaged" and suggested her assumption might be "very wrong". You've got to give it to Mrs Gardner: she's willing to re-assess her assumptions in light of the evidence in front of her. It's...
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Quotation of the week
This dance of hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy, the endless round of masking and unmasking that is electoral politics, can be profoundly frustrating and debilitating. — David Runciman, going on to discuss George Orwell and his attitudes towards hypocrisy....
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Quotation of the week
Since he's lost all this weight, Lee thinks he is Brad Pitt, and that's not a bad thought to take with you out on to this golf course. — Chubby Chandler, the manager of golfer Lee Westwood. There's so much in there that's funny, including Mr Chandler's first name....
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Quotation of the week
When you're young, days go quickly but the years last for ever. As you get older, it's the days that last for ever but the years that speed by. Only people who are 27 experience both days and years at their correct length. — Guy Browning...
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Quotation of the week
[T]he library and what it houses embody and protect the freedom and diversity of the human spirit. To every scholar the library is a personal realm of secret topography. — Colin St John Wilson, architect of the British Library (see article here)....
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Quotation of the week
Formerly you shone among the living like the star of dawn. Now, dead, you shine like the evening star among the departed. — Plato. It's the bit in between shining amongst the living at dawn and shining among the departed in the evening that makes for the hard journey. Does anyone know if Plato had anything to say about that?...
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Quotation of the week
'But come, Pinch, before I say anything more to you, just run over the reasons you have for being grateful to him at all, will you? change hands first, for the box is heavy. That'll do. Now, go on.' 'In the first place,' said Pinch, 'he took me as his pupil for much less than he asked.' 'Well,' rejoined his friend, perfectly unmoved by this instance of generosity. 'What in the second place?' 'What in...
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Quotation of the week
A true born Englishman's a Contradiction, In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction. — Daniel Defoe. Increasingly appropriate and relevant, following this report's findings (and see the Economist article here)....
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Quotation of the week
I can't explain it. I just like looking at type. I get a total kick out of it. They are my friends. Other people look at bottles of wine or girls' bottoms, I get kicks out of looking at type. — Erik Spiekermann, typographer and designer...
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Quotation of the week
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. — Wilhelm Stekel...
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Quotation of the week
What you see is what you get. — Louise Lear, BBC weather person, with probably the most useless weather forecast I have ever heard. In other news, everything you see on the television isn't real. Oh, hang on — I don't think everyone had realised that. Perhaps we do need more information from the BBC's Department of Trivial Fact, Masquerading as News (and Occasionally the Weather)....
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Quotation of the week
It would be incomprehensible to disrupt the lives of millions of Londoners. — Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, on the proposed 3-day strike affecting the London Underground. But Ken — this happens every day anyway! [This is a totally unsubstantiated remark, but I'll bet it tallies with most Londoners' daily commute experiences — ed.]...
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Quotation of the week
Lawyers are all right, I guess... I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys' lives and...
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Quotation of the week
[O]ne should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk...
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Quotation of the week (updated)
I don't go there to just show up and I'm not here to work on my farmer tan and shed a couple of pounds. The whole idea is to win. That's it. — Tiger Woods Update: and that is exactly what he did — win. That makes 13 major titles for Woods, and his taking over of Jack Nicklaus's record is surely just a matter of time?...
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Quotation of the week
The "quotation of the week" has lapsed on arbitrary constant. This post aims to re-introduce it with the following long quotation from Raymond Chandler's The Long Good-bye: There's a peculiar thing about money[.] In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of...
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Quotation of the week
Mr Blair today faced the Liaison committee, made up of the heads of all the select committees, to talk about domestic and international affairs. The discussion ventured on to environment and energy. After giving a hat-tip to Ken Livingstone for having the balls to actually do something about climate change, Michael Jack, the Conservative chair of the environment, food and rural affairs committee, pointed out that we need to be bolder and more revoluntionary with...
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Quotation of the Week
An organisation such as the CEHR will eventually be using its capabilities to support ethnic minorities, disabled groups and people from the gay and lesbian communities to make the most of the opportunities offered by internet blogs. — Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). An interesting view, which I will possibly comment upon in future, work permitting....
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Quotation of the week
Cameron is holding up a mirror which reveals our priorities, and the reflection isn't always flattering. — Nick Cohen on the liberal middle classes. Cohen, ever an engaging, provocative, but generally correct and insightful commentator, also nicely picks up on some other things Cameron, on the sly, is doing: Writing in the Telegraph, he [Cameron] promised that under a Conservative government Britain would opt out of the European Union's Social Chapter. The immediate effect would...
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Quotation of the week
Or more, in this case, headline of the day: One in five Home Office statistics are unreliable, says department head — The Guardian (who else could write a headline like that?!)...
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Quotation of the week
First off, thanks to Stef for picking up his posting quotient here on arbitrary constant; do remember, though, that I did say his language is appalling... Now to the quotation of the week, which seems entirely apt given the monumental waste of £1m of (probably) public money on fireworks that "Red" Ken Livingstone has just spent on London's New Year "Spectacle": Thronging the bridge and the quays along both banks of the river, a crowd...
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Nano Pod
Ola and a happy new year to all. Apologies to Rich for my appauling posting quotient recently but I did have had serious drinking and partying to do. This sublime quote comes from the genius that is 'The Thick of It'. "I will remove your iPod from its tiny nano sheaf, and push it up your cock," says Malcolm Tucker's equally terrifying sidekick, Jamie, to the hapless Ollie. "And then I'll plug some speakers up...
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Quotation of the week
Again, apologies for the lack of posts over the last week or so. This post will hopefully see full service and daily posting resume. And what better way to get things going again from this side of arbitrary constant, then, than by looking to its favoured son, Tony Blair? I think the single thing for me that is most important is that whatever I do afterwards it has a real purpose to it, that it...
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Quotation of the week
Many people have [argued] that inculcating students with patriotism and ideology is the crucial reason for public education in the first place. Prussia and France, for example, developed state education in part for ideological reasons -- the former to foster religion, the latter to counter its influence. In the United States, there has been and remains a fear that, if some private schools are captured by groups with peculiar religious or cultural views, ideological goals...
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Quotation of the week
[T]he elitism of the British civil service — notwithstanding the adulation of those viewing it from afar — actually breeds a degree of complacency bordering on incompetence. — Richard Chapman....
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Quotation of the week
I meant to take you darling. Tony Blair, speaking at his monthly press conference (scroll down to 6 November)....
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Quotation of the week
An excellent article to finish the week, from which this quotation is taken: [W]hen it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don't count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is...
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Neo-err...
From Richard Perle, arch neo-con: I think if I had been a delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?', I think now I would have probably said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists'. Funny how many non-delphics said this at the time and were pilliored by Mr...
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Quotation of the week
[Alternative title for this submission: "People looking out for each other" — ed.] If people can't afford to buy their own home it's their own lookout for having a rubbish job - they should have worked harder at school and got educated. — king_of_reason on the BBC's Have Your Say. Honestly, I wish that this was a joke......
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Quotation of the week
I don't make predictions, and I never will. — Paul Gascoigne. I should follow his example!...
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Quotation of the week
I chose not to pay because I didn't think that Swedish Television produced good programmes. — Tobias Billstroem, Swedish Migration Minister, on why he didn't pay his Swedish television licence. I know how he feels....
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Quotation of the week
In the light of my recent comments, this seems appropriate: Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others. — Groucho Marx, though could equally have been David "Dave" Cameron...
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Quotation of the week
Powerful multinational corporations may control the machinery of the energy community; national governments may control the military forces that defend the world's energy supplies; but at the end of the day, the driving force behind the energy economy, the reason those supplies have value, is the billions of energy transactions that take place every day in every nation on earth and which together embody the world's insatiable thirst for energy. — Paul Roberts (in The...
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Quotation of the week
The meaning of life is that it stops. — Sebastian Horsley reviewing a recent book (via norm). Watching television on a Saturday night, which is what I'm currently sort of doing, makes me feel like life has stopped....
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Quotation of the week
1 I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 2 I was reading 'The Merchant of Venice'. 3 I was reading The Merchant of Venice. The man who cannot see that No 1 is the best looking, as well as the sufficient and sensible form, should print or write nothing but advertisements for lost dogs or ironmongers' catalogues: literature is not for him to meddle with. — George Bernard Shaw, quoted in the Guardian style book,...
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Soul man
We must have a soul. That's Gordon Brown — real name James Brown (no, honestly) — on what the Labour party must have beyond policies and programmes. I like Gordon Brown and think (and hope) he will be the next Prime Minister of the UK. I've got some thoughts on Stef's post concerning the leadership business of the last few weeks and will post those when there is some distance between the conference this week....
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Alleged allegations
Obviously I'm denying all allegations that have been alleged against me. That's Sam Allardyce denying he had anything to do with bungs. Out of interest, surely allegations can only be alleged? That's why they are allegations. I suppose they could have been levelled at him, but they still would have been allegations. We'll put Allardyce's tautology down to the stress of the situation in which he finds himself, and will wonder out loud whether the...
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The internet
Despite my strongly held conviction that the internet holds great possibilities for enabling democratic engagement, I realised the folly of my ways when watching the hilariously brilliant Avenue Q last night. The title of one of the songs was The Internet is for Porn However, all is not lost, I just need to think of a way of combining politics and porn... all ideas gratefully received....
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Quotation of the week
Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How...
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Quotation of the week
Conventional military operations against states cannot remove the threat of further attacks by networks that no state controls. — John Gray (in False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism)...
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Quotation of the week
Chance favors only the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur...
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President in swearing shock
No stranger to mangling his words, George W. Bush shocked the world yesterday by making a statement many thought was to the point and without obfuscation: The irony is, what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over. When asked why he thought it necessary to swear, Mr Bush probably would have replied: "Hey, I'm not the only one"....
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Quotation of the week
Staying on the football theme (with a hint of Rumsfeld for good measure) comes this peach: The biggest problem is that people who were supposed to control the whole system were controlled by those people they were supposed to control instead. — Guido Rossi, the head of the Italian FA, on the match-funding scandal in Italy....
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Quotation of the week
You have to allow yourself to lose control from time to time. — Eric Cantona on Zinedine Zidane's sending off in the World Cup final. He should know....
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Quotation of the week
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. — Ludwig Wittgenstein...
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Quotation of the week
He should not have been there.— Lord Tebbit on David "Dave" Cameron's appearance on the Jonathan Ross show, in which Ross asked "Dave" whether he had ever had [pleasured himself] with Margaret Thatcher in mind....
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Quotation of the week
Not just quotation of the week but a possible contender for quotation of the year:Jesus Christ may be able to turn the other cheek but Luis Figo isn't Jesus Christ.— Luiz Felipe Scolari, Portugal coach on Luis Figo's headbutt of a Dutch opponent during last night's violent encounter between Portugal and Holland...
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Quotation of the week
Even if equality of opportunity is fully achieved, all that has happened is that each of us starts off on the same rung of the ladder. There is still a ladder, and for most of us what we shall be looking at most of our working lives are the perky bottoms of our betters climbing further and faster than we are capable of doing. Lifelong learning devices may offer renewed opportunities to alter out station...
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Quotation of the week
A relevant quotation of the week, courtesy of Mr Jim Taylor, in preparation for the 10k run arbitrary constant will be undertaking on SundayI am still looking for a pair of training shoes that will make running on streets seem like running barefoot across the bosoms of maidens.— Dave Brosnan...
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Quotation of the week
And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, [your stomach] says, 'Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh – drivel in folly and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is the poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol.'— Jerome K. Jerome (in Three Men in a Boat)...
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Quotation of the week
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.— John Stuart Mill (of whose birthday it is currently the 200th anniversay year)...
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Quotation of the week
Note: this is a guest post by Paul Wright The Bible is not the authorised code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today.— Dr Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) Rich is still away — this particular quote tickled me for some reason....
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Quotation of the week
The west, imposing its own sensibilities on the world through a totalising globalisation, can only be impoverished if there are no radically different voices, grounded in other certainties, to call it into question.— Tim Winter...
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Quotation of the week
Philosophers have always tried to show that we are not like other animals, sniffing their way uncertainly through the world. Yet after all the work of Plato ad Spnioza, Descartes and Bertrand Russell we have no more reason than other animals do for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow.— John Gray (in Straw Dogs)...
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Quotation of the week
[R]ising dissatisfaction with the "system"... does not result primarily from poorer performance by that system. Rather, it stems from a rapid escalation of our aspirations as to what the system's performance ought to be... What is not improving is the gap between society's performance and what most people — or at least highly vocal minorities — believe society ought to be doing to solve [...] problems. Our aspirations and standards have risen far faster than...
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Quotation of the week
The result may offer short-term relief for the Liberals, but they ran a shameless anti-government campaign even though they are part of the government in Scotland.— Alex Salmond SNP leader...
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Quotation of the week
For those who believe, no evidence is necessary. [F]or those who don’t believe, no evidence is ever enough.— Medium Colin Fry...
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Quotation of the week
A quote of the week special, this week, with two contributions from Mr Jim Taylor:America could not found a whelk stall.— Simon Jenkins reviewing My Year in Irak If you want to spend an evening getting pointlessly panicked and disorientated you can do it much more cheaply trying to find your way out of the Barbican Centre.— Christopher Hart reviewing Shunt Theatre in the Sunday Times Note: the opinions expressed above are those of the...
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Quotation of the week
[I]ntellectuals in politics are a distinct minority. The political sphere is instead dominated by career politicians who early have learned that a profound and frequently reiterated respect (whether genuine or feigned) for the wisdom of the average voter is a necessary condition of political success.— Thomas A. Baylis...
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Quotation of the week
Some things are true, even if George [W.] Bush believes them.— Thomas Friedman (via the old normblog)...
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Quotation of the week
I thought I should go and see it but I then got in a taxi and was heading somewhere else... I then thought, 'You just live your life. You've got to come and see that whale'. — Shameen Khan...
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Quotation of the week
The flaw in the modern myth is that it tethers us to a hope of unity, when we should be learning to live with conflict. — John Gray (in Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern)...
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Quotation of the week
Anyway, work is not the word I would apply to what I do. Work is too large a term, too serious. Workers work. The great ones work. As for us middling men, there is no word sufficiently modest that yet will be adequate to describe what we do and how we do it. Dabble I do not accept. It is amateurs who dabble, while we, the class or genus of which I speak, are nothing...
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