British Journalist Quotes

I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of 'living a lie'. I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable.

The winner is not the player who wins the most pots. The winner is the player who wins the most money.

Cats do not keep the mice away; it is my belief that they preserve them for the chase.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

After the end of the Cold War, some governments have tended to forget Eastern Europe, allowing the new democracies to stew in the gelatinous leftovers of communism. But the peoples of the new democracies will not forget the West – Europe has become the most unstable continent in the world.

Evil is something you recognize immediately you see it: it works through charm.

It was a testament to the resilience of humanity. Give a man a tree and he will make it into a boat; give him a leaf and he will curve it into a cup and drink water from it; give him a rock and he will make a weapon to protect himself and his family. Give a man a small box and a limit of 140 characters to type into it, and he will adapt it to fight an oppressive dictatorship in the Middle East.

The morning stars sang together. And a person of delicate ear and nice judgment discussed the singing at length, and showed how and wherein one star differed from another, and which was great and which was not. And still the morning stars sang together.

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland

But at least if you hint and are rejected, the rejection is blurable rather than blistering. Whereas if you ask outright and are refused, the humiliation is as stark as a streaker on a football.

A cat actually thinks visibly. If you watch him jump on a shelf, the wish to jump and the action of jumping are one and the same thing... It's in exactly the same way that all Brook's exercises try to train the actor. The actor is trained to become so organically related within himself, he thinks completely with his body. He becomes one sensitive, responding whole... The whole of him is one.

Hard news really is hard. It sticks not in the craw but in the mind. It has an almost physical effect, causing fear, interest, laughter or shock.

Im still very skeptical about the whole thing. The Laboratory (Châtenay-Malabry) is unscrupulous to say the least, because they shouldn't know the sample they're testing. The fact that the lab knew whose sample it was testing is just one of the anomolies It's time for the second test, the so-called B sample, be done in a second country by a second lab. I'm not saying the lab is a crooked lab, they have proved to us that they're not a particularly scrupulous lab. I got a feeling he's not telling lies.

In the dusk of a lane I met a shepherd with his sheep. A small dog with the expression of a professor of mathematics does all the work.

Henry Vollam Morton

Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

There is a story that when Mrs Thatcher first met Gorbachev he gave her a ball-point and she offered him Labour-voting Scotland.

Nicholas Shakespeare

To reform the House of Lords [in 1910] meant to set down in writing a Constitution which for centuries had remained happily unwritten, to conjure a great ghost into the narrow and corruptible flesh of a code.

George Dangerfield

Our establishment has presided over economic decline and bequeathed a culture of mediocrity. Why join a bunch of losers?

Truth travels slowly and gets weaker as it goes. Suitable lies are strong and run faster.

For two years living in a neutral country I have been able to see through the haze of propaganda to reach something which my conscience tells me is the truth.

The foundation of humility is truth. The humble man sees himself as he is. If his depreciation of himself were untrue,... it wouldnot be praiseworthy, and would be a form of hypocrisy, which is one of the evils of Pride. The man who is falsely humble, we know from our own experience, is one who is falsely proud.

And have no doubt, the real purpose of the Earth Summit is to transfer your hard-earned cash to others who mostly have governments with even less of a clue how to conduct their affairs than we do.

Pornography is many things to many men. But it is never adult. Pornography exists in a state of perpetual adolescence... Planet porn is Disneyland for habitual monkey-spankers.

Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education. If you give someone £20 and say, 'Feed your family for the week on it,' a lot of people just couldn't do it adequately and that's because there's – and I do blame the readymeal industry for it, because it is so easy and so attractively packaged, and you just put it in a microwave – a disconnection between what's in that packet, and how simple and cheap it might be to make it for yourself. I think if we can solve food education then we are part of the way to solving food poverty.

To be conservative requires no brains whatsoever. Cabbages, cows and conifers are conservatives, and are so stupid they don't even know it. All that is basically required is acceptance of what exists.

O tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?