Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.
—Gerald Priestland, 1988
Archive
Quotes
Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
—George Washington, 1796Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.
—George Orwell, 1945One’s friends are divided into two classes, those one knows because one must and those one knows because one mustn’t.
—Sybil Taylor, 1922Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, 1946I have always found it in mine own experience an easier matter to devise many and profitable inventions than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself.
—Hugh Plat, 1595I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
—Ray Bradbury, 1992Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.
—Dante, c. 1315If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window.
—Samuel Beckett, 1951Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.
—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?”
—Book of Ecclesiastes, 225 BCSome people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying.
—Barbara Ehrenreich, 2008This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.
—Horace, c. 35 BC