Scorn (4 page)

Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.
Lord Melbourne. Attrib.

CLERGYMAN: How did you like my sermon, Mr Canning?
GEORGE CANNING: You were brief.
CLERGYMAN: Yes, you know I avoid being tedious.
CANNING: But you were tedious.

Yes, about ten minutes.
Duke of Wellington, asked by a vicar whether there was anything he would like his sermon to be about

Parson, I have, during my life, detested many men; but never anyone so much as you … Priests have, in all ages, been remarkable for cool and deliberate and unrelenting cruelty; but it seems to be reserved for the Church of England to produce one who has a just claim to the atrocious pre-eminence. No assemblage of words can give an appropriate designation of you; and therefore, as being the single word which best suits the character of such a man, I call you Parson …
William Cobbett to Thomas Malthus

When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.
Dan George, Canadian Indian Chief, who acted in a number of films, including
Little Big Man

That revolting odious Jew production, called Bible, has been for ages the idol of all sorts of blockheads, the glory of knaves, and the disgust of wise men. It is a history of lust, sodomies, wholesale slaughtering, and horrible depravity, that the vilest parts of all other histories, collected into one book, could not
parallel. Priests tell us that this concentration of abominations was written by a god; all the world believe priests, or they would rather have thought it the outpourings of some devil.
Charles Southwell in the
Oracle of Reason,
an openly atheistic weekly newspaper, 1841. Southwell was fined £100 and imprisoned for a year.

Jesus was a crackpot.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

A parish demagogue.
Percy Bysshe Shelley on Jesus

It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.
Ronald Knox, Catholic priest and writer,
Let Dons Delight

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Leo Tolstoy on his deathbed, refusing to reconcile himself with the Russian Orthodox Church

This is no time for making new enemies.
Voltaire, on being asked to renounce the Devil on his deathbed

Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman …
Pope Benedict XVI, quoting the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus

‘What's it like being a Muslim?' Well it's hard to find a decent halal pizza place and occasionally there's a hashtag calling for your genocide.
@boycotthumans
, on Twitter

I am not a self-hating Jew. I just hate myself.
Woody Allen

A very old political monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.
Rupert Murdoch on the Dalai Lama

 

Morality

Prisoner, God has given you good abilities, instead of which you go about the country stealing ducks.
William Arabin, judge

Anger is just and love is just but justice is not just.
D.H. Lawrence

In the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.
Harvard President, Lawrence Summers

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. Mencken

Common sense is the deposits of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of eighteen.
Albert Einstein

Moral indignation is in most cases two per cent moral, 48 per cent indignation and 50 per cent envy.
Vittorio De Sica

We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Truth is like sunlight: people used to think it was good for you.
From
King of the Hill,
US cartoon

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
Samuel Butler

He that shall follow truth too close at the heels – it shall happily kick out his teeth.
Thomas Hobbes

Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.
Karl Popper to Ludwig Wittgenstein, after the latter had waved a poker in Popper's face and demanded an example of a moral rule in a heated discussion at Cambridge

And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy walks to the funeral of the whole human race and whoever forces himself to love anybody begets a murderer in his own body.
D.H. Lawrence: reply to Jesus

An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
Malcolm Muggeridge

Frivolity is the privilege of the secure, or the refuge of the desperate.
Matthew d'Ancona, British journalist

‘SLUT (noun): A woman with the morals of a man'
Anon.

It's always tempting to impute/Unlikely virtues to the cute.
P.J. O'Rourke

 

Nations

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick

If people behaved in the way nations do, they would all be put in straightjackets.
Tennessee Williams

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.
Arthur Schopenhauer

‘My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'
G.K. Chesterton

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Rebecca West

What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?
Lin Yutang

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw

A diplomat is a person who can be disarming, even though his country isn't.
Adage

I offer a toast to this gracious lady. Up your bottom.
Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister, to Mrs Dean Rusk at the 1979 Vienna Summit, after he had refused the assistance of a translator

The perfidious, haughty, savage, disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, inhuman, English.
Julius Caesar Scaliger on England

You must look out in England that you are not cheated by the charioteers.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

The most significant British contribution to the European Community to date is BSE.
The German newspaper
Allgemeine Zeitung

Britain is the only country now dominated by an elite of anti-elitists.
George Walden

He has one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, is never remembered.
Oscar Wilde

Big ideas murdered my grandmother. I like small, British ideas.
Daniel Finkelstein

It is related of an Englishman that he hanged himself to avoid the daily task of dressing and undressing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The English think soap is civilization.
Heinrich von Treitschke

One of the most precious freedoms of the British is the freedom from culture.
Lord Goodman

A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.
Indian saying

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.
H.G. Wells

England, the heart of a rabbit in the body of a Lion. The jaws of a serpent in an abode of popinjays.
Eustache Deschamps, fourteenth century writer, on England

England is not a bad country – it's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial, slag heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.
Margaret Drabble

… where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant.
Thomas Love Peacock,
Crotchet Castle,
on the English

A ready means of being cherished by the English is to adopt the simple expedient of living a long time. I have little doubt that if, say, Oscar Wilde had lived into his nineties, instead of dying in his forties, he would have been considered a
benign, distinguished figure suitable to preside at a school prize-giving or to instruct and exhort scoutmasters at their jamborees. He might even have been knighted.
Malcolm Muggeridge

The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm.
Alexander Woollcott

The English don't mind people pissing on them, provided it's from a great height.
Anonymous Greek greengrocer

Thirty million, mostly fools.
Thomas Carlyle, when asked what the population of England was. Attrib.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Walter Bagehot

Britain is the only country where people will introduce you to a friend by saying: ‘This is my mate Barry, he's a bit of a twat.'
Reginald D. Hunter

They're not a cynical people, the Americans. They want you to do quite well, whereas in Britain they just want you to fall flat on your face.
Piers Morgan

The English are the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes.
Tony Judt

Continental people have love lives; the British have hot water bottles.
George Mikes

I love the British summer, it's my favourite day of the year.
Kathy Lette

In all the four corners of the earth one of these three names is given to him who steals from his neighbours; brigand, robber or Englishman.
Les Triades de l'Anglais

The English often kill themselves. It is a malady caused by the humid climate.
Napoléon Bonaparte

That sweet enemy.
Sir Philip Sidney on France

A small acquaintance with history shows that all Governments are selfish and the French Governments more selfish than most.
Lord Eccles

I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between
neighbouring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded airs of superiority.
Horace Walpole

Never doubt the courage of the French. They are the ones who discovered snails are edible.
Doug Larson

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.
Thomas Carlyle,
History of the French Revolution

Poltroons, cowards, skullers and dastards.
Eustache Deschamps on the English

France is a dog-hole.
William Shakespeare,
All's Well That Ends Well

England is a nation of shopkeepers.
Napoléon Bonaparte

Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honour.
André Gide

They are short, blue-vested people who carry their own onions when cycling abroad, and have a yard which is 3.37 inches longer than other people's.
Alan Coren on the French

I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
Talleyrand on America

He is a silk stocking filled with dung.
Napoléon Bonaparte on Talleyrand

Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 365 kinds of cheese.
Charles de Gaulle on France

One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad … The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease … After Finland, it is the country with the worst food.
Jacques Chirac, French President, on Britain

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
Groundsman Willie in
The Simpsons,
on the French

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
Mark Twain

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once
crosses the Atlantic. The only real materialistic people I have ever met are the Europeans.
Mary McCarthy

One in three Americans weigh as much as the other two.
David Sedaris

There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
Otto von Bismarck. Attrib.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
Georges Clemenceau

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D.H. Lawrence

The American people generally do the right thing … after first exhausting every available alternative.
Winston Churchill

Be nice to America – or we'll bring you democracy.
Bumper sticker in the USA

Wherever there is suffering, injustice and oppression, the
Americans will show up, six months late, and bomb the country next to where it is happening.
P.J. O'Rourke

Kick all America in the guts: they need it … Spit on every neurotic … All that arty and literacy crew, I know them, they are smoking, steaming shits.
D.H. Lawrence on America

America is one long expectoration.
Oscar Wilde

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
Oscar Wilde

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.
Paul Gallico

Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.
John Updike

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth.
Charles Luckman

America is just a big version of [the] Westfield [shopping centre] but with witty people around the edges and a desert in the middle.
Kevin Maher

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
Arnold Toynbee

Americans are people who laugh at African witch doctors and spend 100 million dollars on fake reducing systems.
L.L. Levinson

As always the British shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.
Alistair Cooke

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
G.K. Chesterton

The Americans often appease their enemies, but they always betray their friends.
Anonymous Middle East Ruler

What you do to your enemies today, you will do to your friends tomorrow.
Afghan proverb

The average American is just like a child.
Richard Nixon

Walking is uniquely un-American.
Bill Bryson

What America calls ‘globalisation' the rest of the world call ‘Americanisation'.
Henry Louis Gates Jnr

Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this country.
George III on America

Not so much an axis of evil, more an arc of insufferability.
US pundit describing America's European allies

Paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrioneating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators, gang of women-murderers, degenerate rabble, parasitic traditionalists, playboy soldiers, conceited dandies.
Approved terms of abuse in 1953 for East German Communist speakers when describing Britain

The Earth contains no race of human beings so totally vile and worthless as the Welsh.
Walter Savage Landor, letter to Robert Southey

‘The Welsh,' said the Doctor, ‘are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,' he said with disgust, ‘sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.'
Evelyn Waugh,
Decline and Fall

Last Sunday I came – a man whom the Lord God made – to the town of Flint, with its great double walls and rounded bastions: may I see it all aflame! An obscure English wedding was there, with but little mead – an English feast! And I meant to earn a shilling solid reward for my harper's art. So I began with ready speed, to sing an ode to the kinsmen; but all I got was mockery, spurning of my song, and grief.
Lewis Glyn Cothi or Tudur Penllyn, tr. from the Welsh by Kenneth Jackson,
The English Wedding

But Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.
Samuel Pepys,
Diary

A Welshman is a man who prays on his knees on Sunday and preys on his friends the rest of the week.
Insult, probably of English origin

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.
Dylan Thomas on Wales

There are still parts of Wales where the only concession to gaiety is a striped shroud.
Gwyn Thomas

The Welsh are so damn Welsh that it looks like affectation.
Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh to D.B. Wyndham Lewis

The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don't trust us and we don't understand them.
Dudley Wood

Fucking Welsh.
Tony Blair, reported by his press secretary Alastair Campbell

Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.
Brendan Behan