Scorn (5 page)

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
George Bernard Shaw

I return your seasonal greeting card with contempt. May your hypocritical words choke you and may they choke you early in the New Year, rather than later.
Professor Kennedy Lindsay, a Vanguard member of the Northern Assembly, returning a Christmas card from the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Garret FitzGerald, in the
Irish Times

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

An Irish queer is a fellow who prefers women to drink.
Sean O'Faolain

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Attrib.

An ass in Germany is a professor in Rome.
German Song

Life is never so bad that Germany is better.
Jeremy Clarkson

German humour is no laughing matter.
Mark Twain

I like Germany so much, I think there should be two of them.
François Mauriac on German reunification

Ah, so next time we shall not be able to hear them coming.
Pierre Mendès-France, former French Prime Minister, on news that German soldiers' jackboots were now fitted with rubber soles, 1960

Germany is too big for Europe, too small for the world.
Henry Kissinger

To the small extent that it still exhibits a smiling countenance it is, as Hofmannsthal said, because it no longer has any muscles in its face. There has indeed always been something feminine about Vienna, perhaps because of the strong Slav elements in its population, and the combination of aimlessness and femininity has unfortunate results. It makes it a sad and rather mean town. The people seem to lack charity towards each other. They rather enjoy denouncing each other for minor breaches of the regulations. They give vent to explosions of rage when inconvenienced in small ways. They cling to what they think of as their old traditions, treacly and anaemic though these were for the most part. The dowdy clothes, the grim municipal tenement buildings and the general grubbiness make Vienna at certain times of the year look more like an Iron-Curtain town than one which belongs to the West. Indeed the inhabitants of Prague and of Budapest seem to me to walk with a jauntier step than do the Viennese. There is certainly no more depressing sight than that of the self-conscious crowds of businessmen and their ladies at the famous opera ball, supposedly the glittering climax of a brilliant carnival season. Austria has the highest published suicide-rate of any country in the world and Vienna makes a disproportionate contribution to this record.
Sir Anthony Rumbold, British ambassador to Austria, on Vienna

The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking.
Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.
Heinrich Heine on the English

German is a language which was developed solely to afford the speaker the opportunity to spit at strangers under the guise of polite conversation.
National Lampoon

Unmitigated noodles.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany on the English

One thing I will say for the Germans, they are always perfectly willing to give somebody else's land to somebody else.
Will Rogers

The English are, in my opinion, perfidious and cunning, plotting the destruction of the lives of foreigners, so that even if they humbly bend the knee, they cannot be trusted.
Leo de Rozmital, 1456

I have the feeling this is all going to end very badly.
General Charles de Gaulle, to an aide, on first seeing California

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Mary McCarthy, American novelist

We are terribly afraid that some Americans spit on the floor, even when that floor is covered by good carpets. Now all claims to civilisation are suspended till this secretion is otherwise disposed of. No English gentleman has spit upon the floor since the Heptarchy.
Sydney Smith

An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.
Alan Jay Lerner,
My Fair Lady

Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating.
Queen Victoria, letter to Disraeli

The English take their pleasures sadly, after the fashion of their country.
Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully

On the Continent people have good food: in England people have good table manners.
George Mikes

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
Paul Theroux

The French have made of ingratitude – as of most things in life – an art.
Charles Krauthammer,
Washington Post

The English are the people of consummate cant.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols

Pakistan has many of the characteristics of mid-Victorian England – few, unfortunately, of the better ones.
John Bushell, British Ambassador to Pakistan

The departure of the Wise men from the East seems to have been on a more extensive scale than is generally supposed, for no one of that description seems to have been left behind.
Sydney Smith on the East

The only good that comes from the east is the sun.
Portuguese saying

I must confess that hitherto I had never been able to take the Lebanese entirely seriously. Poised uneasily between Europe and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, the country, for all its beauty, seemed not really to belong anywhere. It appeared to be inhabited by a kind of quintessential wog with a rich patina of French chic, ready to trade with anyone in any commodity at his own price, existing in a kind of perpetual Nescafé society, hoping that the problems of the real world would somehow
disappear if not looked at too closely, and concentrating on the sensible occupation of making money.
Sir Paul Wright, British Ambassador to Lebanon

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles,
The Third Man

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.
Alan Coren on Switzerland

Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
Samuel Johnson,
Dictionary of the English Language

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
P.G. Wodehouse

Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.
Samuel Johnson,
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

Of course I want political autonomy but not cultural autonomy. You just have to watch the Scottish Baftas to want to kill yourself.
Muriel Gray

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obligated to desist from the experiment in despair.
Charles Lamb

His sayings are generally like women's letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
William Hazlitt on Charles Lamb

The Scotchman is one who keeps the Sabbath and every other thing he can lay his hands on.
Lyndon Johnson

It raises the average IQ of both countries.
Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, commenting on an exodus of New Zealanders emigrating to Australia

Acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness and were gone with the wind.
D.H. Lawrence comparing the Australian mind with the Flying Dutchman

Pass a law to give every single whingeing bloody Pommie his fare home to England. Back to the smoke and the sun shining ten days a year and shit in the streets. Yer can have it.
Thomas Keneally,
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

I find it hard to say, because when I was there it seemed to be shut.
Clement Freud on being asked his opinion of New Zealand

You must remember that the Australian voter has a short memory span … less than fourteen days in most cases.
John Howard, Australian Prime Minister

Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid programme for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer.
Stanley Rudin

American intellectuals became afraid to collect their thoughts lest they be accused of unlawful assembly.
Historian Charles Beard on McCarthyite hysteria in America

The English approach to ideas is not to kill them but to let them die of neglect.
Jeremy Paxman

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
George Orwell

The English think of an opinion as something which a decent
person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.
Margaret Halsey, American writer

Canada is useful only to provide me with furs.
Madame de Pompadour after the fall of Quebec

The gloomy region, where the year is divided into one day and one night, lies entirely outside the stream of history.
W.W. Reade on Canada, 1872

Canada is a country built against any common, geographical, historic or cultural sense.
Pierre Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister

I don't even know what street Canada is on.
Al Capone

A country the size of a piece of snot.
Chen Tan-Sun, Taiwanese Foreign Minister, on Singapore

In China, when you're one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.
Bill Gates

The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low, a good deal lower than ours and much lower than that of the Chinese.
Sir Anthony Rumbold, British ambassador to Thailand

Decayed garbage left for months on the side of the roads; stagnant canals that serve both as cesspools and as the dumping ground for dead dogs; buses and lorries that belch uncontrolled clouds of diesel fumes; scarcely a pavement without potholes and open manholes to break the legs of the unwary; bag-snatchers in every block; assault and violence a way of life; prostitution and every form of natural and unnatural vice on a scale astonishing even in Asia; a city of 4 million with only one park, and that littered with refuse and infested with thieves; unplanned hideous ribbon development; no proper drainage, so that in the rainy season large areas of the city remain flooded for weeks on end; and the whole set in a flat mournful plain without even a hillock in sight for a 100 miles in any direction: this is Bangkok, the vaunted Venice of the East.
Sir Arthur de la Mare, British Ambassador to Thailand

God made serpents and rabbits and Armenians.
Turkish insult

Do not trust a Hungarian unless he has a third eye in his forehead.
Czech insult

Half an Italian is one too many in a house.
German and French insult

I saw the new Italian navy. Its boats have glass bottoms so they can see the old Italian navy.
Peter Secchia, President Bush's nominee for US Ambassador to Italy, during Senate confirmation hearings, 1989

In Milan traffic lights are instructions. In Rome they are suggestions. In Naples they are Christmas decorations.
Italian Defence Minister, Antonio Martino

Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of Holland is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.
Alan Coren,
The Sanity Inspector

The indigested vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Andrew Marvell, ‘The Character of Holland'

There are few virtues which the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.
Winston Churchill

Did hogs feast or did Lithuanians have a feast here?
Polish saying

Beer is the Danish national drink and the Danish national weakness is another beer.
Clementine Paddleford

Fuck off, Norway.
Paul Gascoigne, when asked by live Norwegian television if he had a message for the Norwegian people before the England-Norway World Cup qualifier

It could plausibly be argued that it is a misfortune for anybody but a Finn to spend three years in Finland, as I have just done. Even the Finns who can afford it are happy to make frequent escapes to sunnier climes. Finland is flat, freezing, and far from the pulsating centres of European life. Nature has done little for her and art not much more. Until yesterday the country was inhabited only by peasants, foresters, fishermen and a small class of alien rulers who spent most of their money elsewhere. The rich cultural past of Europe has left fewer traces in Finland in the shape of public and private buildings of quality and the objects of art which adorn them than anywhere else in the Western world save perhaps Iceland. Finnish cooking deserves a sentence to itself for its crude horror; only the mushrooms and the crayfish merit attention.
Sir Bernard Ledwidge, British Ambassador to Finland