Famous put-downs #2

# Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend – if you have one.  George Bernard Shaw (to Winston Churchill)
Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend second – if there is one. Churchill’s reply

#  It’s a new low for actresses when you have to wonder what’s between her ears instead of her legs. Hepburn on Sharon Stone.

 #  He is racist, he’s homophobic, he’s xenophobic and he’s a sexist. He’s the perfect Republican candidate. Bill Press (about Pat Buchanan)

# I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up. Groucho Marx

#  He couldn’t ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner. Johnny Carson (about Chevy Chase)

#  Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts.  Clive James

 #  Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points; why, God Almighty has only Ten! Georges Clemenceau on Woodrow Wilson

#  Michael Jackson’s album was only called “Bad” because there wasn’t enough room on the sleeve for “Pathetic.” The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (about Michael Jackson)

#  Fame has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddy pool. Bill Maher

#  He hasn’t just lost the plot, he’s lost the whole library!  Melody Maker (about Michael Jackson, 1992)

#  Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband’s penis, which explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee. Conan O’Brien

#  Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.  Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye

#  History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford, and Nixon — See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil. Robert J. Dole

#  It all makes sense after 14 pints. Everything makes sense after 14 pints. John Redwood looks sane. Michael Portillo looks loyal. After 14 pints, even William Hague looks like a prime minister. Tony Blair after William Hague’s claim that he used to regularly sink 14 pints in the pub.

#  I worship the quicksand he walks in. Art Buchwald (about Richard Nixon)

#  Such a little man could not have made so big a depression. Norman Thomas (about Herbert Hoover)

#  Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow and poisons our literary club for me. I class him among infidel wasps and venomous insects. James Boswell (about Edward Gibbon)

#  The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Percy? Edmund Blackadder to Lord Percy

 #  Like being savaged by a dead sheep. Denis Healey describing an attack by Geoffrey Howe.

 #  He has not a single redeeming defect. Benjamin Disraeli on William Gladstone.

 Finally, you may think cricket is a genteel, boring game…

#  Rodney Marsh….”How’s your wife and my kids…..”
Ian Botham..”The wife’s fine but the kids are retarded…”

# Shane Warne : I’ve waited two years for another chance to humiliate you.
Daryll Cullinan : Looks like you spent it eating.

Mate, if you turn the bat over, you’ll see the instructions on the back!  Merv Hughes to Robin Smith

Quotes about rights

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson

 

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Ayn Rand

 

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight. Bob Marley

 

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law. Lyndon B. Johnson

 

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights. Thomas Sowell

 

If the evens of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it’s that the terrorists can attack us, but they can’t take away what makes us American – our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that. Jon Stewart.

 

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Alexander Solzehnitsyn

 

You don’t have to love them. You just have to respect their rights. Edward Koch

 

Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee. F. Lee Bailey

Art quotes

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. Pablo Picasso

 

There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical as well as intellectual. Attributed to: John Constable English landscape painter.

 

All art is but imitation of nature. Seneca.

 

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet and playwright

 

In free society art is not a weapon…Artists are not engineers of the soul. John Fitzgerald Kennedy

 

Art lives through the imaginations of people who are seeing it. Without that contact there is no art. Keith Haring U.S. painter.

 

To record the manners, ideas, and aspect of the age as I myself saw them—to be a man as well as a painter—in short to create a living art—that is my aim. Gustave Courbet French painter.

 

‘Tis labour in vain to paint a high noon or midday light in your picture, because we have no colours which can sufficiently express it.  Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy, French painter and theorist.

 

Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Julia Cameron

 

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Ernst H. Gombrich English art historian, The Story of Art, 1950.

 

Every man is an artist. Joseph Beuys, German artist.

 

The character of the artist doesn’t enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velazquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can’t see this in his art. Lucian Freud German-born English painter.

 

Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk. Brian Sewell, art critc.

Quotes about drugs

Drug misuse is not a disease; it’s a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgement. Philip K. Dick

 

Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune Giuseppe Garibaldi

 

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Timothy Leary

 

There is only one reason why men become addicted to drugs, they are weak men. Only strong men are cured, and they cure themselves. Martin H. Fischer, German-born U.S. physician and author.

 

Cocaine isn’t habit-forming. I should know—I’ve been using it for years.  Tallulah Bankhead, U.S. actress.

 

Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. Herbert Hoover, U.S. president referring to Prohibition.

 

Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system. P.J. O’Rourke, writer.

 

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, ‘legal’ drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? William Turnbow

 

Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, though it is not certain that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many persons are deliberately made into drug addicts by pushers, who now give likely prospects their first doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legally available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would largely disappear, since the addict could buy from a cheaper source. Milton Friedman

 

The only law the narcoterrorists don’t break is the law of supply and demand. Virgilio Barco Vargas ex-president of Columbia.

 

The idea that the creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time … Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers – common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplough drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2001)

 

A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her. W.C. Fields

 

It’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times. Bill Hicks

A selection of quotes from the last year

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know I love throwing in quotes. Here is a selection from the last year:

It is easy for a well-fed metropolitan with time and money on his hands to talk about dealing with his chronic symptoms with Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese herbal remedies, but if you go those countries where they are all they have, you’ll find them crying out for goof old Western antibiotics, painkillers and all the rest of the modern and expensive pharmacopoeia. A Ugandan dying of AIDS-related tuberculosis doesn’t wanted to be treated with the natural remedies of his forefathers: he wants an aseptic syringe full of antibiotics…  John Diamond

 

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Richard Dawkins

 

A language is a dialect with an army and navy. Anonymous

 

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.  This has sometimes been attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but without a definite citation.

 

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld

 

The palest ink is better than the best memory. Chinese Proverb

 

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Steve Levitt

 

I remember the time Dr Shipman gave to my dad. He would come round at the drop of a hat. He was a marvellous GP. The son of one of Dr Harold Shipman’s patients. Shipman may well have murdered more than 200 of his patients.

 

All political lives, unless they are cut off in mid-stream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.  Enoch Powell

 

Not many moons ago, Monbiot was looked upon by many people as a green-ink eccentric, who was probably given a newspaper column on the same basis that friends of the Marquis de Sade smuggled scraps of paper and pots of ink into his cell in the Charenton insane asylum: because if he’s kept busy writing, he won’t go utterly off his nut. (The chasm-shaped difference between the Marquis and Monbiot, of course, is that the former wrote some brilliant stuff that nobody was allowed to read, while the latter writes inane copy that one can hardly escape.) Spiked on George Monbiot

 

The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many sceptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive. Prestigious economist Paul Samuelson in an economics textbook published in 1988, one year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

 

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity? Steve Polyak

 

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it. Robert Stetson, an American physicist, one of the pioneers of chaos theory

 

In an era of faceless organisations owned by other equally faceless organisations Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: the owner’s name is on the door. From  the company website.

 

Karl Marx was right, socialism works; it is just that he had the wrong species. Edward O. Wilson suggesting that communism would have been more suitable for ants.

 

America, based on the premise of absolute equality, has one of the most extremely unequal divisions of wealth in the world. Japan, based on the premise of inequality, is one of the most egalitarian societies of all. Alan Macfarlane, anthropologist.

 

When I hear the word culture – I release the safety-catch of my Browning. Said by a character from the play Schlageter, written by Nazi playwright Hanns Johst

 

The common thread that binds nearly all animal species seems to be that males are willing to abandon all sense and decorum, even to risk their lives, in the frantic quest for sex. Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer

 

We all know how stupid the average person is. Now realize that, by definition, fifty percent of the population is dumber than that. Ivan Stang 

 

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.  H. L. Mencken

                       

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Lionel Robbins

 

The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.  Will Durant

 

Languages deal with and describe the natural world, a world which is so complex that any individual attempt to describe it, and make sense of it, can only capture part of it. In order to survive, each individual must make some sense of his environment, most fundamentally by acquiring a language. But the language of each individual (his idiolect) only functions effectively if it forms part of a wider structure such as the language of a group, a region or a nation. So our languages are complex decentralised mechanisms for transmitting information. And we use them confidently without much explicit understanding of their structure or of how they develop.  Dr John Marks

 

There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises. Economist Paul Krugman.

 

I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!  Barry Goldwater

 

Most of economics can be summarised in four words. People respond to incentives. The rest is commentary.  Steven Landsburg

 

That woman speaks eight languages and can’t say no in any of them. Dorothy Parker

Some quotes on television

All life’s answers are on TV. Homer Simpson.

 

How can you put on a meaningful drama when, every fifteen minutes, proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?  Rod Serling

 

I find television to be very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.  Groucho Marx

 

If you came and you found a strange man… teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you’d kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don’t think twice about it.  Jerome Singer

 

Today, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language – and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.  Donna Gephart

 

They say that ninety percent of TV is junk.  But, ninety percent of everything is junk.  Gene Roddenberry

 

Time has convinced me of one thing.  Television is for appearing on, not looking at.  Noel Coward

 

Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.  Clive Barnes

 

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. Ray Bradbury

 

The idea that the media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that’s about tenth or eleventh on their list. The first purpose of the media is to sell us shit. Abbie Hoffman

 

Television: chewing gum for the eyes.  Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.  Alfred Hitchcock

 

Ninety-eight percent of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence.  Gene Baylos

 

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.  Andrew Ross

 

Theatre is life.  Cinema is art.  Television is furniture.  Author Unknown

 

Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home. David Frost

 

So I bought a .44 magnum, it was solid steel cast

And in the blessed name of Elvis well I just let it blast

‘Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet

And they busted me for disturbin’ the almighty peace

Judge said “What you got in your defense son?”

“Fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on”

Fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on Bruce Springsteen

Philosophy quotes

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates

 

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know. Bertrand Russell

 

Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum. (I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am) Rene Descartes

 

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honourably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly. Epicurus

 

Philosophy is the stray camel of the faithful; take hold of it wherever ye come across it. Muhammad

 

In this war of every man against every man; nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues. Thomas Hobbes

 

Man is condemned to be free. Jean Paul Sartre

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. William Shakespeare

 

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. Karl Popper

 

Philosophy is the highest music. Plato

 

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. Karl Marx

 

 

 

 

Some movie one-liners

Here is a list of some classic movie one-liners:

 

Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself. A Fish Called Wanda

At my signal, unleash Hell  Gladiator

Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do you? Dirty Harry

Face it, girls, I’m older and I have more insurance. Fried Green Tomatoes

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn Gone With The Wind

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!  Dr Strangelove

Go ahead, make my day Sudden Impact

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good Wall Street

Hasta la vista, baby.  Terminator 2

Here’s Johnny! The Shining

Houston, we have a problem Apollo 13

I am big…it’s the pictures that got small. Sunset Boulevard

I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner. The Silence of the Lambs

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.  Apocalypse Now

I see dead people The Sixth Sense

I’m the king of the world. Titanic

I’ll be back The Terminator

I’ll have what she’s having When Harry Met Sally

I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse. The Godfather

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! Network

I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way. Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I’m not going to be ignored, Dan.  Fatal Attraction

Infamy, infamy! They’ve all got it in for me! Carry on Cleo

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.  Arsenic and Old Lace

Look at me, jerking off in the shower… This will be the high point of my day; it’s all downhill from here.  American Beauty

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Casablanca

My mama always said life was like a box a chocolates, never know what you’re gonna get.  Forrest Gump

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. The African Queen

Remember, you’re fighting for this woman’s honour, which is probably more than she ever did. Duck Soup

Say hello to my little friend.  Scarface

Show me the money! Jerry Macguire

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The Usual Suspects

They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom! Braveheart

Well, nobody’s perfect. Some Like it Hot

We’re on a mission from God The Blues Brothers

You can’t handle the truth A Few Good Men

You don’t understand, I could’ve been somebody, I could have been a contender On The Waterfront

You talkin’ to me? Taxi Driver

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Food quotes

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.  Anthelme Brillat-Savarin French politician, gastronome, and writer.

 

One should eat to live, and not live to eat. Molière, French playwright.

 

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch. James Beard, U.S. chef and author.

 

We are assaulted by conflicting information about food which appears in the press or on radio and which exposes us to passing fads and fancies. Dilys Wells, British nutritionist.

 

Hunger is the best sauce in the world. Cervantes

 

On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners. George Mikes, Hungarian-born British writer and humorist.

 

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Writer Michael Pollan’s advice on eating.

 

And I find chopsticks frankly distressing.  Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven’t yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?  Bill Bryson

 

I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal.  Martha Harrison

 

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.  W. C. Fields

 

How can you expect to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese?  Charles de Gaulle.

 

 

 

 

Quotes by Richard Dawkins

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

 

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

 

Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

     

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

 

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

 

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

 

Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them. We do so in a small way every time we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.

 

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.

 

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

 

Over the centuries, we’ve moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We’ve evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don’t approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion.

 

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

 

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science

 

There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting… But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it’s true.

 

I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful.

 

Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn’t. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some “alternative” sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double blind trials, statistically analysed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as “orthodox” medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The “alternative” label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

 

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

 

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

 

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. Of course, excellent organizations already exist for raising funds and deploying them in service of reason, science and enlightenment values. But the money that these organizations can raise is dwarfed by the huge resources of religious foundations such as the Templeton Foundation, not to mention the tithe-bloated, tax-exempt churches.

 

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.