Fear And Insecurity Created By The Beauty Industry

We live in a society where women are treated like cut flowers that wilt, whereas men are like fine wines – as they age they get better.
( Charlize Theron )

My eyesight started to go about the same time as the elasticity in my face.
I just see a blur and it’s fantastic.
As long as I don’t put my glasses on, I’m good.
( Elle Macpherson )

I want a man who has a massive pair of balls – not physically but mentally.
He needs to have bigger balls than me without feeling the need to prove that he has bigger balls.
It’s important that he accepts that I have balls, too.
( Tulisa Contostavios )

You can learn so much from bad things.
I feel boring.
I feel like, why is everything so easy for me?
( Kristen Stewart, May 2012 )

Telling The Truth And Doing Good In Society.
Children used to be taught the difference between good and evil.
They were taught to do the right thing, not because of fear of the consequences of being found out, but because the right thing is the good thing to do.
We no longer teach our young about morals and values.
Doing so is sneered at by many who deny the very existence of goodness and virtue.
Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, suffocating in hatred, want to destroy faith.
Religious education, meanwhile, has been all but emptied out of schools, apart from faith schools.
All great faiths have at their core teaching about loving others, telling the truth and doing good in society.
Take this element away from schools, and fail to replace it with strong moral education, and you undermine the foundations of good schooling, and society.
Our young get their values from a daily diet of dubious celebrities and television programmes, full of excess, violence and infidelity.
( Anthony Seldon, Headmaster of Wellington College )

Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams.
If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you any more.
( Lady Gaga )

Unlike Cheryl Cole and the girls, I have co-written seven of my album tracks.
I fail to see how that means I have copied their sound.
I mean, I haven’t resorted to wearing short skirts and dating a footballer to get into the charts.
( Charlotte Church on Girls Aloud )

Charlotte Church is a nasty little piece of work with a fat head.
I don’t know who she and her scabby boyfriend think they are.
He’s a posing idiot who looks like a girl.
And she’s not even gorgeous.
( Cheryl Cole )

Never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome.
Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience.
And if it hurts, you know what?
It’s probably worth it.
( Leonardo DiCaprio )

A Fight That May Last For The Rest Of Their Lives.
It would be wrong of me to speak for these heroes, but not presumptuous of me to pay tribute to them.
So many of our servicemen and women have made the ultimate sacrifice.
So many lives have been lost and so many changed forever by the wounds that they have suffered in the course of their duties.
They have paid a terrible price to keep us safe and free.
The very least we owe them is to make sure that they and their brave families have everything they need through their darkest days and, in time, regain the hope and confidence to flourish again.
For these selfless people, it is after the guns have fallen silent, the din of battle quietened, that the real fight begins – and it is a fight that may last for the rest of their lives.
( Prince Harry )

Do something that, when you wake up every day, makes you smile.
Being happy is more important than anything else.
( Alesha Dixon )

Be nice to people.
If you can’t say anything nice about a person, don’t say anything.
( Emma Watson )

Don’t be boring and dress cute wherever you go.
Life is too short to blend in.
( Paris Hilton )

My father used to tell me, ‘Goldie, when you feel too big for your britches, just go stand in front of that big ocean and feel how small you are’.
He was right.
( Goldie Hawn )

There Are So Few People In Public Life That We Can Admire.
The political class has been letting us down for years, breaking promises, lying and consorting with dodgy people.
Banking chiefs, professional sportsmen and celebrities all too rarely offer anything by way of an edifying example.
Throughout history, man has looked to religious authorities for moral leadership at times of crisis, but the Church of England is locked into a civil war over sex, while its leader has chosen this moment to throw in the towel.
The Catholic Church, meanwhile, has critically wounded itself by failing to be candid over paedophilia within its ranks.
Judaism offers a rare example of moral leadership in Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks – the most persuasive religious figure in Britain today.
The frightening truth is that there are so few people in public life who we can admire.
( Anthony Seldon, Headmaster of Wellington College )

Partings are the beginnings of new meetings.
Beginnings happen because there are endings.
( Natsuki Takaya )

Live it well and this life can be grand. 
( Amelia Atwater-Rhodes )

What you are or where you came from is not important.
It is who you are and the choices you make, that determine who you will become.
If you can look inward and be satisfied, the opinions of others should melt away. 
( J.D. Stroube )

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
( Sir George Bernard Shaw )

I Was Writing For My Life.
There’s a time in everyone’s life when you have to make a choice – and it’s true whether you are privileged or disadvantaged.
I was fed up of being so self-destructive, and fed up with not seeing my mum for months.
I felt lonely and ashamed.
I told my father everything and he said, ‘Do you want to change?’
One day I went back to the flat and picked up the guitar.
It was the weirdest feeling.
I just held it, stayed with it for ages and started writing Ebenezer Hotel.
I felt like I was becoming the person I was before.
It was just amazing working with my mind again, feeling creative and being productive.
There’s no more beautiful feeling than creation.
I had the same feeling when I did bricklaying, building barbecues and sheds.
With music it’s even better because it comes from a deeper place.
It just makes you feel alive.
I was chasing that feeling through writing, just like someone would do with a drug, really.
Every time I finished a song I felt super peaceful and alive.
I actually felt I was writing for my life.
( Josh Osho )

I don’t miss you.
I miss the person I thought you were.
( Rose Winfold )

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
( Sir Winston Churchill )

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
( Oscar Wilde )

Comedy is a serious business.
A serious business with only one purpose – to make people laugh.
( W C Fields )

Fear And Insecurity Created By The Beauty Industry.
Imagine walking into that beauty salon on the high street, laying on the couch and the woman in the fake nurse’s outfit starting her spiel: “Now, if you just lie there I’m going to rub sheep’s afterbirth on your cheeks. If that doesn’t work I’ve got some bird droppings we can smear over you”.
What?
You’d be out the door in seconds.
But not it seems Victoria Beckham and other wealthy delusionals in Los Angeles who are paying up to £320 to have sheep placenta facials (and not any old placentas either, they’re flown in specially from New Zealand where they’ve been untouched by the modern world).
Victoria is also apparently a big fan of ‘nightingale poop’ treatments too.
Nice.
But it’s not just Victoria.
Simon Cowell has taken to breathing canned oxygen and Demi Moore has used leeches to purify her blood.
All to stay young.
It’s the ultimate proof that you can have more money than sense.
So why have we all been suckered into frittering away our hard-earned money on treatments which might have some minor effect in the short term but can never actually stop the clock?
And how come someone as supposedly savvy as Victoria Beckham falls for such horse (or in this case sheep) shit?
It’s fear of course – fear that with every forming wrinkle we become a little more invisible in a youth-obsessed world.
It’s a fear and insecurity created by beauty industry bosses who have worked very hard to take away the joy that used to come with ageing, of wrinkles that bore witness to triumphs and tragedies, and laughter lines that showed a life truly lived.
Surely after 15 years and four kids Victoria can’t be so insecure that she thinks bird mess is the only thing standing between herself and being traded in by David for a younger model?
Sadly, it looks that way.
( Alison Phillips )

Never make someone a priority if they only make you an option.
( Rose Winfold )

A good deed never goes unpunished.
( Gore Vidal )

The teenage years…
That time in life when you show your individuality by looking like everyone else.
( Dion Felsrow )

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
( Oscar Wilde )

Simon Cowell Likes To Think Of Himself As James Bond.
From the evidence presented in this overlong book, Simon Cowell is both a bit dull and a bit odd, with precious little in between.
His oddity is largely confined to his cosmetic regime.
Apparently, he travels everywhere with two large suitcases containing any amount of special face-creams, eyedrops, milk lotions, bath salts and so forth.
He swallows a saucerful of tablets daily, and has vitamins injected into his body once a week.
Twice a year, he is injected with Botox.
His chest is waxed, his teeth capped, his hair dyed.
Nor does the bottom half of his body pass untended.
Until he was 36 years old, Simon Cowell was one of the also-rans and hangers-on with which the record business is stuffed.
In X Factor terms, he was one of those talent-free first-round losers whom he nowadays delights in cutting down to size.
He had been given countless leg-ups by his father, who was a cigar-toting, E-Type-driving director of EMI Records, but young Simon was somehow so incompetent that everything he touched turned to dust.
He became famous when he appeared as a judge on Pop Idol.
What of Cowell’s sex life?
Tom Bower, author of the book, provides a dutiful inventory of the former lap-dancers and topless models Cowell has courted, but most of their time seems to have been taken up with borrowing his make-up.
Cowell likes to think of himself as James Bond, but on this evidence he is rather closer to Benny Hill.
( Craig Brown )

Clothes make the man.
Naked people have little or no influence on society.
( Mark Twain )

Anyone who tells you to be yourself is giving you really bad advice.
( Len Firswood )

When I go to a party, some people make me really happy.
By not being there.
( Rose Winfold )

The Most Ill-Mannered Brat Ever To Be Reared In Brooklyn.
Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943.
His father’s identity is uncertain.
The two possible candidates, Gerhardt Fischer and Paul Nemenyi, were both physicists.
His mother worked hard and moved Bobby and his sister around a great deal.
In 1950 they settled in Brooklyn.
Bobby was a remarkable but difficult child.
He had a very high IQ but no interest in academic work.
At the age of six he discovered chess and immediately showed great promise.
The tall, toothy prodigy became World Chess Champion at the age of 29 after beating the Russian Boris Spassky in Reykjavik.
It was a major victory for America during the Cold War and for American chess in an age of Soviet dominance, but no triumph for the reputation of Fischer’s manners.
During the match, he made numerous demands and complaints, prompting the Daily Mail to call him ‘quite certainly the most ill-mannered temperamental and neurotic brat ever to be reared in Brooklyn’.
The Spassky match was one of the greatest of all time, but it marked the end of Fischer’s career.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
( Oscar Wilde )

When I look at some people.
I get this strong desire to be lonesome.
( Dion Felsrow )

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
( Mark Twain )

We Must Start With Our Young People.
If we want to know where to start reviving the community, the workplace, the economy, start with our young people.
Start with enabling the young to move out of the indifference of the circumstances they are born into.
To somewhere where they can cash in on their youth and not find themselves kicking their heels.
I know it’s not an easy task to take disaffected youths and get them moving.
As a former disaffected youth I can remember the attempts that were made to draw me into doing something with my life.
But we will have to make the big investment in youth, either in their betterment or in protecting the rest of society because we have allowed them to go off.
I would put the money on turning the young around.
Or else we will lose them for ever.
( John Bird, August 2012 )