She Saw The Best In Everybody

Have I seen this level of sexist culture in other countries?
It hasn’t been so in your face, so pervasive.
( Rashida Manjoo, UN official, says that Britain is the most sexist country she has seen )

I cannot sit here day after day watching misery and doing nothing.
( UK High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge quits in despair at the divorce rate and the breakdown of family life )

A Failure To Rise Up Will See Us Enslaved.
We have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity.
We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free.
And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us.
The structures of the corporate state must be torn down.
Its security apparatus must be destroyed.
And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of mainstream political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power.
Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope.
A failure to rise up – which is what the corporate state is counting upon – will see us enslaved.
( Chris Hedges )

She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and most bonkers of all of us.
What a beautiful child.
How is this possible that we will not see her again?
( Bob Geldof, after the death of his daughter Peaches )

She saw the best in me.
She saw the best in everybody.
She wouldn’t think they couldn’t make something of their lives.
( Ann Maguire’s former pupil Cain Thewlis, after the Leeds teacher was stabbed to death in the classroom )

I’m not a Christian but I want to live in a Christian country as I believe that it is the best guarantor of my freedom and the freedom of others.
( Julie Burchill )

Prince Charles Sent His Sons To Eton.
What a pity that Prince Charles did not try to send his sons to state grammar schools instead of to Eton, a school everyone associates with money and privilege.
Yes, I can see the difficulties, but it would have been a beautiful way of skewering the socialist hypocrites who claim to be the friends of the poor.
In one action, he could have put the Crown clearly on the side of the people against a bone-headed and unfeeling government – which is where the Monarchy should always be.
And he could have given enormous help to a cause that will, in my view, one day triumph – the noble battle (now raging for almost 50 years) to make good education available once again to the sons and daughters of the poor.
( Peter Hitchens, 06.07.2014 )

Not so much the Wolf of Wall Street, more the Dunce of Downing Street.
( Ed Miliband, after the UK Prime Minister sold Royal Mail far too cheaply )

I am excited about the ageing process.
I am more interested in women who are not perfect.
( Emma Watson )

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
( Katherine Hepburn )

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
( Emily Dickinson )

Most Americans don’t realise that, decades ago, the Democrats instituted a long-term plan to gradually turn the United States into a Third World nation.
The country would become poorer and less free, but Democrats would have an unbeatable majority.
( Ann Coulter )

People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance, they live, they love, and they die.
And that matters.
That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.
( Elizabeth Warren )

If you scoff at intellectuals, harass scientists, and reward only athletic achievements, then the future is very dark indeed.
( J.F. Kennedy )

Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana Heyday.
Based in LA during Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana heyday, I often saw him out and about with his wife Courtney Love, who desperately hogged the limelight as he sheepishly looked on.
They appeared a mismatched pair to me.
In 1994, I reported on his suicide, aged 27.
This week a note found at the death scene was revealed in which Cobain calls his wife ‘a bitch with zits’ who siphoned his money ‘for doping and whoring’.
Tragic.
But not at all surprising.
( Fiona Phillips, 03.05.2014 )

The sons of a property tycoon walked free after they admitted attacking two off-duty policemen.
George Panayiotou, 26, and Costa, 24, whose father Andreas is worth about £400million, left one officer needing metal plates in his cheek and eye socket.
( Daily Mirror, 03.05.2014 )

Conservatism is the dread fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.

Those times when I get a bit paranoid and think I’m going a bit mad and need to see somebody who knows about mad people to tell me that I’m not.
( Lily Allen )

That’s The Way It Is With The Tories.
A new Eurostat survey this week revealed that the people of Cornwall and the Welsh Valleys are worse off than Poles, Lithuanians and Hungarians.
Families in West Wales and the Valleys are only half as wealthy as those in Germany.
And folk in Durham and Lincolnshire fare little better with the same living standard as Estonians and Polish peasants.
Eight areas of the UK, including Lancashire, Leicestershire and Staffs, are poorer than any region in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Ireland.
This is the legacy of 35 years of Thatcherism, carried forward by her bastard political children.
Nor have attitudes changed since that fateful day in 1979.
Tory candidate Carl Husted, standing for elections to the council in Wolverhampton, this week described local people as “scum” who should be abandoned to kill one another.
I remember despairing jobless lads throwing themselves off the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle at the height of Mrs T’s reign.
She abandoned them, and they killed themselves.
She died last year, a rich old woman loaded with honours, in a private suite in the Ritz Hotel, London.
That’s the way it is with the Tories.
( Paul Routledge, 09.05.2014 )

A City firm which advised ministers against raising the Royal Mail share offer price had a ‘golden ticket’ to cash in on the sell-off.
Lazard used its preferred buyer status to snap up six million shares, which were sold at a £8million profit.
( James Lyons, 01.05.2014 )

Joanna Lumley took 37 takes to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio?
I bet she wangled that.
( Dame Julie Andrews )

We just have one life.
Let’s keep it simple.
( Florence Emily Hookins )

I came into this business uneducated, dyslexic, 5ft 6in, cubic, with a face like a squashed cabbage, and they welcomed me with open arms.
( Bob Hoskins )

Some people we meet were dropped on their heads as babies.
Some were clearly thrown in the air and hit the ceiling fan.
Then bounced off the wall and fell out the window.

The Tory obsession with privatisation is unabated.
Mrs Thatcher flogged off gas, water and electricity.
John Major sold the coal industry and the railways.
Cameron undersold Royal Mail and is privatising the NHS and public services as fast as he can.
( Paul Routledge, 09.05.2014 )

In A Few Years It All Went.
I have stopped believing in free trade.
If we cannot keep out goods produced by sweatshops in Canton (and I have seen these awful places) how long before we, too, are reduced to the same living standards?
When I was a child there was almost nothing we used that wasn’t made here, from the cutlery in the kitchen and the tools in the shed to my third-hand bicycle, not to mention all our food (apart from the New Zealand lamb and butter) and clothes.
When we spent our money, most of it went to our fellow Britons.
Then, in a few years, it all went.
I still recall my father’s shame and misery at even contemplating buying a foreign car.
He gave in in the end, but never really got used to it.
The ironmongers still tried to sell solid British tools, but they were ludicrously costly compared to the foreign imports beside them.
Why was the old arrangement wrong, and the new one better?
Is protection really so wicked?
No doubt it would make life more expensive, but for a good purpose.
As people who barely make anything but buy a great deal, can we expect our current standard of living to last?
We are visibly becoming a land of cheap labour, debt, insecure jobs and over-crowded housing.
( Peter Hitchens, 11.05.2014 )

Taking care of our veterans is a cost of war.
If you can spend six trillion dollars sending people to war, you can spend a few billion dollars taking care of them when they come home.
( Bernie Sanders )

My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh.
But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.
( Charlie Chaplin )

It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that’.
As if that gives them certain rights.
It’s actually nothing more than a whine.
‘I find that offensive’ – It has no meaning, it has no purpose.
It has no reason to be respected as a phrase.
‘I am offended by that’ – Well, so f++k++g what!
( Stephen Fry )

There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
( C.S. Lewis )

If you can get your head around your dream it means your dream isn’t big enough.
( Victoria Beckham )

You learn a lot about yourself doing physical work.
And what I learnt was I didn’t like doing physical work.
( Rod Stewart )

In A Few Years It Destroyed A Century Of Experience.
The privatisation of the railways was done against the advice of everyone who knew anything about the subject.
Quite predictably, it cost far more in subsidies than the old nationalised system.
In a few years it destroyed more than a century of experience in safety and track maintenance.
It finished off most of what was left of our train manufacture.
All the claims made for it are bogus.
Passenger numbers increased not because of privatisation but in spite of it, as more and more people were forced by unhinged house prices to commute vast distances to work – and could only do so by train.
For many years, investment in such things as electrification almost ceased.
The trains I ride daily are 1970s antiques that ought to be in the National Railway Museum at York.
It is bitterly funny to record that Network Rail, successor to the disastrous Railtrack, is now officially classified as a ‘government body’ and its debts of £30billion are part of the national debt.
( Peter Hitchens, 11.05.2014 )

I see the flaws, but I see what’s great more.
And I’ve got a banging body.
( Minnie Driver )

You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
( Daniel C. Dennett )

If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age.
( Winston Churchill, 1940 )

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
( Mahatma Gandhi )

The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
( C.S. Lewis )

Just Be Good, And Just Do Good.
When a bird is alive, it eats ants.
When the bird is dead, ants eat the bird.
Time and circumstances can change at any time.
Don’t devalue or hurt anyone in life.
You may be powerful today.
But remember…
Time is more powerful than you.
One tree makes a million matchsticks.
Only one matchstick is needed to burn down a million trees.
So just be good, and just do good.
( Karma )

Blair And Cameron Are Like Advertising Men.
The important thing is to realise we are making a very similar mistake now.
The same sort of people who managed the Blair fraud long ago gave up on him, and started work on the Cameron fraud instead.
These people are like advertising men stuck with a product that is no good, a car that breaks down, a soap that crumbles into powdery grease when it touches water, a foodstuff that tastes disgusting and cleaves to the tongue.
Yet they have signed a contract to promote it.
At all costs they must keep the consumer from seeing the truth until after he has bought the merchandise.
One way of doing this is to spread negative stories about rival products.
( Peter Hitchens, 29.06.2014 )