Christopher Hitchens - Quotes

 Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where 

Tags: ancestry   antisemitism   arabs   armageddon   bedouin   bolshevism   britain   christianity   colonialism   crimea   democracy   diplomacy   fanaticism   france   history   israel   jerusalem   jews   leftism   london   oppression   palestine   palestinians   persecution   ramallah   russia   secularism     


Alexander McCall Smith - Quotes

 Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom... 

Tags: boredom   death   england   london   suburbia     
Christopher Hitchens - Quotes

 I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.



Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral. 

Tags: baghdad   cowardice   imperialism   iraq   iraqis   london   mendacity   prejudice   vandalism     


Bette Midler - Quotes

 When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London.  

Tags: humor   london     
Boris Johnson - Quotes

 In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I think of those millions of poor put-upon parents who must now pay to fly to Orlando and pay to buy wizard hats and wizard cloaks and wizard burgers washed down with wizard meade_STmk, the more I grind my teeth in jealous irritation.



Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King's Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other 

Tags: americanism   britain   britishism   hogwarts   london   orlando   wizards     
Maureen Dowd - Quotes

 McChrystal never should have been hired for this job given the outrageous cover-up he participated in after the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. He was lucky to keep the job after his 'Seven Days in May' stunt in London last year when he openly lobbied and undercut the president on the surge.



But with the latest sassing, and the continued Sisyphean nature of the surge he urged, McChrystal should offer his resignation. He should try subordination for a change. 

Tags: coverups   insubordination   london   obama   sassing   speeches     
Virginia Woolf - Quotes

 One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry. 

Tags: london   party   revelry   sunset     
T.S. Eliot - Quotes

 Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson!

You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,

Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere! 

Tags: death   fear   humanity   london     
Jeffrey Eugenides - Quotes

 Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. 

Tags: culture   design   detroit   london   money   paris   rome     
Jack London - Quotes

 Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past. 

Tags: jack   london   tattoo     
Christopher Hitchens - Quotes

 I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know him. He was a brave and decent man, who in a series of articles in the London Times had floated the first-ever trial balloon for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. 'Well tell him he is a traitor,' barked my host. 'And tell him we have only one way with those who betray us.' The rest of the interview passed as so many Middle Eastern interviews do: too many small cups of coffee served with too much fuss; too many unemployed heavies standing about with nothing to do and nobody to do it with; too much ugly furniture, too many too-bright electric lights; and much too much faux bonhomie. The only political fact I could winnow, from Abu Nidal's vainglorious claims to control X number of 'fighters' in Y number of countries, was that he admired the People's Republic of China for not recognizing the State of Israel. I forget how I got out of his office. 

Tags: arafat   china   interviews   iraq   israel   london   palestine   politics     
Christopher Hitchens - Quotes

 In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement. 

Tags: atheism   christianity   humility   london   palestine   religion   rushdie     
Boris Johnson - Quotes

 I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London. 

Tags: britain   crime   london   orlando     
Samuel Johnson - Quotes

 When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. 

Tags: london     
Peter Shaffer - Quotes

 If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. 

Tags: london     
David Thewlis - Quotes

 I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It's freezing and it starts to rain and it's the ugliest bus I've ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds. 

Tags: london   ugly     
Thomas Moore - Quotes

 Go where we may, rest where we will,

Eternal London haunts us still. 

Tags: london   sentimental     
Arthur Conan Doyle - Quotes

 I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. 

Tags: holmes   laziness   london   watson     
Peter Ackroyd - Quotes

 Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?

And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.

Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?

And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more. 

Tags: death   dust   history   london   time     
Thomas Moore - Quotes

 Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it. 

Tags: london     
Geoff Nicholson - Quotes

 Your own exploration therefore has to be personalized; you're doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.  

Tags: london     
Wendy Cope - Quotes

 On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,

the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.

I wipe them away with a black woolly glove

And try not to notice I've fallen in love



On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:

This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.

But the juke-box inside me is playing a song

That says something different. And when was it wrong?



On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair

I am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.

the head does its best but the heart is the boss-

I admit it before I am halfway across 

Tags: london   love   poetry     
Nick Hornby - Quotes

 I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at nay time of the day r year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they've come to represent the trumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain. 

Tags: england   humor   london     


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