English Quotes - page 90
He [Nicolas Malebranche] cannot give up the principles which the Catholic Church imposes on him. He carries forward that process of rationalisation in Christian ethics which Descartes began, and which, like the attempt to restore an older theology, finds its fulfilment in Spinoza. It is Spinoza who is the first to create a wholly metaphysical ethics, free from all trace of its theological origin. Spinoza thus completes for continental ethics the separation between morality and religion which English empiricism, in spite of many relapses, had effected under the leadership of Bacon.
Baruch Spinoza
The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.
Julian Assange
I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all.
Vladimir Nabokov
I attacked the English of the Northern Shires like a lion. I ordered their houses and corn, with all their belongings, to be burnt without exception and large herds of cattle and beasts of burden to be destroyed wherever they were found. It was there I took revenge on masses of people by subjecting them to a cruel famine; and by doing so - alas!- I became the murderer of many thousands of that fine race.
William I of England
Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. ... In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Sound is the connecting energy to our African past. When thrown into the Middle Passage and the babble of languages, then given this foreign language, English, that had to be learned by ear in this foreign land, Africans, even though they spoke different languages, found a connection and an umbrella culture emerging from the different ethnic groups thrown together by the brutal rubric of enslavement.
Ifa Bayeza
There is a persistent current that flows along undermining the integrity and motives of individuals, organisations and institutions. An insidious impression is thereby created that, for instance, the police are corrupt, British justice is flawed, the BBC is moribund and public servants are time-serving wasters of taxpayers' money. Can we really believe the fashionable theorists in the English faculties of our universities who have tried to tear apart many of our wonderful novelists, poets and playwrights because they do not fit their abstruse theories of the day?
Charles III
If such men lose, in the issue, their property, they are themselves alone to blame. By deserting the first and most sacred of duties, the duty to their country, they have incurred a wilful forfeiture; by disdaining to occupy the station they might have held among the people and which the people would have been glad to see them fill, they left a vacancy to be seized by those who had more courage, more sense and more honesty; and not only so, but by this base and interested desertion they furnished their enemies with every argument of justice, policy and interest to enforce the system of confiscation... The best that can be said in palliation of the conduct of the English party is that they are content to sacrifice the liberty and independence of their country to the pleasure of revenge and their own personal security. They see Ireland only in their rent rolls, their places, their patronage and their pensions.
Theobald Wolfe Tone
They were the final blow that brought down that whole planned structure. The great English reform movement of the 19th century consisted wholly in repealing laws. There was nothing constructive in it; it was wholly destructive. It was a destruction of Government's interference with human affairs, a destruction of the so-called ‘protection' that is actually a restriction of the exercise of natural human rights. In that mid-19th-century period of the greatest individual freedom that Englishmen have ever known, they made the prosperity and power of the British Empire during Victoria's long and peaceful reign. And to that freedom, and prosperity and power and peace, the American clipper ship contributed more than any other one thing.
Rose Wilder Lane
I think he was the first man I met who was not afraid of me in some way. We were very similar, like brother and sister. Our spirits are similar. We were the same height and the same age, almost ... He was well read and he introduced me to William Blake and also the English Romantic poets who came after him. Jim liked Shelley. I preferred Coleridge. In fact, he is my favoured poet of all time. Did you know they were all drug addicts? Coleridge was addicted to opium. It is better to be addicted to opium than to be addicted to money.
Nico
Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.
Roger Scruton
Scholes was probably the best English midfielder since Bobby Charlton. Since I have been in England, Paul Gascoigne was the best of those who could lift you from your seat. In his last few years, Paul Scholes elevated himself above Gascoigne. One, for longevity, and two, for improving himelf in his thirties.
He was such a brilliant long passer that he could choose a hair on the head of any team-mate answering the call of nature at our training ground. Gary Neville once thought he had found refuge in a bush, but Scholesy found him from 40 yeards. He inflicted a similar long-range missile strike, once, on Peter Schmeichel, and was chased round the training ground for his impertinence. Scholesy would have made a first class-sniper.
Paul Scholes
...the real truth. Now, you must have heard that the English – or as they are better known the Englishmen – took away our country, the Transvaal, or, as they say, annexed it. We then talked nicely for four years, and begged for our country. But no; when an Englishman once has your property in his hand, then is he like a monkey that has its hands full of pumpkin-seeds - if you don't beat him to death, he will never let go – and then all our nice talk for four years did not help us at all. Then the English commenced to arrest us because we were dissatisfied, and that caused the shooting and fighting. Then the English first found that it would be better to give us back our country. Now they are gone, and our country is free, ...
Piet Joubert
My readers understand now something of the nature of a false position. I hope they will never know one experimentally. Should they unfortunately become entangled with one, they had better not flounder along in it till they are carried they know not whither, but adopt the practice of French and English statesmen, who, immediately on the happening of such a dilemma, submit to what they call a ministerial crisis, and quietly resign their official posts. An occasion of this kind has just transpired in France. ...They wisely chose the latter evil, and retired covered with glory for the great things they would have accomplished had the king only permitted them to carry forward their grand designs: thus the ministers preserve their credit the nation its peace.
Alexander Bryan Johnson
I wouldn't want to be labelled a Woman Writer even though I'm definitely not a man. And I think Scottish Writer has some unfortunate associations.
Last century when I was commissioned to write my first novel, Scottish writers were being bullied by a purple nosed publisher to write in dialect. Well my voice is authentically Scottish. I'm an educated Scottish person who escaped. My voice is as valid as a whiny cunt who lives in a council flat and doesn't quite speak English. That doesn't mean I have to sound like Evelyn Waugh either.
I'd like to be called a Good Writer. To quote a review on Amazon, "Carole Morin is a Fucking Genius. Fact." Fucking Genius will do.
Carole Morin
He had a reservoir of learning, from which he drew gracefully and effortlessly. But the most marked quality of his judicial and non-judicial writing was not the ability to borrow an apt quotation or to find an idea well expressed by one who had written before him; it was the ability to think brilliantly in original and bold fashion and to express his thoughts in forceful and eloquent English of a style inimitably his own. His writing was pithy and pungent; yet he never sacrificed clarity of thought for a well-turned phrase. He was a master of the paradox; he had a great love of alliteration and his antithetical statements were gems. Yet his wit never descended to the frivolous; it always added a barb to the telling point. His wit was especially telling when turned upon himself or his Court.
Robert H. Jackson
Ascending to the next group of rocks, we find the traces of life become more abundant, the number of species extended, and important additions made in certain vestiges of fuci, or sea plants, and of fishes. This group of rocks has been called by English geologists, the Silurian System, because largely developed at the surface of a district of western England, formerly occupied by a people whom the Roman historians call Silures.
Robert Chambers (publisher born 1802)
I thought, 'I have been through this process before'...When I was 13 years old I came from Puerto Rico to the United States not knowing any English. What I did at that time was I went to the public library, and I would go to the children's book section where there would be alphabet books and everything would be illustrated. So it was very easy to connect the words to the images. I said, ‘I'm just going to do the same thing. If I did it once before, I can do it again.'
Esmeralda Santiago
