Scourge Quotes
The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,- sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.
Francis Parkman
We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good - have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. ..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.
Emil Cioran
My dad, Ron Brand, was an entrepreneurial Essex man, Del Boy'd up to the hilt on Thatcher's creed. He was a self-made and self-destructive man and intermittently tumbled either side of the line. The prevailing mentality of the time, the eighties, was "every man for himself.” Unions were crushed, state interests were carved up and flogged, and council houses were sold back to the people whose efforts had built them. One of the great venture-capitalist heroes of this time, who epitomized this buccaneering spirit, was Sir James Goldsmith, Tory hero, Thatcher crush, scourge of Private Eye, and demon of the left. My dad and a lot of people from modest backgrounds admired him; there was something appealingly antiestablishment and daring in the aggressive and ingenious ways that James Goldsmith exploited the system.
Russell Brand