Scorn Read online

  Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua

  Why the fuss over the Burmese elections? They said it was a general election – and the generals were elected.

  Ray Rayner

  War

  Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

  Joan of Arc

  War is the national industry of Prussia.

  Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Attrib.

  When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan.

  Afghan saying

  It’s God’s responsibility to forgive Bin Laden … it’s our responsibility to arrange the meeting.

  Slogan on a US marine’s bumper sticker

  If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

  US diplomat Charles W. Freeman

  Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

  Groucho Marx

  Military justice is to justice, as military music is to music.

  Groucho Marx

  War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

  Ambrose Bierce

  They’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.

  Curtis E. LeMay

  War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

  C.E. Montague, Disenchantment

  But when we open our dykes, the waters are 10ft deep.

  Queen Wilhelmina replying to a boast by Wilhelm II that all his guardsmen were 7ft tall

  Götterdämmerung without the gods.

  Dwight Macdonald on the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  It’s easy to be brave from a distance.

  Aesop

  Peace: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

  Ambrose Bierce

  If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

  I’d live with scarlet Majors at the base,

  And speed glum heroes up to the line of death.

  You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,

  Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,

  Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’

  I’d say – ‘I used to know his father well;

  Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’

  And when the war is done and youth stone dead,

  I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.

  Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack, ‘Base Details’

  To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

  W.H. Auden, Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier

  This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.

  David Lloyd George on the First World War

  Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.

  Bertrand Russell

  A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men’s iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural thing.

  William Godwin

  Seven months ago I could give a single command and 541,000 people would immediately obey it. Today I can’t get a plumber to come to my house.

  H. Norman Schwarzkopf III, Commander of US forces in the Gulf War

  Lions led by donkeys.

  Max Hoffmann on the British army in the First World War

  Suez – a smash and grab raid that was all smash and no grab.

  Harold Nicolson

  Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.

  US General Thomas Power, Head of Strategic Air Command

  Standing at the head of his troops, his drawn salary in his hand.

  Henry Labouchère on the Duke of Clarence

  The scum of the earth.

  Duke of Wellington on the British army

  These boys have fought for four years. They deserve their fun.

  Joseph Stalin on reports of the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers

  Marijuana smokers, drug addicts, long-hairs, homosexuals and unionists.

  General Augusto Pinochet, describing the West German army

  This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

  Extract from Royal Navy and Marines Fitness Report, 1997

  He never commanded more than ten men in his life – and he ate three of them.

  General Weston on Adolphus Greely being made a general. Much of his life had been spent as an Arctic explorer.

  He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.

  Donald Trump on John McCain

  He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.

  Margot Asquith on Winston Churchill

  If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.

  Margot Asquith

  In defeat unbeatable; in victory unbearable.

  Winston Churchill on Viscount Montgomery

  Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.

  Winston Churchill

  The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

  George Bernard Shaw

  One to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.

  Herbert Asquith, explaining why the War Office kept three sets of figures

  You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you a new way.

  Will Rogers, Autobiography

  What have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter and barren in the summer; an island which not even the Southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smiles upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future buccaneers.

  Samuel Johnson on the Falkland Islands

  The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

  Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands War

  To all the Libyan people, the Libyan land belongs to you. Those who are trying to take it away from you are outsiders, they are mercenaries. They are dogs. They are spies for France and Britain. They are all germs and rats.

  Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, having been driven out of Tripoli

  Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?

  Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary on concerns about al-Qaeda (April 2001)

  Imperialist running dogs.

  Approved Chinese term for Americans in print and on radio

  They present themselves to the public as superheroes, but away from the camera are a bit pathetic in many ways: street kids drunk on ideology and power. In France we have a saying – stupid and evil. I found them more stupid than evil. That is not to understate the murderous potential of stupidity.

  Nicolas Hénin, French journalist and former ISIS hostage on his former captors

  Maybe it would have been better if neither of us had been born.

  Napoléon Bonaparte, looking at the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Empire

  A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen natives; bring a
way a couple more by force for a sample; return home and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants; and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!

  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. ‘Gulliver on the English system of colonizing’

  Civilized men arrive in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers and the Bible.

  Havelock Ellis

  The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilisations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

  Samuel Huntingdon

  Columbus was not a learned man, but an ignorant. He was not an honourable man, but a professional pirate … To the harmless and hospitable peoples among whom he came he was a terror and a curse …

  Ambrose Bierce on Christopher Columbus

  I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

  Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes

  It is nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace.

  Winston Churchill on Mahatma Gandhi

  I think it would be a good idea.

  Mahatma Gandhi on being asked his view of Western civilization. Attrib.

  A nagging desire to rule the world, or at least to tell it how to behave, is embedded in the genes of every British politician.

  Simon Jenkins

  [He] speaks like a Buddha and thinks like a serpent … His soul is possessed by British colonialism. Nothing can distract him from his perfidy … The truth has come to light … Chris Patten will stand condemned down the ages.

  Wen Wei Po, the Communist-run newspaper in Hong Kong on Chris Patten, the Governor

  Journalism

  I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.

  Earl Warren on journalism

  Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

  G.K. Chesterton

  Journalism consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it for ten cents a pound.

  Cyril Connolly

  News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.

  Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

  They are only ten.

  Lord Northcliffe, notice to remind staff on his newspaper of the mental age of readers

  A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

  Albert Camus, The Fall

  A journalist is a person who works harder than any other lazy person in the world.

  Anonymous

  Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper.

  Mother Teresa

  Bye! I won’t miss you.

  Cherie Blair, leaving Downing Street for the last time, to the attendant press corps

  I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it – a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Sometimes I suspect most of the media commentariat are suffering from Munchausen syndrome.

  Rebekah Brooks

  A journalist is a reporter out of a job.

  Mark Twain

  All newspaper opinion-writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over, and bayonet the wounded.

  Adage

  The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist. The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists.

  James Joyce

  A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

  Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

  A drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay.

  George Galloway MP on Christopher Hitchens

  Ba’athist, short-arse, sub-Leninist, Eastend carpet-bagger.

  Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway

  Made natural history by metamorphosing from a butterfly to a slug.

  George Galloway MP on Christopher Hitchens

  How unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

  Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway

  Ready to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood.

  George Galloway on Christopher Hitchens

  This is not just a matter of which of us can be the rudest, because I already conceded that to Mr Galloway. Or which of us can be the most cerebral, because he already conceded that to me.

  Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway

  Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

  Janet Malcolm

  The way I had it is all gone now. The bars are gone, the drinkers, gone. There remain the smartest, healthiest newspeople in the history of the business. And they are so boring that they kill the business right in front of you.

  Jimmy Breslin

  You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

  Thank God! the British journalist.

  But, seeing what the man will do

  Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

  Humbert Wolfe

  To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it.

  Fred Allen

  Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

  Norman Mailer

  I hesitate to say what the functions of the modern journalist may be, but I imagine that they do not exclude the intelligent anticipation of facts before they occur.

  Lord Curzon

  Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

  Ben Hecht

  A newspaper is a device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.

  George Bernard Shaw

  The government of bullies, tempered by editors.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson on democracy

  Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

  T.S. Eliot

  What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

  Stanley Baldwin on press barons Lord Rothermere and Beaverbrook

  Good God, that’s done it. He’s lost us the tarts’ vote.

  The 10th Duke of Devonshire on Stanley Baldwin’s attack on newspaper proprietors. Attrib.

  There are moments when we in the British press can show extraordinary sensitivity: these moments usually coincide with the death of a proprietor, or a proprietor’s wife.

  Craig Brown

  The press is the enemy.

  Richard Nixon

  Politicians who complain about the media are like ships’ captains who complain about the sea.

  Enoch Powell

  The freedom of the press works in such a way t
hat there is not much freedom from it.

  Grace Kelly

  All the faults of the age come from Christianity and Journalism.

  Frank Harris

  Christianity, of course, but why journalism?

  Arthur James Balfour in reply

  Frank Harris has been invited to all the great houses in England once.

  Oscar Wilde

  You lying BBC; you’re photographing things that aren’t happening.

  Belfast woman to a BBC cameraman

  To press journalists, television is like a mendacious, boastful cousin who keeps turning up at family parties with a prettier girl and a more powerful motor that you rather hope will end up in a ditch.

  Allison Pearson, Evening Standard

  An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.

  Adlai Stevenson

  Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from Niagara.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements.

  Thomas Jefferson

  It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

  Jerry Seinfeld

  It’s a wonder none of them crash-landed on the magazine.

  Private Eye, responding to the editor of Punch’s comment that ‘jokes winged back and forth between the men and women’

  The Times is speechless and takes three columns to express its speechlessness.

  Winston Churchill on Irish Home Rule

  When it is said of a man that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, it means he was an intolerant old brute. When it is said of an old lady that she was lively and vivacious, it means she was usually plastered.

  Anthony Howard on the obituarist’s code

  If I see ‘upcoming’ in the paper one more time, I will be downcoming and someone will be outgoing.

  Unnamed editor of The Wall Street Journal

  Unreconstructed wankers.

  Tony Blair’s description of the Scottish media, 1997

  No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

  H.L. Mencken

  Every item should make our readers hate someone or something, or fear something or someone, a little bit more.

  Instruction to a young journalist joining the Daily Mail’s Wicked Whispers diary column

  By office boys for office boys.

  Lord Salisbury on the Daily Mail