Scorn Read online

  Lord Salisbury

  If it stinks it’s chemistry. If it wiggles, it’s biology. If it doesn’t work, it’s physics.

  Anon

  The world is formed by unreasonable men. A reasonable man looks at the world and sees how he can fit in with it. An unreasonable man looks at the world and sees how he can change it to fit in with him.

  George Bernard Shaw

  All of man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to stay in a room alone.

  Pascal

  Hell is other people.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Hull is other people.

  Jonathan Cecil, British actor

  There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, envious, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

  William Hazlitt, On Living to One’s-Self

  People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.

  From Peep Show

  The only people we think of as normal are those we don’t know very well.

  Sigmund Freud

  People who say others are difficult are usually difficult themselves.

  Van Morrison

  For what do we live but to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

  The belief in the supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

  Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  A desperate man never forgives a favour.

  Dominic Lawson

  If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principle difference between a dog and a man.

  Mark Twain

  He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty.

  Sam Houston, American politician, on fellow-politician Thomas Jefferson Green.

  Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

  Mark Twain

  If a dog whines it does it because it’s in pain or is hungry. But if a human being whines, nine times out of ten it’s doing it because it enjoys it.

  Julie Burchill

  Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

  Dr Johnson

  Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

  W.C. Fields

  The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.

  Roger Scruton

  I like animals. It’s people who like animals I don’t like.

  Jean Genet

  I love mankind: it’s people I can’t stand.

  Peanuts character Linus van Pelt

  Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of men.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

  Aldous Huxley

  Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

  David Hume

  Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

  Mel Brooks

  The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

  Bill Watterson

  Progress means bad things happen faster.

  Terry Pratchett

  Shyness is just egotism out of its depth.

  Penelope Keith

  The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the cinema and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart.

  J. D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

  A friend in need is an acquaintance.

  Mariella Frostrup

  If friendship were cars, then women would constantly be out there tinkering with them, polishing them, servicing them – whereas men would just let them rust away in the front garden.

  Christopher Middleton

  The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Trying to be popular in high school is like trying to be mayor of a city that won’t exist in four years.

  Jenny Holzer

  Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

  Samuel Butler

  In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favours.

  Duc de la Rochefoucauld

  History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.

  Konrad Adenauer

  History is gossip.

  Robert Frost

  History is irony on the move.

  Emil Cioran

  It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

  Seamus Heaney

  History is about arrogance, vanity and vapidity. Who better than me to present it?

  David Starkey

  What is history?

  Manuscript scrawl by W.E. Gladstone in a book margin against its author’s mention of ‘history’

  God cannot alter the past; only historians do that.

  Simon Jenkins

  Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

  Leo Tolstoy

  If it were not for quotations, conversation between gentlemen would consist of an endless succession of ‘what-hos!’

  P.G. Wodehouse

  The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

  Tom Stoppard

  I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  All quotation is out of context.

  Enoch Powell, responding to a complaint that he had quoted someone ‘out of context’

  There is nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter, with its disagreeable noise and shocking distortion of the face.

  Lord Chesterfield

  The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, after his trial for treason. Attrib.

  I am told I am a true cosmopolitan. I am unhappy everywhere.

  Stephen Vizinczey, in the Guardian

  I am a Renaissance man, but only in the sense that I wear mauve pantaloons and have tertiary syphilis.

  Simon Blackwell

  Be yourself. Well, maybe someone a little nicer.

  Barbara Bush

  If you look like your passport photo, you’re too ill to travel.

  Joe Pasquale

  Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?

  Keith Waterhouse

  A spa hotel? It’s like a normal hotel, only in reception there’s a picture of a pebble.

  Rhod Gilbert

  Camping is nature’s way of promoting the motel business.

  Dave Barry

  Often it seems a pity Noah and his party didn’t miss the boat.

  Mark Twain

  A week in which a bunch of loser jihadists slaughtered 132 innocents in Paris to prove the future belongs to them, rather than a civilisation like France.

  I can’t say I fancy their chances. France, the country of Descartes, Boulez, Monet, Sartre, Rousseau, Camus, Renoir, Berlioz, Cézanne, Gauguin, Hugo, Voltaire, Matisse, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Satie, Pasteur, Molière, Zola, Balzac, Poulenc, cutting-edge science, world-class medicine, fearsome security forces, nuclear power, Coco Chanel, Château Lafite, coq au vin, Daft Punk, Zizou Zidane, Juliet Binoche, liberté, égalité, fraternité and crème brûlée
.

  Versus what? Beheadings, crucifixions, amputations, slavery, mass murder, medieval squalor and a death cult barbarity that would shame the Middle Ages.

  Well, IS or Daesh or ISIS or ISIL or whatever name you are going by, I’m sticking with IS – as in Islamist Scumbags. I think the outcome is pretty clear to everyone but you. You will lose. In a thousand years’ time, Paris, that glorious city of lights, will still be shining bright as will every other city like it. And you will be as dust, along with the ragbag of fascist Nazis and Stalinists that previously dared to challenge democracy and failed.

  Andrew Neil, following the ISIS terrorist attack on Paris

  I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

  Clarence Darrow

  Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

  Arthur Miller

  God and Religion

  If triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

  Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres persanes

  God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He doesn’t exist.

  J.B. Priestley, in the Listener

  If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.

  Woody Allen

  It is clearly absurd that it should be possible for a woman to qualify as a saint with direct access to the Almighty while she may not qualify as a curate.

  Mary Stocks

  Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot and he creates Gods by the dozen.

  Michel de Montaigne, Essais

  God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

  H.L. Mencken

  An inordinate fondness for beetles.

  J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what inferences could be drawn about the nature of God from a study of his works

  God in his wisdom made the fly. And then forgot to tell us why.

  Ogden Nash

  Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee

  And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.

  Robert Frost

  [God] invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

  Pablo Picasso

  Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire Cat.

  Julian Huxley, biologist and first director-general of UNESCO, Religion without Revelation

  Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

  William Ralph Inge, More Lay thoughts of a Dean

  The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.

  Havelock Ellis

  Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

  Harriet Martineau

  Religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

  Voltaire

  The godless arch scoundrel Voltaire is dead – dead like a dog, like a beast.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  It is the opium of the people.

  Karl Marx on religion

  All religions are the same; religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

  Cathy Ladman

  When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? The need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied, by the consummate mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.

  Vita Sackville-West

  All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician and ridiculous to the philosopher.

  Lucretius

  All wise men have the same religion. As to what it is, wise men never say.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.

  Richard Dawkins

  Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

  Terry Eagleton

  Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.

  Ricky Gervais

  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

  Oysters are more beautiful than any religion … There’s nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

  Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov

  My prayer to God is a very short one: ‘Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ God has granted it.

  Voltaire

  To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

  Ambrose Bierce’s definition of ‘pray’

  Anything too stupid to be said should be sung.

  Voltaire

  When I’m sitting on the woolsack in the House of Lords I amuse myself by saying ‘bollocks’, sotto voce, to the bishops.

  Lord Hailsham, Lord Chancellor

  I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeal to religious prejudice.

  T.H. Huxley, biologist, replying to Bishop Wilberforce in an Oxford debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution

  Illness is a consequence of sin.

  Archbishop Paul Cordes, head of the Vatican Agency for Humanitarian Relief, presenting the Papal Message for Lent, 2002

  For a priest to turn a man when he lies a-dying, is just like one that has a long time solicited a woman, and cannot obtain his end; at length makes her drunk, and so lies with her.

  John Selden

  Utter nonsense.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, spoken to the nurse who told her she would die when the reason God put her on earth was fulfilled

  Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. Really.

  Lenny Bruce

  While I cannot be regarded as a pillar, I must be regarded as a buttress of the church, because I support it from the outside.

  Lord Melbourne. Attrib.

  Fuckin Abbot.

  Written by a monk on a 1528 manuscript of De Officiis

  We must preserve the Church of England. It’s our only defence against real religion.

  Anon British politician

  It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.

  J.B. Priestley, of the Marylebone Cricket Club, in the New Statesman

  You can’t exactly lapse when you’re C of E. You don’t lose your faith; you just can’t remember where you left it.

  Jeremy Hardy

  Like many C of E folks I am merely tinged with faith, like those white paint-shades with ‘a hint of peach’.

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  The Church is like a swimming-pool: most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

  Theologian W.H. Vanstone

  It is no accident that the symbol of a bishop is a crook and the sign of an archbishop is a double-cross.

  Dom Gregory Dix

  When the last trumpet shall sound, a commission will be set up on the significance of the trumpet, the financial implication of the trumpet, and for a report to come back in three years’ time.

  John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, on The Church of England

  The numerous vermin of mendicant friars, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustins, Carmelites, who swarmed in this century [the 13th], with habits and institutions variously ridiculous, disgraced religion, learning, and common sense. They seized on scholastic philosophy as a science particularly suited to their minds; and, excepting only Friar Bacon, they all preferred words to things. The subtle, the profound, the irrefragable, the angelic, and the seraphic Doctor acquired those pompous titles by filling ponderous volumes with a small number of technical terms, and a much smaller number of ideas. Universities arose in every part of Europe, and thousands of students employed their lives upon these grave follies.

  Edward Gibbon on medieval Christendom

  I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

  In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.

  Nancy Astor

  Abstinence makes the Church grow fondlers.

  Placard at a London anti-Pope rally

  I have to believe in the Apostolic Succession. There is no other way of explaining the descent of the Bishop of Exeter from Judas Iscariot.

  Sydney Smith

  Frankly I’m amazed it survived the invention of the tambourine.

  Jack Dee on Christianity

  The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

  David Hume, Essays, ‘Of Miracles’

  Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being pecked to death by ducks.