Scorn Read online

  Catholic chaplain quoted by Chris Patten

  Bad weather is God’s way of telling us to burn more Catholics.

  Rowan Atkinson, Blackadder

  We know these new English Catholics. They are the last word in Protest. They are Protestants protesting against Protestantism.

  D.H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith

  I am a devout ex-Catholic. Every Sunday, come rain or shine, I remember not to go to church.

  Big Issue founder John Bird

  A single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong.

  Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on Martin Luther, at the Diet of Worms

  A Lutheran’s foot has six toes.

  Polish insult

  Puritanism – the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

  H.L. Mencken

  Mencken, with his filthy verbal haemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnable dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottommost pit of Hell.

  Letter to H.L. Mencken, in the Jackson News

  Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

  H.L. Mencken

  Mr Mencken did not degenerate from an ape, but an ass. And in the process of ‘evolution’ the tail was eliminated, the ears became shorter, and the hind parts smaller; but the ability to bray was increased, intensified, amplified, and otherwise assified about one million times.

  J.D. Tedder on H.L. Mencken

  The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

  H.L. Mencken

  The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England

  Martyrdom … the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Sir, the pretending of extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.

  Bishop Joseph Butler to John Wesley

  Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.

  George Orwell

  A saint is a person whose life has been under-researched.

  Theologian Henry Chadwick

  A thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf.

  Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa

  An ugly little charlatan … if you gave [him] an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.

  Christopher Hitchens on evangelical pastor Jerry Falwell

  No visit to Dove Cottage, Grasmere, is complete without examining the outhouse where Hazlitt’s father, a Unitarian minister of strong liberal views, attempted to put his hand up Dorothy Wordsworth’s skirt.

  Alan Coren

  Tell my clergy when I’ve gone to weep no tears –

  I’ll be no deader than they have been for years.

  Bishop Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of London

  I’ve heard of the milk of human kindness but I’ve never met the cow before.

  Henry Montgomery Campbell, after staying the night at a vicarage

  I’m taking steps to have the Thames widened.

  Bishop Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of London, on the news of Mervin Stockwood’s appointment as Bishop of Southwark, over the river

  No kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

  Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres persanes

  HECKLER: Christianity has been on the earth for 2,000 years, and look at the state of the world today.

  DONALD SOPER: Water has been on the earth longer than that, and look at the colour of your neck.

  It was just one of those parties which got out of hand.

  Lenny Bruce on the Crucifixion

  If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.

  Lord Melbourne. Attrib.

  CLERGYMAN: How did you like my sermon, Mr Canning?

  GEORGE CANNING: You were brief.

  CLERGYMAN: Yes, you know I avoid being tedious.

  CANNING: But you were tedious.

  Yes, about ten minutes.

  Duke of Wellington, asked by a vicar whether there was anything he would like his sermon to be about

  Parson, I have, during my life, detested many men; but never anyone so much as you … Priests have, in all ages, been remarkable for cool and deliberate and unrelenting cruelty; but it seems to be reserved for the Church of England to produce one who has a just claim to the atrocious pre-eminence. No assemblage of words can give an appropriate designation of you; and therefore, as being the single word which best suits the character of such a man, I call you Parson …

  William Cobbett to Thomas Malthus

  When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.

  Dan George, Canadian Indian Chief, who acted in a number of films, including Little Big Man

  That revolting odious Jew production, called Bible, has been for ages the idol of all sorts of blockheads, the glory of knaves, and the disgust of wise men. It is a history of lust, sodomies, wholesale slaughtering, and horrible depravity, that the vilest parts of all other histories, collected into one book, could not parallel. Priests tell us that this concentration of abominations was written by a god; all the world believe priests, or they would rather have thought it the outpourings of some devil.

  Charles Southwell in the Oracle of Reason, an openly atheistic weekly newspaper, 1841. Southwell was fined £100 and imprisoned for a year.

  Jesus was a crackpot.

  Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

  A parish demagogue.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley on Jesus

  It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

  Ronald Knox, Catholic priest and writer, Let Dons Delight

  Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

  Leo Tolstoy on his deathbed, refusing to reconcile himself with the Russian Orthodox Church

  This is no time for making new enemies.

  Voltaire, on being asked to renounce the Devil on his deathbed

  Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman …

  Pope Benedict XVI, quoting the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus

  ‘What’s it like being a Muslim?’ Well it’s hard to find a decent halal pizza place and occasionally there’s a hashtag calling for your genocide.

  @boycotthumans, on Twitter

  I am not a self-hating Jew. I just hate myself.

  Woody Allen

  A very old political monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.

  Rupert Murdoch on the Dalai Lama

  Morality

  Prisoner, God has given you good abilities, instead of which you go about the country stealing ducks.

  William Arabin, judge

  Anger is just and love is just but justice is not just.

  D.H. Lawrence

  In the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.

  Harvard President, Lawrence Summers

  Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

  H.L. Mencken

  Common sense is the deposits of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of eighteen.

  Albert Einstein

  Moral indignation is in most cases two per cent moral, 48 per cent indignation and 50 per cent envy.

  Vittorio De Sica

  We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

  T
homas Babington Macaulay

  Truth is like sunlight: people used to think it was good for you.

  From King of the Hill, US cartoon

  Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

  Samuel Butler

  He that shall follow truth too close at the heels – it shall happily kick out his teeth.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.

  Karl Popper to Ludwig Wittgenstein, after the latter had waved a poker in Popper’s face and demanded an example of a moral rule in a heated discussion at Cambridge

  And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy walks to the funeral of the whole human race and whoever forces himself to love anybody begets a murderer in his own body.

  D.H. Lawrence: reply to Jesus

  An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Frivolity is the privilege of the secure, or the refuge of the desperate.

  Matthew d’Ancona, British journalist

  ‘SLUT (noun): A woman with the morals of a man’

  Anon.

  It’s always tempting to impute/Unlikely virtues to the cute.

  P.J. O’Rourke

  Nations

  The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

  Stanley Kubrick

  If people behaved in the way nations do, they would all be put in straightjackets.

  Tennessee Williams

  National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  ‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’

  G.K. Chesterton

  All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

  Rebecca West

  What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?

  Lin Yutang

  Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

  George Bernard Shaw

  A diplomat is a person who can be disarming, even though his country isn’t.

  Adage

  I offer a toast to this gracious lady. Up your bottom.

  Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister, to Mrs Dean Rusk at the 1979 Vienna Summit, after he had refused the assistance of a translator

  The perfidious, haughty, savage, disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, inhuman, English.

  Julius Caesar Scaliger on England

  You must look out in England that you are not cheated by the charioteers.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  The most significant British contribution to the European Community to date is BSE.

  The German newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung

  Britain is the only country now dominated by an elite of anti-elitists.

  George Walden

  He has one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, is never remembered.

  Oscar Wilde

  Big ideas murdered my grandmother. I like small, British ideas.

  Daniel Finkelstein

  It is related of an Englishman that he hanged himself to avoid the daily task of dressing and undressing.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  The English think soap is civilization.

  Heinrich von Treitschke

  One of the most precious freedoms of the British is the freedom from culture.

  Lord Goodman

  A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.

  Indian saying

  In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

  H.G. Wells

  England, the heart of a rabbit in the body of a Lion. The jaws of a serpent in an abode of popinjays.

  Eustache Deschamps, fourteenth century writer, on England

  England is not a bad country – it’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial, slag heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.

  Margaret Drabble

  … where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant.

  Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle, on the English

  A ready means of being cherished by the English is to adopt the simple expedient of living a long time. I have little doubt that if, say, Oscar Wilde had lived into his nineties, instead of dying in his forties, he would have been considered a benign, distinguished figure suitable to preside at a school prize-giving or to instruct and exhort scoutmasters at their jamborees. He might even have been knighted.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm.

  Alexander Woollcott

  The English don’t mind people pissing on them, provided it’s from a great height.

  Anonymous Greek greengrocer

  Thirty million, mostly fools.

  Thomas Carlyle, when asked what the population of England was. Attrib.

  But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

  Walter Bagehot

  Britain is the only country where people will introduce you to a friend by saying: ‘This is my mate Barry, he’s a bit of a twat.’

  Reginald D. Hunter

  They’re not a cynical people, the Americans. They want you to do quite well, whereas in Britain they just want you to fall flat on your face.

  Piers Morgan

  The English are the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes.

  Tony Judt

  Continental people have love lives; the British have hot water bottles.

  George Mikes

  I love the British summer, it’s my favourite day of the year.

  Kathy Lette

  In all the four corners of the earth one of these three names is given to him who steals from his neighbours; brigand, robber or Englishman.

  Les Triades de l’Anglais

  The English often kill themselves. It is a malady caused by the humid climate.

  Napoléon Bonaparte

  That sweet enemy.

  Sir Philip Sidney on France

  A small acquaintance with history shows that all Governments are selfish and the French Governments more selfish than most.

  Lord Eccles

  I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighbouring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded airs of superiority.

  Horace Walpole

  Never doubt the courage of the French. They are the ones who discovered snails are edible.

  Doug Larson

  France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

  Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution

  Poltroons, cowards, skullers and dastards.

  Eustache Deschamps on the English

  France is a dog-hole.

  William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

  England is a nation of shopkeepers.

  Napoléon Bonaparte

  Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honour.

  André Gide

  They are short, b
lue-vested people who carry their own onions when cycling abroad, and have a yard which is 3.37 inches longer than other people’s.

  Alan Coren on the French

  I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.

  Talleyrand on America

  He is a silk stocking filled with dung.

  Napoléon Bonaparte on Talleyrand

  Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 365 kinds of cheese.

  Charles de Gaulle on France

  One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad … The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease … After Finland, it is the country with the worst food.

  Jacques Chirac, French President, on Britain

  Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

  Groundsman Willie in The Simpsons, on the French

  It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

  Mark Twain

  When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only real materialistic people I have ever met are the Europeans.

  Mary McCarthy

  One in three Americans weigh as much as the other two.

  David Sedaris

  There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.

  Otto von Bismarck. Attrib.

  America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

  Georges Clemenceau

  The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

  D.H. Lawrence

  The American people generally do the right thing … after first exhausting every available alternative.

  Winston Churchill

  Be nice to America – or we’ll bring you democracy.

  Bumper sticker in the USA

  Wherever there is suffering, injustice and oppression, the Americans will show up, six months late, and bomb the country next to where it is happening.

  P.J. O’Rourke

  Kick all America in the guts: they need it … Spit on every neurotic … All that arty and literacy crew, I know them, they are smoking, steaming shits.

  D.H. Lawrence on America

  America is one long expectoration.

  Oscar Wilde

  It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

  Oscar Wilde