Scorn Read online

  Finnish joke

  The Greeks – dirty and impoverished descendants of a bunch of la-de-da fruit salads who invented democracy and then forgot how to use it while walking around dressed up like girls.

  P.J. O’Rourke, in the National Lampoon

  The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

  Saki

  Just compare with the vast monuments of this vital aqueduct network those useless pyramids or the good-for-nothing tourist attractions of the Greeks.

  Frontinus, superintendent of Roman aqueducts

  In Sao Paulo it is now said to be quicker and safer to rob a bank than to try to cash a cheque in one.

  Sir John Russell, British Ambassador to Brazil

  Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States!

  Porfirio Díaz

  There is, I fear, no question but that the average Nicaraguan is one of the most dishonest, unreliable, violent and alcoholic of the Latin Americans – and after nearly 21 years of Latin American experience I feel I can speak with some authority on the subject.

  Roger Pinsent, British Ambassador to Nicaragua

  Bolivians are merely metamorphosed llamas who have learned to talk but not think.

  Chilean Admiral José Toribio Merino

  Realizing that they will never be a world power, the Cypriots have decided to settle for being a world nuisance.

  George Mikes

  A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.

  William Ralph Inge, The Perpetual Pessimist

  If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

  E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, ‘What I Believe’

  Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  Samuel Johnson

  When Dr Johnson described patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word Reform.

  US Senator Roscoe Conkling

  Places

  I come from Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody had to.

  The opening line to Bill Bryson’s first book

  I’m out of here, I’m better than all of you.

  Tracey Emin on her home town of Margate

  You gotta live somewhere.

  Jimmy Brogan, a suggested motto for Cleveland, USA

  Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

  It isn’t fit for humans now.

  … Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

  To get it ready for the plough.

  The cabbages are coming now;

  The earth exhales.

  John Betjeman, Continual Dew, ‘Slough’

  I see you come from Slough. You can go back there. It is a terrible place.

  Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, to a prisoner acquitted of rape

  Erith isn’t twinned with anywhere, but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham.

  Linda Smith

  In 1956 the population of Los Angeles was 2,243,901. By 1970 it had risen to 2,811,801, 1,650,917 of whom are currently up for a series.

  Fran Lebowitz on Los Angeles

  The difference between yoghurt and Los Angeles is that yoghurt has a living culture.

  Sean Penn

  She’s blended right in – not necessarily a compliment around here.

  A member of the public after seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in London’s Kilburn High Road

  Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

  Bill Vaughan

  Can pigs grow wings and fly, unwonton birds?

  Can the salt sea grow black with grazing herds?

  Can the lean thistle blossom into figs?

  Or Oxford aught produce save fools and prigs?

  Geoffrey Howard on Oxford

  Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

  Matthew Arnold on Oxford

  So this is Winnipeg. I can tell it’s not Paris.

  Bob Edwards on Winnipeg

  From 20,000 feet in the air, on the way to Paris.

  Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, asked the best way to see Darwin, Northern Territory

  One has no great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

  Jane Austen, Emma

  When a man is tired of Birmingham he is entirely right.

  Hannah Betts

  Getting drunk is the quickest way out of it.

  Anonymous High Court Judge on Manchester

  Manchester is, in the main, dull and workmanlike, the majority of its people live between the workshop, the racing columns of the newspapers, the organized banality of the music hall and the mean street.

  D.L. Kelleher, The Glamour of Manchester, 1920

  He chose to live in Manchester, a wholly incomprehensible choice for a free man to make.

  Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, of a man in a divorce case

  Not such a nice place.

  Queen Elizabeth II on Manchester, during a visit to St Petersburg, 1994

  The best thing that comes out of Yorkshire is the road to Lancashire.

  Dame Thora Hird

  Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does, he will tell you without asking. If he does not, why humiliate him?

  Sydney Smith

  They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.

  Editorial in the Spectator. The editor, Boris Johnson, took responsibility. It was alleged that the journalist Simon Heffer was involved in drafting the column.

  Here we are, in one of the most depressed towns in Southern England, a place that is arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs.

  Boris Johnson on Portsmouth

  An inverted pyramid of piffle.

  Boris Johnson on allegations against himself

  A small nodule of erupted spleen at the eastern edge of England.

  Camilla Long on Thanet

  They will steal the very teeth of your mouth as you walk the streets. I know it from experience.

  Judge William Arabin on the people of Uxbridge

  New York … That unnatural city where everyone is an exile, none more so than the American.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.

  Phyllis Diller

  I am faced with a typically New York problem, which is how to bring my mediocrity before the public.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

  I don’t know what London’s coming to – the higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

  Noël Coward

  Rome’s just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I’d say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

  Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr Enderby

  The young Cambridge group, the group that stood for ‘freedom’ and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.

  D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.

  William Hazlitt, The Ignorance of the Learned

  Oxford is on the whole more attract
ive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.

  Baedeker’s Great Britain

  Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Bugger Bognor.

  George V, alleged last words when told by his doctor that he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor Regis; also claimed as the king’s response to the proposal to rename the town Bognor Regis in honour of its recuperative effect on His Majesty

  Brighton looks like a town which is helping police with their enquiries.

  Keith Waterhouse, in the Evening Standard

  Very flat, Norfolk.

  Noël Coward, Private Lives

  Roast beef in human form.

  Horace Walpole on the inhabitants of Norfolk

  Shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave and he will rise and steal a horse.

  Lancashire saying

  California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

  Joan Didion

  The continental United States slopes gently from east to west, with the result that everything with a screw loose rolls into California.

  John Naughton

  In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.

  Mark Twain

  If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.

  General Philip Sheridan

  Race

  We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of and made of shit)…

  Imamu Amiri Baraka, Black Magic, ‘A school of prayer’

  One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folks is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

  H.L. Mencken

  I wouldn’t know, I’m from Alabama.

  An African-American responds to President Nixon, having been asked, at a celebration of Ghana’s independence, what it felt like to be free.

  I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice.

  Martin Luther King

  I fucking hate niggers, I wish we could put them all in a concentration camp with the kikes and be done with the lot.

  ‘Tay’, a Microsoft bot designed to learn how to communicate authentically on Twitter. It took just fifteen hours for the bot to become racist.

  [A person is] a male Person, including an Indian and excluding a person of Mongolian or Chinese race.

  Canada Franchise Act 1885

  We have every kind of mixture you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.

  James Watt, US Interior Secretary on the balanced composition of an advisory board

  Porkie.

  Jamaican term of abuse for white people

  What negroes want is tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit.

  Earl Butz, US Secretary for Agriculture in the Nixon administration

  When black man thief, him steal half a bit; but when white man thief, him steal a whole sugar plantation.

  Black American slave. Attrib.

  When the white man is about to leave a garden for good, he wrecks it.

  Yoruba proverb

  Making love to a white man is like making love to a skinned animal.

  Anonymous Nigerian woman

  The white race is the cancer of all human history. It is the white race and it alone, its ideologies and inventions, which eradicate autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.

  Susan Sontag, Partisan Review

  You gotta say this for the white race – its self-confidence knows no bounds. Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where there’s no poverty, no crime, no unemployment, no war and no worry – and call it a ‘primitive society’?

  Dick Gregory

  I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two which, in my judgement, will probably for ever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I … am in favour of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

  Abraham Lincoln

  White people say to me ‘Isn’t there anything good about us?’ and I reply ‘Yes. You sure can ski. You’re beautiful skiers.’

  Paul Mooney

  The Sioux Indians are a set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, seething, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless, faceless, dog-eating SKUNKS as the Lord ever permitted to infect the earth, and whose immediate and final extermination all MEN, excepting Indian agents and traders, should pray for.

  Topeka Weekly Daily, 1869

  I’m a coloured, one-eyed Jew.

  Sammy Davis, Jr., when asked what his handicap was during a game of golf

  There is only one race greater than the Jews – and that is the Derby.

  Victor Sassoon

  All those who are not racially pure are mere chaff.

  Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

  His 140,000 words were 140,000 offences against the spirit of the German language.

  Leon Feuchtwanger on Hitler’s Mein Kampf

  They are more like animals than human beings. Those of them who live deep in the north – between the end of the even climates and the end of the habitable world – have been so affected by the extreme distance of the sun from the Zenith above their heads, resulting in cold climate and thick atmosphere, that their temperatures have become chilly and their humours rude. Consequently their bodies are huge, their colour pale and their hair long. For the same reason they lack keenness in intelligence and perspicacity and are characterized by ignorance and stupidity. Folly and mental blindness prevail among them.

  Sai’d, eleventh-century Muslim scientist, on Northern Europeans

  If a Jew can have the rope free of charge he will let himself be hanged.

  Russian insult

  If the Jew is of gold, his testicles are of copper.

  Moorish insult

  The gentleman will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting the wild boar in Silesia, mine were princes of the earth.

  Judah Benjamin, replying to an anti-Semitic remark by a senator of German origin. Attrib.

  Of all the bigotries that savage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic.

  David Lloyd George

  … a tendency – from which I suffer myself – to presume that anyone of any eminence at all is Jewish, unless he or she can show definitive proof to the contrary.

  Chaim Bermant

  No, not really. Except this: We think they’re stupid.

  Dominic Lawson, when asked at a Spectator lunch whether Jews held any prejudice against Gentiles comparable to anti-Semitism

  Class and Courtesy

  Actually I vote Labour, but my butler’s a Tory.

  Earl Mountbatten to a canvasser during the 1945 election

  The difference between us is that my family begins with me, whereas yours ends with you.

  Iphicrates, Athenian general and the son of a cobbler, replying to a descendant of the Athenian hero Harmodius who mocked his lowly origins

  Of course they have, or I wouldn’t be talking to you.

  Barbara Cartland, when asked by BBC reporter Sandra Harris in a radio interview whether she thought English class barriers had broken down

  You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school.

  Saki

  Aristocrats spend their childhood being beaten by fierce nannies and their later years murdering wildl
ife, so it’s hardly surprising their sex lives are a bit cock-eyed.

  Jilly Cooper, Men and Super Men

  In the British aristocracy the gene pool has always had a shallow end.

  Former US ambassador Raymond Seitz

  The English aristocracy is a wonderful institution, not for its power, which is nothing, nor for its achievements, which are few, but for the gigantic impression it is able to make upon weak minds. Practically, its power has dwindled to the prerogative of occasionally obstructing a theological measure for a limited period … [but it is] one of the stock nightmares of morbid brains. It takes its place with Antichrist and irremissible sin among the dismal spectres that haunt a disturbed imagination.

  Lord Salisbury

  He was educated at Eton and at Oxford, so Watson, bring the gun.

  Sherlock Holmes

  These bloody people. I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is.

  Prince Charles on Royal Correspondent, Nicholas Witchell

  Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

  Mark Twain

  Good manners is the art of making people uncomfortable.

  Craig Brown

  How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them past the test?

  The Duke of Edinburgh to a driving instructor in Scotland

  An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.

  Nancy Mitford, Noblesse Oblige

  How beastly the bourgeois is

  especially the male of the species – …

  Nicely groomed, like a mushroom

  standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable –

  And a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life

  sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

  And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.

  Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside

  just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow

  under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

  Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings

  rather nasty –

  How beastly the bourgeois is! …

  D.H. Lawrence, Pansies, How beastly the bourgeois is

  The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.