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Great Quotations

"When you’ve got money and you do the kind of things I get up to, people laugh and say that you’re eccentric...which is a polite way of saying you’re fucking mad."-Keith Moon
 
Bad Bungle said:
"Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway.
Stupidity is the same. That's why life is hard."

Jeremy Goldberg.
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"Mmm," I think Courage is knowing that something in front of you is probably very dangerous, but you carry it out regardless, because you believe it is/was, the right thing to do at the time. . . Stupidity on the other hand, I would suggest is doing something with which to confront, without considering if you're able to carry it out, or not, or for all the right reasons or forethought.
 
My late father - "welcome to Blackpool, arsehole of the north!"
 
'...one of the reasons why our people are alive and flourishing and have avoided many of the troubles that have fallen to less happy nations, is that we have never been guided by logic in anything we did.'

Stanley Baldwin talking - totally unironically - about the people of the UK, sometime in the 1930's.

As Josh Ireland puts it in his thoroughly engaging book, The Traitors - a decent enough man and a reassuring presence but, 'not a man for these tumultuous times'.

(I can't find an online source for the quote - the book notes suggest it's from a correspondence of some kind between Baldwin and Oswald Mosely - quoted from Robert Skidelsky's, Oswald Mosley.)
 
I have to wonder why, aside from the obvious novelty of him being a fascist politician from the UK, Mosley seems to haunt the collective imaginations of many establishment figures. Along with their rather rote condemnation, there are - or rather, were - certain people who write of him with regret and poignancy, as if he were a potentially great man led astray(!) Besides, half of them clearly fancied Mosley or his equally despicable wife, the objectionably Aryan Diana (who once broke her nail in shock and horror when she realised she was talking to a Jewish man*). Rotten people.


* 'The journalist Paul Callan remembered mentioning that he was Jewish while interviewing her husband in Diana's presence. According to Callan, "I mentioned, just in the course of conversation, that I was Jewish - at which Lady Mosley went ashen, snapped a crimson nail and left the room..." No explanation was given but she would later write to a friend: 'A nice, polite reporter came to interview Tom [Mosley] but he turned out to be Jewish and was sitting there at our table. They are a very clever race and come in all shapes and sizes.''
 
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Spookdaddy said:
'...one of the reasons why our people are alive and flourishing and have avoided many of the troubles that have fallen to less happy nations, is that we have never been guided by logic in anything we did.'

Stanley Baldwin talking - totally unironically - about the people of the UK, sometime in the 1930's.

As Josh Ireland puts it in his thoroughly engaging book, The Traitors - a decent enough man and a reassuring presence but, 'not a man for these tumultuous times'.

(I can't find an online source for the quote - the book notes suggest it's from a correspondence of some kind between Baldwin and Oswald Mosely - quoted from Robert Skidelsky's, Oswald Mosley.)
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I think the use of the word 'logic' here may perhaps be misleading (us).

His suggestion is not that the British are illogical, but that they are arch pragmatists.

Once an ideology has been subscribed to, it sets demands for consistency and the logic of the argument forces one into positions in response to future states of affairs before they are even encountered or analysed.

In short: if you believe this then you cannot believe that. Position A justifies such-and-such an action and precludes another.

The British—historically speaking—avoid these pitfalls with an aversion to ideology, an acceptance of contingency and a 'creatively' carefree attitude to consistency.

"That was there and then, this is here and now. What works for thee may not for me. I'll decide what I think when I've had a good look."
 
Found the whole thing here. The point he was addressing was constitutional, but I don't think my reading was too far astray.
TEXT PLUS ANALYSIS

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'These trivialities demean me. I must away and tend to my ravens.'
 
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