Brexit in Ten Quotes

I collect quotes. I find the best way to have interesting ways to liven up your talks and articles is to have your own quotebook. I read left-leaning papers and find the Brexit case unconvincing and unmade in any way apart from democratically. So the sound you can hear is that of an axe being ground to dust. I just followed back the string of quotes with #Brexit or #EU and it was interesting.

3/2/10
Headline in Daily Express after survey found that 70% of cafe milk jugs are unhygienic

Now EU meddlers want to take our milk jugs

2011
Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

In 1784 ... each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London by up to half an hour.

27/5/16
Richard Osman on Twitter

In most debates we have to listen to people who shout the loudest or are the most certain of their views. That doesn't represent most of us.

5/11/16
Decca Aikenhead, the Guardian

Every time I interview a Brexiteer, I come away more confused than I arrived.

20/1/17
Roger Cohen, New York Times

The vote for Brexit was in fact the moment Britain turned its back on the world, succumbing to pettiness, anti-immigrant bigotry, lying politicians, self-delusion and vapid promises of restored glory.

1/4/17
Natalie Nougayrede - The Guardian 'Opinion'

It's because the EU strives to act on the world stage as a block, however imperfect that exercise, that it can have a say in how globalisation will be shaped.

11/17
Roger Scruton The Times

You can be a loyal subject of the British Crown and also English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh when it comes to other aspects of belonging. You can be a British Nigerian or a British Pakistani, and the future of our country depends upon the process of integration that will persuade new arrivals that this is not only possible but also necessary if they are to make a home here. You can be a British Muslim, Jew, Christian or atheist, since nationality, defined by land and sovereignty, does not extinguish religious attachment.

13/11/17
Ian Birrell - theipaper

...Brexit has left our nation horribly divided, undermining the Union and fuelling nationalism while opening up fissures between young and old, rich and poor, north and south.

22/5/18
Heather Brooke - Journalism in a Post-Truth World, Bath Festival

People have not had the journalistic training to assess the truths on the internet. But you could do a one day course in how to spot bullshit.

29/7/18
Pete Conrad's review of Michiko Kakutani's 'The Death of Truth', The Observer

Brexiteers are nostalgic fantasists, in retreat from a large world; Trumptards seek to uphold America's swaggering dominance in the world, if necessary by destabillising their alliances. Brexit is an isolated act of suicide, at worst pathetic and pitiable, whereas Trumpism fondly contemplates genocide.

Quote of the Day

Thank you for being with me. I have now finished the job of indexing my quote book. It loomed at me as a massive job I would never get done. But by chopping it into small bits and indexing ten a day for five days a week I have finished in about a year.

Now all I need is a weekly reminder to transfer any new quotes into my book and to index them when ten are there.

I call this system 'Eating a slug'. If you absolutely have to eat slug you want that critter thin-sliced.

1227. Modern agriculture, with its push toward vast monocultures, is as likely to produce environmental harmony as a call centre is to produce social harmony.
(Guy Watson, Riverford News Letter 19/5/14)

Quote of the Day

1209. Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, argued that the invention of writing meant people would '...cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful'. It seems likely that we'll get over internet distraction soon enough.
(Oliver Burkeman. Guardian Weekly 21/6/13)

Quote of the Day

1199. In a democracy there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the taste of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble.
(Olivier in Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America)

Quote of the Day

1186. We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look at the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.
(Alexander Herzen, quoted by Edward St Aubyn in 'Mother's Milk')

Quote of the Day

1175. ... religion ... - it is the asylum to which all poor crazed sinners may come at last, the door which will always open to us if we can only find the courage to knock.
(James Robertson, The Testimony of Gideon Mack)

Quote Book Index

1166. In a world where entire meals are consumed in forgetfulness, there's something powerful and evocative about focusing attention, gratefully, on one tiny morsel.
(Dave Tomlinson, How to be a Bad Christian)

Quotes of the Day

For those not appreciating this exercise, can I reassure you that we are within two years of the end of the book I am indexing. Two to ponder:

1121. Retribution is of two kinds: first, social, also known as justice; and second, individual, also known as revenge. The mark of a civilised society is that it promotes the messy frustrations and delays of the former over the false and instant consolation of the latter.
(Amol Rajan, theIpaper 19/4/12 on Norway's response to Anders Breivik's court behaviour)

1135. ...there are many kinds of wealth money cannot buy. You can buy education, but you cannot buy intelligence; you can buy designer clothes, but not style; cosmetics but not beauty; sex, but not love.
(A.C.Grayling, The Heart of Things)

Quote of the Day

1114. When we contemplate the cross of Christ, we are always living with fragments. Not literal splinters of wood, but fragments of understanding, glimpses of heart, mind and experience. As long as we recognise they are only fragments, they can help us.
('Touch Wood', Meeting the Cross in the World Today - David Runcorn)

Quote of the Day

1106. Blaise Pascal said, 'Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?'
(Quoted by Brian McLaren in A New Kind of Christianity)

Quote of the Day

1092. You're worse off relying on misleading information than on not having any information at all. If you give a pilot an altimeter that is sometimes defective he will crash his plane. Give him nothing and he will look out the window. Technology is only safe if it is flawless.
(John Lanchester, Whoops! quoting Nassim Taleb)

Quotes of the Day

Missed yesterday so had to catalogue twenty of my quotes today. Here are two of the best:

1079. For the fathers of the Church, scripture was a 'mystery' ... not just a text but an 'activity'; you did not merely read it - you had to do it.
(Karen Armstrong: The Case for God)

1090. Great art exists in the spaces between the certainties. Economically, culturally and artistically, Music Theatre can't afford spaces, only certainties.
(Stewart Lee, Esquire 10/04 quoted in his book, 'How I Escaped My Certain Death')

Quote of the Day

1064. ...fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misinterprets the tradition it is trying to defend.
(Karen Armstrong - The Case for God

Quote of the Day

1051. Atheism must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: 'Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God.' Believers must be free to argue back, 'You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe.' But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society.
(Timothy Garton-Ash, The Guardian 29/11/07)

Quote of the Day

1048. If our lives have meaning it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come equipped.
(Terry Eagleton - The Meaning of Life)

Quote of the Day

1016. ...without anyone leading them or directing them, people - most of them not especially rational or farsighted - are able to co-ordinate their economic activities.
(James Surowiecki on why supermarkets have orange juice in stock, taken from The Wisdom of Crowds)

Quote of the Day

1005. In settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church; by a Frenchman, a fort; by a Dutchman, a warehouse; and by an Englishman, an alehouse.
(Francis Grose - Provincial Glossary - 1787)

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day has been on holiday but is delighted to return to examine quotes 990-1000. Here is the best:

997. Tony Benn's guide to democracy and power:
What power have you got?
Who gave it to you?
To whom are you accountable?
On whose behalf have you exercised it?
How do we get rid of you?

Quote of the Day

979. We live in the age of the victim: everyone can be excused his or her failings by appeal to something nasty that once happened or still happens.
(A.C.Grayling, The Mystery of Things)

Quote of the Day

I love the late Frank Zappa. He produced a huge range of styles of music and thus has a back catalogue it is almost impossible to tire of. What is less well known is what an interesting interviewee he was, once he was pinned down to a proper conversation:

966. The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents - because they have a tame child-creature in their home.
(The Guardian, 'Family' 29/7/06)