Scorn (15 page)

He is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral he attends.
Todd Purdum on Bill Clinton, post-presidency

I have difficulty in looking humble for extended periods of time.
Henry Kissinger

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry Kissinger

Satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. There were no jokes left after that.
Tom Lehrer

A joke that doesn't make you laugh about someone you don't know told by a man who went to Oxford.
AA Gill on satire

I think I speak for everyone when I say what a shame it is that only one of these guys can lose.
David Letterman on the 2000 Presidential election campaign between George
W. Bush and Al Gore

I am Al Gore and I used to be the next President of the United States.
Al Gore, to an audience of students

Al Gore is an old person's idea of what a young person should be.
Michael Kinsey

The start of spring, otherwise known to Al Gore as proof of global warming.
Bill Clinton

He struggles to exude authority. He furrows his brow, trying to look more sagacious, but he ends up looking as if he has indigestion. Appearing confused at his own speech, he seems like a first-grade actor in a production of
James and the Giant Peach
. Are his blinks Morse code for ‘Oh, man, don't let that teleprompter break'?
Maureen Dowd of George W. Bush

That's like saying the veterinarian and the taxidermist are in the same business because either way you get your dog back.
Joseph Lieberman on the suggestion that he shared many of the views of George
W. Bush

George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he fucking applied himself.
Margaret Cho

George Bush doesn't care about black people.
Kanye West, going off script at a Hurricane Katrina benefit concert

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple – talk about class and hope no one notices.
Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be
fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Candidates without ideas hiring consultants without convictions to run campaigns without content.
President Gerald Ford talking about a US Presidential race

Too few have the courage of my convictions.
Robert M. Hutchins (Margaret Thatcher made a similar remark about her Cabinet)

Cheer up, only one of them can win.
Bumper sticker in the US Election 1992

She's every American's ex-wife.
P.J. O'Rourke on Hillary Clinton

A congenital liar.
William Safire on Hillary Clinton

If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.
Hillary Rodham Clinton

A goddamned fool he was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he didn't know what a mortgage is. His head rattles as he walks.
Gore Vidal on John McCain

I think her strategy is more or less insane … I'd always rather liked her. She's a perfectly able lawyer … But this long campaign, this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy.
Gore Vidal on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination

It's the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training.
Christopher Hitchens on Barack Obama's campaign slogan of ‘Yes we can'

They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.
Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House of Representatives on members of Congress

Arianna Huffington is unattractive, both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.
Donald Trump

You know, it really doesn't matter what the media write as long as you've got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.
Donald Trump

One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don't go into government.
Donald Trump

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best … They are sending people that have lots of problems, and
they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.
Donald Trump

Mr Trump is a misogynist, a racist and a xenophobe. He glories in his own ignorance and inconsistency. Truth is whatever he finds convenient. His policy ideas are ludicrous, where they are not horrifying. Yet his attitudes and ideas are less disturbing than his character: he is a narcissist, bully and spreader of conspiracy theories. It is frightening to consider how such a man would use the powers at the disposal of the president.
Martin Wolf in the
Financial Times

We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
Euan Ferguson's suggested campaign slogan for Donald Trump

Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15 2016, at the age of 68.
Obituary in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch

On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned with a moron.
H.L. Mencken

No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?
Barack Obama on producing his certificate, whose authenticity Donald Trump had publicly called into doubt

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science – these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy … In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It's not cool to not know what you're talking about. That's not keeping it real, or telling it like it is. That's not challenging political correctness. That's just not knowing what you're talking about.
Barack Obama

Scratch any American and underneath you'll find an isolationist.
Dean Rusk

A few decades ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no cash, no hope and no jobs. Please don't let Kevin Bacon die.
Bill Murray

 

Politics in Europe and Beyond

I wonder what he meant by that.
Prince Metternich on the death of scheming statesman Talleyrand

This going into Europe will not turn out to be the thrilling mutual exchange supposed. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting in a darkened bedroom in a Brussels hotel for a Group Grope.
E.P. Thompson on the EEC, in the
Sunday Times,
1975

Up Yours Delors!
Sun
headline, attacking the President of the European Commission, Jaques Delors

I was my best successor but I decided not to succeed myself.
Pierre Trudeau on his decision not to seek another term as Canadian Prime Minister

A political leader worthy of assassination.
Irving Layton on Pierre Trudeau

A man who looks as if he has two flies fucking in his mouth.
Boris Yeltsin on his adviser Sergei Filatov

He has missed a wonderful opportunity to keep his mouth shut.
Jacques Chirac on Ariel Sharon

Israel's dark id.
Tony Judt on Ariel Sharon

I understand why he has to do this – to prove he's a man. He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.
Angela Merkel, after Vladimir Putin brought a dog to a press conference, knowing she had a fear of them

An unfuckable lard-arse.
Silvio Berlusconi on Angela Merkel

What is his name? It's someone with a tan. Barack Obama!
Silvio Berlusconi

Better to like women than to be gay.
Silvio Berlusconi

In twenty years of politics, I have never insulted anyone.
Silvio Berlusconi

You won the elections, but I won the count.
Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua

Why the fuss over the Burmese elections? They said it was a general election – and the generals were elected.
Ray Rayner

 

War

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.
Joan of Arc

War is the national industry of Prussia.
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Attrib.

When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan.
Afghan saying

It's God's responsibility to forgive Bin Laden … it's our responsibility to arrange the meeting.
Slogan on a US marine's bumper sticker

If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.
US diplomat Charles W. Freeman

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Groucho Marx

Military justice is to justice, as military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce

They've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
Curtis E. LeMay

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
C.E. Montague,
Disenchantment

But when we open our dykes, the waters are 10ft deep.
Queen Wilhelmina replying to a boast by Wilhelm II that all his guardsmen were 7ft tall

Götterdämmerung without the gods.
Dwight Macdonald on the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It's easy to be brave from a distance.
Aesop

Peace: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heroes up to the line of death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,'
I'd say – ‘I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.'
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die – in bed.
Siegfried Sassoon,
Counter-Attack,
‘Base Details'

To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W.H. Auden,
Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier

This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.
David Lloyd George on the First World War

Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell

A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural thing.
William Godwin

Seven months ago I could give a single command and 541,000 people would immediately obey it. Today I can't get a plumber to come to my house.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf III, Commander of US forces in the Gulf War

Lions led by donkeys.
Max Hoffmann on the British army in the First World War

Suez – a smash and grab raid that was all smash and no grab.
Harold Nicolson

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.
US General Thomas Power, Head of Strategic Air Command

Standing at the head of his troops, his drawn salary in his hand.
Henry Labouchère on the Duke of Clarence

The scum of the earth.
Duke of Wellington on the British army

These boys have fought for four years. They deserve their fun.
Joseph Stalin on reports of the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers

Marijuana smokers, drug addicts, long-hairs, homosexuals and unionists.
General Augusto Pinochet, describing the West German army

This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.
Extract from Royal Navy and Marines Fitness Report, 1997

He never commanded more than ten men in his life – and he ate three of them.
General Weston on Adolphus Greely being made a general. Much of his life had been spent as an Arctic explorer.

He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured.
Donald Trump on John McCain

He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.
Margot Asquith on Winston Churchill

If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.
Margot Asquith

In defeat unbeatable; in victory unbearable.
Winston Churchill on Viscount Montgomery

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
Winston Churchill

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
George Bernard Shaw

One to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.
Herbert Asquith, explaining why the War Office kept three sets of figures

You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you a new way.
Will Rogers,
Autobiography

What have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter and barren in the summer; an island which not even the Southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smiles upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future buccaneers.
Samuel Johnson on the Falkland Islands

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands War

To all the Libyan people, the Libyan land belongs to you. Those who are trying to take it away from you are outsiders, they are
mercenaries. They are dogs. They are spies for France and Britain. They are all germs and rats.
Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, having been driven out of Tripoli

Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary on concerns about al-Qaeda (April 2001)

Imperialist running dogs.
Approved Chinese term for Americans in print and on radio

They present themselves to the public as superheroes, but away from the camera are a bit pathetic in many ways: street kids drunk on ideology and power. In France we have a saying – stupid and evil. I found them more stupid than evil. That is not to understate the murderous potential of stupidity.
Nicolas Hénin, French journalist and former ISIS hostage on his former captors

Maybe it would have been better if neither of us had been born.
Napoléon Bonaparte, looking at the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau