Scorn (6 page)

How do you tell the difference between a Finnish introvert and a Finnish extrovert? One looks at his own feet when he's talking to you, the other will look at yours.
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 attractive 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