Scorn (9 page)

Watching the eurozone countries trying to resolve their debt crisis has been like watching 17 people in oven gloves manipulating a Rubik's cube.
John Lichfield

The only person alive actually famed for his obscurity.
Hugo Rifkind on Herman Van Rompuy, first President of the European Council

All the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.
Nigel Farage on Herman Van Rompuy

I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately it's the government.
Woody Allen

 

Left and Right

Welcome to Britain's New Political Order. No passion … No Right. No Left. Just multi-hued blancmange.
Austin Mitchell

The facile leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence.
Karl Marx on Jeremy Bentham

The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.
Irving Berlin on Karl Marx

The left always has an orgasm when it sees a crowd.
Simon Jenkins

The voice of the discontented wealthy.
Nick Cohen on Russell Brand

You can read Russell Brand's autobiography and dismiss it as
rubbish, if you like. Or you can dismiss it as rubbish without reading it, to save time.
Stewart Lee

I couldn't see him overthrowing a table of drinks.
Noel Gallagher on Russell Brand

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.
Don Marquis

We should have had socialism in this country long ago, if it were not for the bloody people who became socialists.
George Bernard Shaw

Conservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are.
Geoffrey Madan

That dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat.
George Orwell on left-wing intellectuals

I would rather consult my valet than the Conservative conference.
Arthur Balfour

My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a communist at 30, I will do it then.
Georges Clemenceau

There are lots of ways to get socialism, but I think trying to fracture the Labour party by incessant contest cannot be one of them.
Neil Kinnock

We know that the organised workers of the country are our friends. As for the rest, they don't matter a tinker's cuss.
Emanuel Shinwell, Labour politician

My epitaph must be: ‘Died of writing inane letters to empty-headed Conservative Associations'. It is a miserable death to look forward to.
Lord Salisbury

They are political Calibans on Prospero's island, chanting their subversive songs only to each other.
Jenny McCartney on the Left

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he
made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
Jack London on strikebreakers

The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.
Oscar Wilde

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned how to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Why do Republicans hate gay marriage so much? They certainly don't hate gay prostitutes.
Margaret Cho

Its relationship to democratic institutions is that of the death-watch-beetle – it is not a Party, it is a conspiracy.
Aneurin Bevan on the Communist Party

Russian communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.
Clement Attlee

I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.
Catherine the Great. Attrib.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt

Russia is a collapse, not a revolution.
D.H. Lawrence

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka

It would have been better if the experiment had been conducted in some small country, to make it clear it was a Utopian idea.
Boris Yeltsin on Communism

The Party line is that there is no Party line.
Milovan Djilas on reforms to the Yugoslavian Communist Party

It is a Party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.
Lord Salisbury on the Conservative Party

We will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev at a Kremlin reception

A pig-eyed bag of wind.
Frank L. Howley on Nikita Khrushchev

When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some on to grow so that you can skin them again.
Nikita Khrushchev to British businessmen

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical and social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party … So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Aneurin Bevan

I Told You So You Fucking Fools.
Kingsley Amis's suggested name change for a republication of Robert Conquest's
The Great Terror
. Conquest had been attacked by the left as a Cold War propagandist at the time of the original publication.

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?
Joseph Stalin, when urged by Pierre Lavel to tolerate Catholicism in the USSR to appease the Pope

The most eminent mediocrity in the party.
Leon Trotsky on Joseph Stalin

Pathological exhibits … human scum … paranoiacs, degenerates, morons, bludgers … pack of dingoes … industrial outlaws and political lepers … ratbags. If these
people went to Russia, Stalin wouldn't even use them for manure.
Arthur Calwell, Australian Minister of Immigration, on Australian Communists

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Brazilian archbishop Hélder Câmara

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Aldous Huxley,
Proper Studies

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. That's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.
Michael Frayn

Wonderful theory, wrong species.
Biologist E.O. Wilson on Marxism

Stupid asses.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the proletariat, private correspondence

If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes to be completed they would perhaps show a little more interest.
Jenny Marx, frustrated by the lack of attention given to the publication of her husband's magnum opus,
Das Kapital.

The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher

‘To borrow and to borrow and to borrow' is not Macbeth with a heavy cold: it is Labour Party policy.
Margaret Thatcher

Communism is the longest path from capitalism to capitalism.
Russian joke

It is too early to say.
Zhou Enlai, 20th-century Chinese Party Chairman, asked for his assessment of the 1789 French Revolution. But he may have thought the question was about revolutionary French students.

An ideological movement is a collection of people, many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world.
Professor Kenneth Minogue

I've been married to one Marxist and one fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.
Actor Lee Grant

 

British Politics

What shall we do with this bauble? There, take it away.
Oliver Cromwell, dismissing Parliament, 1653

SIR,
I have received your letter with indignation and with scorn return you this answer … I scorn your proffer; I disdain your favour; I abhor your treason; and am so far from delivering up this island to your advantage, that I shall keep it to the utmost of my power, and, I hope, to your destruction. Take this for your final answer, and forbear any further solicitations; for if you trouble me with any more messages of this nature, I will burn your paper, and hang up your messenger.
DERBY
The Earl of Derby, a Royalist holding the Isle of Man, to General Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son in law

… consider into the commission of what crimes, impieties, wickednesses, and unheard of villanies, we have been led, cheated, cozened, and betrayed, by that grand impostor, that
loathsome hypocrite, that detestable traitor, that prodigy of nature, that opprobrium of mankind, that landscape of iniquity, that sink of sin, and that compendium of baseness, who now calls himself our Protector. What have we done, nay, what have we not done, which either hellish policy was able to contrive, or brutish power to execute? We have trampled underfoot all authorities; we have laid violent hands upon our own Sovereign; we have ravished our Parliaments; we have deflowered the virgin liberty of our nation; we have put a yoke, an heavy yoke of iron, upon the necks of our own countrymen; we have thrown down the walls and bulwarks of the people's safety; we have broken often repeated oaths, vows, engagements, covenants, protestations; we have betrayed our trusts; we have violated our faiths; we have lifted up our hands to heaven deceitfully; and that these our sins might want no aggravation to make them exceedingly sinful, we have added hypocrisy to them all; and … like the audacious strumpet, wiped our mouths, and boasted that we have done no evil …
Anabaptist address to Charles II, attacking Cromwell shortly before his death

Sir, the atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honourable gentleman has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of those who continue ignorant in spite of age and experience … Much more, Sir, is he to be abhorred, who, as he has advanced in age, has receded from virtue, and become more wicked with less temptation: who prostitutes himself for money which he
cannot enjoy, and spends the remains of his life in the ruin of his country.
William Pitt, speech, after entering Parliament, to Horace Walpole, who had mocked his youth

Gentlemen, I received yours and am surprised by your insolence in troubling me about the Excise. You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody Else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation. Yours, etc., Anthony Henley
Letter from Anthony Henley, MP for Southampton (1727–34), to his constituents, following their protests over the Excise Bill

Mr Speaker, I said the honourable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honourable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan on being asked to apologise for calling a fellow MP a liar. Attrib.

Therefore I charge Mr Hastings with having destroyed, for private purposes, the whole system of government by the six provincial Councils, which he had no right to destroy.

I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.

I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which
fidelity, even in iniquity, requires at the hands of the worst of men.

I charge him with having robbed those persons of whom he took the bribes.

I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.

I charge him with having, without right, title or purchase, taken the lands of orphans and given them to wicked persons under him.

I charge him with having removed the natural guardians of a minor Raja, and given his zamindary to that wicked person, Deby Singh.

I charge him – his wickedness being known to himself and all the world – with having committed to Deby Singh the management of three great provinces; and with having thereby wasted the country, destroyed the landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that country.
Edmund Burke, peroration on Warren Hastings, 1788

As he rose like a rocket, he fell like a stick.
Thomas Paine on Edmund Burke

When I get into Parliament, I will pledge myself to no party, but write upon my forehead in legible characters ‘To Be Let'.
Tom Sheridan to his father, Richard Brinsley Sheridan

And under it, Tom, write ‘Unfurnished'.
Richard Sheridan's reply

With death doomed to grapple
Beneath this cold slab, he
Who lied in the Chapel
Now lies in the Abbey.
Lord Byron on William Pitt

… two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, similes for two political characters of 1819 – the Home Secretary Sidmouth, and Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Commons, Castlereagh

Why is a pump like Viscount Castlereagh? –
Because it is a slender thing of wood,
That up and down its awkward arm doth sway,
And coolly spout and spout and spout away,
In one weak, washy, everlasting flood.
Thomas Moore on Viscount Castlereagh

I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh …
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
The Mask of Anarchy

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this;
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop here traveller, and piss.
Lord Byron on Viscount Castereagh, who killed himself

Honest in the most odious sense of the word.
Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone

I don't object to the Old Man always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that God Almighty put it there.
Henry Labouchere on W.E. Gladstone

An old man in a hurry.
Lord Randolph Churchill on W.E. Gladstone

Gladstone … founded the great tradition … in public to speak the language of the highest and strictest principle, and in private to pursue and possess every sort of woman.
Peter Wright on W.E. Gladstone

Mr Peter Wright,
Your Garbage about Mr Gladstone in ‘Portraits and Criticisms' has come to our knowledge. You are a liar. Because you slander a dead man, you are a coward. Because you think the public will accept invention from such as you, you are a fool. GLADSTONE
I associate myself with this letter.
H.N. GLADSTONE
W.E. Gladstone's son

The Right Honourable Gentleman's smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin.
Benjamin Disraeli on Sir Robert Peel

… the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.
Walter Bagehot on Sir Robert Peel

Mrs Thatcher is a woman of common views but uncommon abilities.
Julian Critchley on Margaret Thatcher

If a traveller were informed that such a man was the Leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect.
Benjamin Disraeli on Lord John Russell

He has committed every crime that does not require courage.
Benjamin Disraeli on the Irish agitator Daniel O'Connell

He is a liar. (Cheers) He is a liar in action and in words. His life is a living lie. He is a disgrace to his species … He is the most degraded of his species and kind; and England is degraded in tolerating or having upon the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable, foul and atrocious nature. (Cheers)
Daniel O'Connell on Benjamin Disraeli, at a meeting of trades unions in Dublin

London, May 6 [1835]
Mr O'Connell:
Although you have long placed yourself out of the pale of civilization, still I am one who will not be insulted, even by a Yahoo, without chastising it … Listen, then, to me. If it had been possible for you to act like a gentleman, you would have hesitated before you made your foul and insolent comments … With regard to your taunts as to my want of success in my election contests, permit me to remind you that I had nothing to appeal to but the good sense of the people … I am not one of those public beggars that we see swarming with their obtrusive boxes in the chapels of your creed …

We shall meet at Philippi; and … I will seize the first opportunity of inflicting upon you a castigation which will make you at the same time remember and repent the insults you have lavished upon
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Benjamin Disraeli to Daniel O'Connell

As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench, the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coast of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes, not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest, but the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.
Benjamin Disraeli on the Liberal Government

There is not a criminal in an European gaol, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation
would not rise and boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged; which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and which may again spring up, in another murderous harvest, from the soil soaked and reeking in blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once, is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that a door should be left open for their ever-so-barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the whole …
W.E. Gladstone on the Turks,
Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East

He made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.
Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone

… What should we do with others to confront this threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer under the yoke, the cruel yoke, of Daesh?

… We know that in June four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. We know that in August the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. And we know that in recent weeks there has been the discovery of mass graves in Sinjar, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were
judged too old to be sold for sex … Given that we know what they are doing, can we really stand aside …?
Hilary Benn MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary, defending air-strikes on Syria in a Commons Speech on 2 Dec 2015

He has not a single redeeming defect.
Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone

If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anybody pulled him out that, I suppose, would be a calamity.
Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone asked to distinguish misfortune and calamity

He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street.
Michael Foot on Benjamin Disraeli

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination, that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments, malign an opponent and glorify himself.
Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone, parodying his style

Gladstone … spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question.
W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman in
1066 and All That

Mr Gladstone speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.
Queen Victoria on W.E. Gladstone

If you weren't such a great man you'd be a terrible bore.
Mrs W.E. Gladstone to her husband

Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.
Winston Churchill on W.E. Gladstone

He spent his whole life in plastering together the true and the false and therefrom extracting the plausible.
Stanley Baldwin on David Lloyd George

Not even a public figure. A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance.
Lord Curzon on Stanley Baldwin

A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.
Stanley Baldwin, referring to the post-First-World-War Commons

English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.
Lord Salisbury

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin

Like a cushion, he always bore the impress of the last man who sat on him.
David Lloyd George on Lord Derby; also attrib. to Lord Haig