210
“[U2] are rubbish and then some. That guy walks like John Wayne. Any guitarist that calls himself The Edge and wears a hat because he’s gone bald deserves to have stuff thrown at him.” – Mark Kermode
209
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” – Thomas Pynchon
208
“And there was John Carlos, defending his actions of 1968 to a young audience. I was more than starstruck; this was a figure who shaped history, not someone you imagine you could meet. It was like hiring a decorator to do your living room, then when he comes round it turns out he’s Leonardo da Vinci.” – Mark Steele
Put People First
G20, London, March 28th – be there.
207
“No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.” – Edward Abbey
206
“Fascism was little more than terrorist rule by corrupt gangsters.” – AJP Taylor
205
“The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.” – EB White
204
“With Thatcher, we felt that she wasn’t our fault. New Labour was about fairness and has turned out to be as corrupt if not more so, and more tied to the American military machine than Thatcher was. I feel a great deal more hatred for Blair than I ever felt for Thatcher.” – Alexei Sayle
203
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear.” – Cicero
202
“The last message from the radio station in Hungary in 1956 as the Soviet tanks rolled in was Don’t forget us. We need good democrats to make democracy work, and it is the responsibility of both the politicians and the media to make sure that they are in good supply in our society.” – Lord McNally
201
“The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they’re liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
200
“Right, we’d better have a bloody revolution.” – Dave Attenborough
199
“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.” – George Orwell
198
“The notion of a ‘personal computer’ was as alien as an individual citizen owning a personal aircraft carrier.” – John Sutherland
197
“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.” – George Orwell
