#rita

I know some of my parents' friends think 'Little Britain' is in incredibly poor taste. But swimming the Channel? You can't really say anything negative about that, can you? There's nothing better than making your parents happy. The glee on my father's face that day was amazing. ↗

— David Walliams

#amazing #anything #better #britain #channel

We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#authoritarian #be happy #because #china #countries

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain. ↗

— Arabella Weir

#boarding #britain #diplomat #expected #fact

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps. ↗

— Johann Hari

#britain #elizabeth-ii #monarchy #monarchy-of-the-uk #postage-stamps

Personally I'm not a feminist, as I can't stand puritans. ↗

— Vivienne Westwood

#i #personally #puritans #stand

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose. ↗

— Elinor Wylie

#able #am #better #heaven #hell

I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated and I shall continue to dedicate my work. ↗

— Chen Ning Yang

#background #chinese #civilization #continue #dedicate

I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can. ↗

— Lee Kuan Yew

#admiring #better #better job #britain #i

We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other words a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers. The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#materialism-versus-spiritualism #traditions #values #age

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#artists #puritans #art