“Burke's complaint against the [(French)] revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of the traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and all that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian thinking.”
Source: Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
“The West’s adversarial political system, in which all manner of decisions were made by majority rule, was little more than a refined version of civil war, replacing one form of coercion (fighting) with another (voting).”
Source: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
“For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the French, those great anti-venerators, those relentless beheaders of Great Men, worshipped Voltaire.”
Source: The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong
“Bonjour, the Embassy of France'
'Ah, bonjour, excuse me for asking but where is the French Coastguard?'
'At the coast. Guarding.”
Source: In the Bath: Conquering the Channel in a Piece of Plumbing
“There's no Coastguard in France. They let the French Navy do it. They have to give them something to do. It's not good for national pride to have to disband it so they turned it into a Coastguard. I think it does a few other bits and bobs too.”
Source: In the Bath: Conquering the Channel in a Piece of Plumbing
“He walked out into the night, thinking languageless thoughts...He ran suddenly across a street. At night, he knew, there could be the belief that something never before felt might be felt, something new. You could allow yourself quite easily this view of the world--this thrilling, midnightly faith--of there being something out there that loved you, that, at night, worshipped and searched for you, like a past life seeking its next, wanting desperately the continuation of itself. And though it would probably never find you, it would also, you believed at night, never give up, and this was enough--that something was out there and desperate and on its way.”
Source: Bed
“i recommend the phrase 'pineapple ass”
“This was a place impossible for romance, a place where tea was brewed, earnestly, from paint chips, glass shards, and small change. In this world, Sean knew, one could put faith in a toe bone, a blood bone, a cartilage of eye--all the unloved contributors of one's own body world.”
Source: Bed
“She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over--she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. 'Oh,' she said.”
Source: Bed
“I didn't need them to save me, I just wanted them to notice I was drowning.”
Source: Because i'm still breathing