Harold Wilson

The ambition of the present Labour government is that every worker in the country will have a greater than average income.

"The main essentials of a successful prime minister are sleep and a sense of history."

"A week is a long time in politics."

"One man's wage increase is another man's price increase."

"The monarchy is a labor intensive industry."

"I'm at my best in a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle."

"I'm an optimist, but an optimist who carries a raincoat."

"Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power."

"Everybody should have an equal chance - but they shouldn't have a flying start."

The labour party is like a stage-coach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody inside is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.

Toni Morrison

"Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another."

"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think."

"Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers."

"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."

"When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same."

"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."

"You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone."

"Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader."

"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it."

Iris Murdoch

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

"All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."

"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

"Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph."

"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia."

"In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all."

"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."

"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."

"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end."

"Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously."

David Hockney

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

It takes a long time to make it simple.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.

Abigail Adams

Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life....Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe.

Great necessities call out great virtues.

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.

I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, ’Give, give.’

Thomas Hardy

I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. [Suicide note by a boy who killed himself and his two younger siblings:] Done because we are too menny.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You’d treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

John Ruskin

Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money, — he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. "What will you make of what you have got?" you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

There is no wealth but life.

You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased with them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, 'We, the people.'

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

A gender line... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Amy Lowell

*See the note below for a recent Guardian article by Alison Flood ont he debt that Hughes and Lawrence owe Amy Lowell

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.

You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.

For the man who should loose me is dead, Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, In a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?

Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.

A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.

*Ted Hughes’s poem Pike is one of the late poet laureate’s best-known works, taught in schools across the UK and endlessly anthologised. But Hughes’s image of a fish with “green tigering the gold” has an unacknowledged debt to a forgotten poem by the American poet Amy Lowell, according to an English academic who claims that Hughes “confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work” in a new paper.

According to Dr Hannah Roche, a lecturer in English at the University of York, it is “nothing short of incredible” that Hughes’s 1959 poem Pike “has not been considered in its close relation” to Lowell’s 1914 work The Pike. In her paper Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians, which has just been published in the academic journal Modernist Cultures, Roche pinpoints similarities between the poems.

“In Lowell’s poem, ‘shadows’, ‘green-and-copper’, ‘under the reeds’, and ‘orange’ appear in sequence; in almost the same pattern, Hughes’s poem gives us ‘green tigering the gold’, ‘silhouette’ , ‘under the heat-struck lily pads’, and an ‘amber cavern’,” she writes, also highlighting the “echo” of Lowell’s line, “darkness and a gleam”, in the final line of Hughes’s poem: “Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed”.

Alison Flood — The Guardian

Bernardo Bertolucci

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

I remember being young in the 1960s... we had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life.

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.

I think that I used to love Hollywood movies. I remember great phases and moments. But, unfortunately, now is not the moment.

I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

I put all my time into Indian rights, and I think this is something I know something about, and I think that my time is best spent insofar as my political views are concerned.

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

When somebody says, 'Oh, Buffy, you're such a warrior for peace', I stop them and say, 'No, I'm not really a warrior for peace. What I promote is alternative conflict resolution'.

By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done.

We allow each other so little enjoyment or even tolerance for our individualities, our uniquenesses, and yet to me, that's what it's all about.

I think that most Americans feel that the Indians lost because of fair fights and superior odds and superior weaponry. That's because that's the only side of the story that's been told.

When I first got famous in the '60s, I got a little too famous, and in order to escape showbusiness, I moved to Hawaii.

It never occurred to me that I was important enough to have some politician go out of his way to silence me. I only found out about it in the '80s by accident - a broadcaster announced they received letters of commendation from the White House for having suppressed my music. My career was so highly impacted in the U.S. it will never recover.

John Keats

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.

My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk.

David Niven, Actor

Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity.

[Photo Note: In WWII Niven did something on the secret side to disguise the Normandy Landings]

I have a face that is a cross between two pounds of halibut and an explosion in an old clothes closet.

You can count on Errol Flynn, he'll always let you down.

I wonder why it is, that young men are always cautioned against bad girls. Anyone can handle a bad girl. It's the good girls men should be warned against.

I see my purpose in life as making the world a happier place to be in

Malta is a sod of a place.

I make two movies a year to take care of the butcher and the baker and the school fees. Then I try to write, but it's not that easy. Acting is what's easy.

Champagne offers a minimum of alcohol and a maximum of companionship.

I've taken up the Bible again, somewhat in the spirit of W.C. Fields - looking for loopholes.

David Niven, PhD.

“Events are temporary. Bad things happen, but usually we do not feel their effects on us forever. It’s really true that time heals wounds. Your disappointments are important and serious, but your distress will pass and your life will take you in new directions. Give yourself some time.”

“These were all very talented engineers. All knowledgeable, capable, skilled, and driven. Yet their likelihood of succeeding varied tremendously based on what they were trying to do. The group that had never seen a bad example let their natural talents carry them to a good design. They wasted not a moment on the problem and spent all their time on the solution.”

“Today, every American state spends more on its jails than on its universities. When you have a clear enemy, you fight it with everything you have.”

“You are not just here to fill space or be a background character in someone else's movie. Consider this: nothing would be the same if you did not exist. Every place you have ever been and everyone you have ever spoken to would be different without you. We are all connected, and we are all affected by the decisions and even the existence of those around us.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

[Caption: Solzhenitsyn in Vermont, where he lived while in the West.]

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.

Joan Didion

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Dolphins, I learned from J. Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

Pablo Casals

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.

I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.

Time and tide wait for no man.

The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.
Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,
The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne;
Al this mene I be love.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

He was as fresh as is the month of May.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swych licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

People can die of mere imagination.

The guilty think all talk is of themselves.

Forbid us something, and that thing we desire.

There's never a new fashion but it's old.

Muddy Waters

I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.

I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.

I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.

Aretha Franklin

Sam Cooke had a huge influence on me. He left the gospel field at one point and went into the secular, and he had this huge hit, 'You Send Me.' Irma, my older sister, and I heard 'You Send Me' on the radio while we were driving through the South one night. We had to stop the car. We got out and danced around the car out on the highway.

Being the Queen is not all about singing, and being a diva is not all about singing. It has much to do with your service to people. And your social contributions to your community and your civic contributions as well.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I'm using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I'm happy with that.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

I always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Don't say Aretha is making a comeback, because I've never been away!

I'm the lady next door when I'm not on stage.

My faith always has been and always will be important to me.

I think the hardest thing is losing weight. That's the hardest thing more than anything else.

Dorothy Maclean

If there ever was a time in our evolution of consciousness it is now—the ground is prepared for this planting.

We judge everything as good or evil and forget that resistance, pain and difficulties are there so we can learn when we leave balance.

The key is love, the action is service, and the joy is knowing the grandeur that is God in us and in everything.

Stress is caused by our resistance to what already is. Even our difficulties we need to accept. My greatest wish is to do God's will.

I've always thought that we have to bring our spirituality into our everyday life such as even brushing our teeth with God.

I've also found that at the bottom of all of these qualities is love. If you have enough love you have enough courage, enough love then you have patience.