Sedulia's Quotations

Frank O'Connor on the Irish of 1916: A bookless, backward race

…a bookless, backward, superstitious race which had scarcely emerged from the twilight of mythology….

               --Frank O’Connor (1903-1966) describing the Irish of 1916, in The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution, p. 16

Will.i.am: If countries were people, Italy would be dead

If countries were people, England and France would be old men. Italy would be dead.

     --Will.i.am (William J. Adams) (1975- ) in an interview with Dana White, Oprah magazine, May 2009

"It's hard to be a good person in China"

It's hard to be a good person in China. The system makes you numb to what's right and wrong.

             --Tao Jun, a former Foshan businessman turned anti-corruption activist, interviewed by Mark Magnier in the Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2008

A.E. on the British: If they were only alive they would be the best people in the world

It is really a dead country, but there are very nice people among the dead, and if they were only alive they would be the best people in the world.

   --A.E. [pen name of George William Russell, Anglo-Irish writer] (1867-1935), in a letter to his friend Frank O'Connor from London, quoted by O'Connor in My Father's Son, his autobiography

Quentin Letts on modern Britain

 

Modern Britain is full of snivelling people on the take who have lost all moral background and fibre.

--Quentin Letts (1963), British journalist. Quoted in Tatler, November 20 08

Jean Baudrillard: Los Angeles no longer real

In fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real.

  --Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), quoted in his obituary in the U.K. Telegraph, 8 March 2007

Chinese Party Secretary Zhang Jingli 張慶黎 on the Dalai Lama: "A monster with a human face"

A wolf wrapped in a monk's robe; a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast.

       --Zhang Jingli (張慶黎) Chinese Party Secretary for Tibet, describing the Dalai Lama. Quoted in article by Paul Lin 林保華 in the Taipei Times, 25 April 2008.

H.L. Mencken: Almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.

  --H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), in the Baltimore Evening Sun, fromA Second Mencken Chrestomathy (pub.2006, ed. Terry Teachout

A.A. Gill on French literature

The sad truth is that little has been written in French that even the French will read for a generation. They are a nation with a thin literary heritage and virtually no literary present. Their contribution to the world's library in the past 30 years has been cartoon books which they consider art and literary criticism which is unreasonable. We have the French to thank for deconstruction. They are good at criticism. They have pathetically declined from being a second-rate nation to being the shrill, pinched, finger-pointing nag of Europe.

   --A.A. Gill (1954- ) in a newspaper article ca 1995

French union leader Marcelle Rohr on French department store hours

Even if the stores closed at midnight, there would still always be people coming in to buy. So there's a moment when you just have to say stop. The customers just have to be organized.

     --Union delegate Marcelle Rohr, who works at the Paris department store Printemps, quoted in an article on the possible extension of department store hours to 8 p.m., in Le Parisien, 31 March 2008

Même si on fermait à minuit, il y aurait toujours des gens pour venir faire des achats. Alors il arrive un moment où il faut s'arrêter. Les clients n'ont qu'à s'organiser.