Quotable Quotes

Quotable Quotes from my readings, regularly updated

Women

The man who gets on best with women is the one who knows best how to get on without them. Baudelaire.

Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen. Compton Mackenzie, born 1883. English playwright and novelist.

I love thee like pudding; if thou wert pie, I'd eat thee. John Ray, 1627-1705. English chronicler.

Nothing sharpens the wits like promiscuous flirtation. George Moore, Irish novelist, art critic and essayist.

The law

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished. Jeremy Bentham 1748 – 1832.

Politics and Society

Modern lives are being remorselessly crushed beneath the blind executive rump; its twin buttocks are management and accountancy, between which escapes the thin mephitic steam of marketing. Michael Bywater Third Oldie Annual 1997.

A good many people fret themselves about the rather improbable speculation that the earth may be blown asunder by nuclear weapons. The grimmer and more immediate prospect is that men and women may be reduced to a sub-human state through limitless indulgence in their own vices – with ruinous consequences to society. Russell Kirk.

Whole tracts of our religion are bare of spiritual passion, or spiritual depth. Christianity speaks the language of our humane civilisation; it does not speak the language of Christ. The age, and much of the Church, believes in civilisation and is interested in the Gospel, instead of believing in the Gosepl and being interested in civilisation. P T Forsyth.

Morality

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. John Adams.

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. G K Chesterton.

When principles that run against against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith. Abraham Kuyper.

Pilgrims, posers and pop history

Pilgrims, posers and pop history 

Inside Robben Island

A romp, with diversions, through Robben Island Museum history, written for the global market

Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like – William Cobbett, 1762-1835

A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company – Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication – George Bernard Shaw 1856 -1950.

Fast track affirmative action in the heritage sector. -- from an article in Ilifa Labantu, June 2002. (Robben Island Museum newsletter, Heritage of the People.)

Garth King spent four years living on Robben Island from 1998 to 2002, working as a “media and marketing consultant” and a “publications and productions co-ordinator” for the young museum. Here are some of his island stories:

By Garth King

Introduction

United States President Bill Clinton and Hilary were there. Nelson Mandela, was there too. Standing on the rough, scrubby kikuyu lawn of the Victorian guest house, the Governor's Residence, on Robben Island, one fine day in 1995.

It was just one year into South Africa's new, shiny-bright democracy. Several gangs of TV cameramen and other media people were there too for the pomp and ceremony. A critical point of the pomp was the delivery to the island of a large luxury bus, which Bill had kindly donated. The crowd on the lawn were waiting for a large helicopter, which was airlifting the bus via attached cables, to arrive.

The chopper appeared on the horizon. The dignitaries stood around clutching their chilled chardonnays, carefully watching the spectacle. It came closer, and the large bus beneath it was just visible. Slowly it started to bridge the 10km distance from the mainland.  Everybody was watching. The copter and the bus began to loom large as it swept  oddly, imperiously towards the striped-roofed somewhat scruffy flagship VIP venue on the island. About 200m or so from the island, one of the cables inexplicably snapped.

The copter lurched sideways and the bus suddenly dropped into the Atlantic, and sunk quickly in very deep waters -- to the stunned amazement of the then-leader of the free world and his buddy, the planet's most fabulous freedom fighter. The bus was never recovered, or replaced.

It was a a prophetic moment in the annals of the history of the young Robben Island Museum, that holy of holies of the apartheid struggle, whose own epicentre remains Mandela's cell in the old apartheid regime's Maximum Security Prison, where Mandela spent 16 years of his 27-year incarceration.

It was early days for the soon-to-be national museum, national monument and World Heritage Site.