Samizdata

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.

– Saki (aka H. Munro).

If you have not read any Saki, well you should repair that omission immediately. Many people, including PG Wodehouse, Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh and others were inspired by the brilliant, cruel wit of Saki. I have my old friend and intellectual mentor, the late Chris R. Tame, to thank for encouraging me to read Saki. If you are ever in need of cheering up, read any one of Saki’s short stories. Absolute magic.

Kissing the jackboot gets you kicked, not loved

– Triinu Saar

Is using perfectly legal methods of minimising tax right? The answer is no.

– Andrew Pendleton, a senior campaigner at Christian Aid

The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy

– Fred L. Smith

It felt like a lion being savaged by Christians

– Madsen Pirie, when asked how it felt to be the only one in a room offering strongly dissenting opinions from the usual statist consensus.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

– Voltaire, without a doubt one of the greatest Frenchmen who have lived. His novel, Candide, with its great character Dr Pangloss, reads as fresh today as when it was written two centuries and a half ago.