Time Bandits

If I'd created the world, I wouldn't have wasted time mucking about with butterflies. It'd have been lasers. 8 o'clock, day one.

Satan

Family Guy

Forecast for tomorrow - a slight sprinkling of genius with a chance of doom!

Stewie Griffin

Luke Haines

Wir haben es geschafft dass die Bulken dummi aus der wasche geguckt haben am der grenze.

Baader Meinhof (by way of some kind German PhD students)

From Bad Vibes:
On being thrown out of art college:

I am thrown out - asked to leave as I have 'a bad attitude to further education'. Not true. I have a great attitude.

On being dubbed the Saviour of Rock:

Why would I want to save rock? The damn thing has been stumbling around like a wounded donkey since 1981. The only thing I want to do with rock is kick the fucker to death and put it out of its misery.

On James Banbury*:

I have trouble getting down to a few of the low notes. The Cellist demonstrates that he can reach them and kindly offers his services. 'Hey, tough guy, bit keen aren't you? says Phil to the swot, visibly irritated.
I'm watching you, I think to myself. I'm watching.

On James Banbury again:

The Cellist reveals himself to be something of a bon viveur in search of an onion pastry called pissal-adiere. As a non viveur, I find his quest rather disappointing on any number of levels.

On Alan McGee:

'You. You're Tom Verlaine.' He is of course referring to the buzz-saw blitzkrieg maverick lead guitarist of seminal symbolist New York City art rockers Television. Maybe some people would be happy with this introduction. Not I. I am a stickler for manners and would have preferred a 'How do you do?' or even a simple 'Hello.' The 80s were plagued by these small-time indie Svengalis, wannabe Brian Epsteins or mini-Malcolms. Forever proclaiming some poor bugger to be a genius. Of course hype is fundamental to pop music. But it often says more about the hyper than the hyped. The start of the cursed holy bestowals.
'You. You're Tom Verlaine,' it says, utterly unbecoming. I fix the fool with a dead-eyed stare. Say nothing, say nothing. You, Alan McGee, will pay for this transgression. You will pay.

On the music press:

The first music press front covers of the year are traditionally a bold prediction of who is going to dazzle like no one else has dazzled before, reaping unimaginable rewards for themselves, and for the rest of us change the way we perceive the dimensions of time and space. For their first issue of the year NME stick Elastica on the front cover. During the first week of the new year Blobby is still number one. Time and space remain unaltered.

The full verdict on Chris Evans is probably a bit long to include here, but it does include the phrases 'the only thing I want right now is for the lifeblood to drain out of you' and 'jumped-up kissogram-turned-light-entertainment-colossus'.

On fans' criticism:

The 'spare' guitarist is crestfallen.
'It's the fans,' I console, 'who can be the harshest of critics. John Lennon found that out.'

David Manning

I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties [of invading Iraq]. They may agree that failure isn't an option , but this doesn't mean that they will avoid it.

March 14th 2003

Linda Smith

What is it with the Labour Party? What is this genius it has for making you nostalgic for the previous party leader, the one you used to think was rubbish? I thought Neil Kinnock was useless, but now, looking back, he seems like Spartacus!

Linda Smith

Mark Thomas

We pay for the arms companies to influence our government, bribe other governments and arm the world. And then we phone up radio stations and defend the arms companies for being good for the economy and creating jobs. We paid for the jobs. We bought our own jobs. How mafia is that! And do you know what? When it comes to the arms trade, Britain is one of the better regulated countries on the planet - think how fucked the others have to be! And it doesn't have to be this way. An ethical foreign policy - just think what could have happened if it had been real.

As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I hate sand. It's just tiny rocks.

Joel Barish

Terry Pratchett

There is no higher life form than a librarian.

Rosa Luxemburg

The public life of states with limited freedom is - so inadequate, so schematic, so unfruitful precisely because, in excluding democracy, it seals off the living sources of all spiritual wealth and progress.

Reform or Revolution

Daria Morgendorffer

There is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life, that cannot be improved with pizza.

Bertrand Russell

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

Why I Am Not a Christian

Horst Mahler

Every capitalist has a terrorist in the family.

(N.B. this was back in the days when he was a socialist.)

Mark Kermode

All films should end on a nicely ambiguous, slightly downbeat note with an element of the possibility of hope and redemption.

Falco

If a band's ambition is to influence a generation of lazy people with bad haircuts, then they're never going to be a great band.

I'm not the greatest Christian in the world - I'm not even a Christian.

Invader Zim

Tuna? Tuna is worth nothing.

Zim

Engels

I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British 'respectability,' we should be even worse off than we are.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Wittgenstein

7.0 Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

3.333 The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and it cannot contain itself.

For let us suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument: in that case there would be a proposition 'F(F(fx))', in which the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings, since the inner one has the form φ(fx) and the outer one has the form ψ(φ(fx)). Only the letter 'F' is common to the two functions but the letter by itself signifies nothing.

This immediately becomes clear if instead of 'F(fu)' we write '(∃φ):F(φu).φu=Fu'.

That disposes of Russell's Paradox.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

109. ... Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

- Philosophical Investigations I

Tom Vague

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?
Well, it's better than bottling it up.

Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story.

Lenin

To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to misrepresent the people in parliament is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics ... How can it be dispensed with? ...
The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of the representative institutions and the electoral principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from mere "talking shops" into working bodies.

"The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time."

The State and Revolution (Essential Works, Dover 1987, p. 305)

Monopoly has sprung from the banks. The banks have developed from modest intermediary enterprises into the monopolists of finance capital. Some three or five of the biggest banks in each of the foremost capitalist countries have achieved the "personal union" of industrial and bank capital, and have concentrated in their hands the power to dispose of thousands upon thousands of millions which form the greater part of the capital and revenue of entire countries. A financial oligarchy, which throws a close net of relations of dependence over all the economic and political institutions of contemporary bourgeois society without exception - such is the most striking manifestation of this monopoly. ...
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest or most powerful nations - all these have given birth to those distinctive features of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more there emerges as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the "bondholding" (rentier) state, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by "clipping coupons."

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Essential Works, p. 266)

John Fleming

Before taking our leave of Mr Greenough, we feel disposed to state candidly, that his performance is one by no means calculated to advance his own reputation, or promote the interests of geology.... He appears to be totally unacquainted with the laws of evidence. With him the testimony of every mineralogist is of equal value; all are supposed to have been equally well informed, and to have studied the subject with equal care....

There has resulted from all this a kind of geological scepticism, which we regard in this instance as the index of a mind unaccustomed to philosophical induction, but which others may consider as the mark of free and independent thinking. It is calculated to disgust the adept, and to perplex the tyro. It has been publicly intimated, that the author is a gentleman of independent fortune, and that he has expended large sums in furnishing an extensive collection of minerals. These circumstances, while they aggravate his errors, and render him more dangerous as an authority, recall an expression of the late illustrious Playfair in reference to De Luc, 'to reason and to arrange, are very different occupations of the mind; and a man may deserve praise as a mineralogist, who is but ill qualified for the researches of geology'.

John Fleming, Review of Greenough's Critical Examination, Edinburgh Monthly Review, IV (1820), 571. Quoted in Leroy E Page, Diluvialism and Its Critics in Science and Religious Belief: A Selection of Recent Historical Studies, CA Cassell (Ed), pp. 220-1

It's as nice a summary of the characteristics of junk science and the dangers of speaking out of your area of expertise as you're likely to find. As a bit of background, Fleming was writing during the period when geology was going through some of its formative debates. One of the issues at stake was diluvialism: whether the principal cause of the formations of the face of the earth that we see today were caused by a giant, world-encompassing flood.*

*Guess which one? Hint: the source material for the claim was not noticeably peer-reviewed.**

**Although it's unfair to suggest that it's that straightforward. The actual debate was more complicated than that - see the wiki entry I've linked to above. It's just not as funny if I go into the whole messy reality now.

Doctor Who

Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!

The 9th Doctor

Doctor Constantine: Mrs Harper, how much better you're looking!
Mrs Harper: My leg's grown back! When I come to the hospital, I had one leg!
Doctor Constantine: Well, there is a war on. Is it possible you miscounted?

Right you lot! Lots to do! Beat the Germans, save the world, don't forget a welfare state!

The 9th Doctor

Rose: Look at you, beaming away like Father Christmas!
Doctor: Who says I'm not? Red bicycle when you were twelve.
Rose: What?

Funny thing, last time I was sentenced to death I ordered 4 hypervodkas for my breakfast. All a bit of a blur after that. Woke up in bed with both my executioners. Lovely couple. They stayed in touch. Can't say that about most executioners.

Captain Jack Harkness

Save your wiles for emergencies.

The 10th Doctor

Approve? It's brilliant. I can't decide if it's Marxism in action or a West End musical.

The 9th Doctor

Happiness will prevail!

Helen A, The Happiness Patrol

You can't rule the world in hiding. You've got to come out on the balcony sometimes and wave a tentacle.

- The 4th Doctor

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

- The 4th Doctor

You're a classic example of the inverse ratio between the size of the mouth and the size of the brain.

- The 4th Doctor

To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained.

- The 4th Doctor

The Long Good Friday

The mafia? I shit 'em.

Harold Shand

Humph

As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication. ... It has enabled me to look back with some equanimity on a life that has had its fair share of downs as well as ups. The redeeming quality of silliness should not be ignored.

It Just Occurred to Me... pp.45-6

my current recipe for scrambled egg that, with the advance of domestic science and technology, has now reached the peak of refinement:

Ingredients
Two or three eggs, depending on how concerned you are about your cholesterol.
Milk.
Smoked salmon, if you live in the southern half of England where it is not regarded as a symptom of elitism, snobbery or decadence. (I once asked for it in a small supermarket in Crosby, Lancs. The shop assistant's response, a high-pitched shriek of disbelief and derision, attracted a small crowd of shoppers and some passers-by who dashed in from the street thinking that some free professional entertainment had been laid on.)
Pepper.
Garlic Salt.
Tarragon.

The Method
Break the eggs into a bowl, which must be deep enough to avoid splashing. Add a dollop of milk. Using a fork (or one of those ingenious wire gadgets, if you can find it in the chaos of your kitchen drawer), whisk the mixture enthusiastically until it has blended to the colour and consistency of anaemic custard. Add a generous sprinkling of dried tarragon, and pepper and salt to taste. Whisk again with the manic vigour of one who senses that something rather hazardous is about to take place.
Put the bowl into the microwave and set it at three minutes on full power. Start the microwave, but do not go off to watch a bit of television till it bleeps. You will only get involved in a gripping episode of The Bill and return, fifty minutes later, to find that you have made something black and crumbling that will offer no pleasing visual contrast to the slice of toast that you are going to burn later. Stay by the microwave and, when you begin to feel a bit edgy, open the door and peer into the bowl. Microwave ovens rather pride themselves on being unpredictable, so you must repeat this inspection at frequent intervals, ignoring the urgent warnings of friends who still believe that if you expose your hands too often to the electromagnetic waves, your fingers will drop off. They may, but not for sixty years, when most of us are past caring.
The principle of the M-wave (let's start using trendy abbreviations - everybody else does) is that it cooks from the outside inward. Thus before your very eyes the egg mixture will soon start to show some creeping solidification round the rim of the bowl, leaving a liquid lake in the middle. And this is where the process demands acute concentration. With each inspection, the lake will be seen to have shrunk. It is important not to allow it to disappear altogether - if that happens the egg will have overcooked and fragmented into bits that will bounce about uncontrollably on the toast, evading capture like so many hyperactive grasshoppers on amphetamines. (If we never get around to actually scrambling the egg, we're learning the heck of a lot about biophysics on the journey.)
At some stage round about now, you should tip the chopped smoked salmon into the mix so that it will not have long enough to cook, but can be evenly dispersed when we come to agitate or, as we say, 'scramble' the egg. But I've forgotten to tell you about the chopping bit, and things are moving so fast that it's too late to do so now. So, quickly smooth back the cover that you have ripped off the pack of smoked salmon, replace the fish and put the whole caboodle back in the fridge for another occasion. That way, you will avoid finding yourself, when you come to eat the egg, chewing on the squares of invisible plastic film that separate the salmon slices. By the time all that's done, the lake, as I have described it, will have dwindled to the size of, say, a two-pound coin. Quickly remove the bowl from the microwave, go at it with a fork like one possessed, blending the still-liquid egg with the rest. When the mixture is poured on to the slice of toast, it will look soft, shiny and appetising.

I have assumed that the reader who has got thus far will have known how to make the slice of toast; if not, a few words of advice. Few households nowadays have the sort of roaring open fire before which one used to be able to toast the bread on a fork, achieving a wonderful golden-brown finish that spread evenly over the slice and up the hand, wrist and forearm as far as the elbow. Nowadays the popular alternative is the electric toaster, which is indeed a boon. But be sure the machine is fully run-in before use. If not, it is likely to fling the finished slice up to the ceiling, and thence into some distant corner of the room, where it will be pounced upon and devoured by a dog, a cat, or even perhaps a swan that has entered the house unannounced. Swans will eat anything, which is why I hope you haven't thrown away those charred remains of overcooked egg. Bon Appetit!

Ibid, pp. 22-25

People often speak of an 'English sense of humour', and it's no more accurate than most such generalisations. It's not a matter of nationality. The distinction is between lateral and literal thinking.

Ibid, pp. 77-8

For readers who have only seen Radiohead on stage or screen, the following bit of dialogue may reassure - or perhaps destroy a cherished image. Backstage earlier in the day, I was chatting with Jonny Greenwood when his brother Colin came up:
JG: 'Have you rung Mum to say we're on tonight?'
CG: 'Not yet - if she watches, she'll only say whgat she always says.'
HL (unable to restrain his curiosity): 'What does she always say?'
Both: 'She says, "I watched like you said, but it wasn't you."'

Ibid. p.155

Tony Benn

From Free at Last!:

Tuesday 17 August [1999]
A tragic earthquake in Turkey. Originally they thought 500 people had died but by the end of the day they were talking about 5000 or 10,000 people killed. The British Government has put aside £0.5 milliion in relief.
When you think that £8 billion was spent on killin 2000 Serbs and half a million pounds is going on trying to rescue up to 10,000, it just confirms how disgraceful war is.

Tuesday 24 August [1999]
I wrote a letter to The Times linking together the bombing of Iraq, the inadequate help given for the Turkish earthquake and the continued support for the KLA in the Balkans. I wrote that I couldn't recall a government pursuing such an unethical and immoral foreign and defence policy.

Monday 27 September [1999], Labour Party Conference, Bournemouth
The Conference is totally different now; they really have obliterated any function of deision-making and the media just hover around trying to find a bit of trouble. But the press may get bored with Jesus Christ taking responsibility for all our sins.

Tuesday 28th September [1999]
I was invited to the Channel 4 breakfast - God knows why I was asked. ... Vanni Treves [Chairman of Channel 4] welcomed us, as if somehow Channel 4 was running the Conference at Bournemouth and we were his invited guests. ... When Vannni Treves said, 'We are very glad out masters; - referring to the Government - 'have conceded some reduction in taxation,' I thought, 'our masters' indeed. It's the other way around.

Wednesday 29th September [1999]
There were 250 people at the Campaign Group rally at the Wessex Hotel ... I said that after the class war has been abolished by Tony Blair, he's going to announce that Darwin was wrong, that the world was made in seven days - and you know by whom; that Galileo was wrong, the Earth does rotate around the Millbank Tower.

Sunday 4 February [2001]
There is an anti-globalisation conference in London this weekend, organised in effect by the Socialist Workers' Party. The more I think of the SWP, the more I realise how important that element is in any successful political movement.

Green Wing

Just because I feel sick every time I look at you doesn't mean I'm not glad you're not dead.

Joanna Clore

Stevie Smith

It needs a good woman, or a good girl will do, to bring you back from the stony desert that runs up flat to a precipice where the soul hangs by a thread over the abyss. And what is down below? Hell. And don't say you don't believe in hell or hell may get the laugh of you.

Novel on Yellow Paper

You say I must write another book? But I've just written this one.
You liked it so much that's the reason? Read it again then.

To an American Publisher

The Beiderbecke Trilogy

Trevor: I never have diarrhoea!
Mr Carter: You're lucky!
Trevor: That's my philosophy: never catch anything you can't spell. In case you have to write a note.

Chief Inspector: Here's what I'll do. Ask for volunteers, and I'll look the other way. If it goes tits up, it's all your fault.
Sergeant Hobson: And if it's a success, sir?
Chief Inspector: Then I will claim full credit.
Hobson: Is that entirely fair?
Chief: Of course not. That's why I'm in a big posh office and you're buggering about with frogs and locusts.

Buffy

Willow: Is it me, or is the school paper getting kind of depressing lately?
Oz: I dunno, I usually skip straight to the obits.

Buffy: You want credit for not feeding off bleeding disaster victims?
Spike: Well... yeah.
Buffy: You're disgusting.
Spike: (exasperated) What's it take?

Giles: It's the apocalypse.
Xander, Willow, Buffy (in unison, slightly annoyed): Again?

Buffy: mausoleums: big freaky cereal boxes of death.

Power Without Responsibility

From Curran and Seaton's 1997 classic, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, which has been on my reading pile for a significant proportion of my adult life...

a Foreign Office official added, “it cannot be the object of foreign policy to wipe a tear from every eye – however much the cameras would like us to.”

(Curran and Seaton 1997:251)

It might also be helpful if, rather than saying that we know what shape the future holds - and consequently abdicating responsibility for it - we began to ask again what it might be possible to do to make it better.

(ibid.: 262)

Jose Saramago

A dark vessel, the Highland Brigade, ascends the sombre river and is about to anchor at the quay of Alcantara. The steamer is English and belongs to the Royal Mail Line ... [there are] spacious decks for games and sunbathing, even cricket, a field sport, can be played on deck, which shows that for the British Empire nothing is impossible.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1992 ed. p. 1

The evidence of death is the veil with which death masks itself.

ibid. p. 27

the gods of Ricardo Reis are silent entities who look upon us with indifference and for whom good and evil are less than words, because they never utter them, and why should they, if they cannot even tell them apart. They journey like us in the river of things, differing from us only because we call them gods and sometimes believe in them. We were taught this lesson lest we wear ourselves out making new and better resolutions for the incoming year. Nor do the gods judge, knowing everything, but this may be false. The ultimate truth, perhaps, is that they know nothing, their only task being to forget at each moment the good as well as the evil. So let us not say, Tomorrow I shall do it, for it is almost certain that tomorrow we will feel tired. Let us say instead, The day after tomorrow, then we will always have a day in reserve to change our mind and make new resolutions. It would be even more prudent, however, to say, One day, when the day comes to say the day after tomorrow, I shall say it, but even that might not prove necessary, if definitive death comes first and releases me from the obligation, for obligation is the worst thing in the world, the freedom we deny ourselves.

ibid. p.46

Salvador assured him that he always waited up to hear the bells ring in the New Year at midnight, a family tradition. They always ate twelve raisins, one for each chime, to bring luck during the next year, a popular custom widely observed abroad. You're talking about rich countries, but do you really believe such a custom will bring you good fortune. I do not know, but perhaps my year would have been even worse had I not eaten those raisins. It is with such arguments that the man who has no God seeks gods, while he who has abandoned his gods invents God. One day we shall rid ourselves of both God and gods.

ibid. p. 57

'These earthenware bowls are fragile and so easily broken, they are only made of a little clay on which fortune has precariously bestowed some consistency, and the same could be said of mankind.'

from The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2008: 151)

xkcd

'Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.'

Here.

J.G. Ballard

On refusing his CBE:
the honours system is a 'Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy.'

On SF:
he 'wasn't interested in the far future, space-ships and all that ... [but rather] the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television - that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here'

from the Guardian, here.

June Brown

'that awful word 'shagging, which I can't bear. And snog - I hate that. It's so unromantic. I hate it all.'

'I loathe it all. Oh it's a horrible world, and I loathe it all.'

G2 interview here.

Josie and the Pussycats

'Dujour means seatbelts! Dujour means crash positions!'

Josie: When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. And when the going gets tough -
Melody: - the tough make lemonade!

The Thick of It

Malcolm: 'Who's the only gay in the village?'
Hugh: 'Eddie Grundy?'

Hugh: I always thought the PM was quite with it
Malcolm: No, no - he's as bad as you - he uses phrases like 'with it' as well.

Jesus Christ

I realise that the rest of the world probably knew these already, but since I've been an atheist from a very young age, I never troubled myself with the finer details of the gospels until now. What a strange man:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God ... Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well ... Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you

Matthew, Ch 5

Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice..'

Matthew, Ch 9

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother ... and one's foes will be members of one's own household ... Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it

Matthew, Ch 10

Like I say, funny old chap.

Terry Eagleton

On JC being the Son of God:

Jesus cannot have believed that he was literally the Son of God. Yahweh does not have testicles.

On Jesus the Radical:

Some aspects of the way Jesus is presented in these texts have an obvious radical resonance. He is presented as a homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful. The problem of much modern Christianity has been how to practice this lifestyle with two children, a car and a mortgage.

Foreword to Jesus Christ: The Gospels

To meditate on our being in the world is part of our being in the world

The Meaning of Life 2007:23

Charlie Brooker

On James Murdoch:

James knows a thing or two about horror households: he's the son of Rupert Murdoch, which makes him the closest thing the media has to Damien from The Omen.

That's a fatuous comparison, obviously. Damien Thorn, offspring of Satan, was educated at Yale before inheriting a global business conglomerate at a shockingly young age and using it to hypnotise millions in a demonic bid to hasten Armageddon. James Murdoch's story is quite different. He went to Harvard.

cf.
cf.
cf.
We are aware of all internet traditions.

On the old Access ads from the 80s:

The greatest comedy pairing since Dastardly and Hitler

On Jeremy Kyle:

His show has only been on air since 2005, but Jeremy Kyle has been with us since the dawn of time

Can I ask you a question? Does Jeremy Kyle get up in the morning, or does he just slither out of a haunted mirror?

Stuart Davis

Stuart 2: Life began when a bolt of lightning struck some protoplasmic soup. You want to make a conscious ommelete? You've gotta break some atmospheric eggs!

Stuart 1: There's an ozone hole the size of a continent!
Stuart 2: Affording fantastic views of the aurora borealis!
Stuart 1: The oceans have become violent! Tsunamis! Hurricanes!
Stuart 2: And surfing has never been more exciting!

Stuart 2: The dodo? A flightless bird? I'm supposed to be bummed out by that? Oh no, what are we going to lose next, a fish that can't swim? Oxymorons should go extinct.

Time Trumpet

Tesco changed their slogan from "Every Little Helps" to, um, "We Control Every Aspect of Your Lives."

Mark Watson

Janet Downey

On Leibniz:

I haven't got past monads yet. They sound like shy secondary genital adornments.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Karl Marx

On Lincoln

Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important utterances the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be 'fighting for an idea', when it is a matter for them of fighting for square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an ideal, talks about square feet ... Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This ... average person of good will was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its social and political organisation, ordinary people of good will can achieve feats which only the heroes could achieve in the old world.

Karl Marx, Die Presse, 22 August 1862

On Religion
One of my favourite pieces from Marx, taken from Critique of Hegel's Theory of Right. Contains one of his most famous phrases, almost always used out of context...

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness an self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe. But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State, and society. This State, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spritual point d'honeur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human being inasmuch as the human bieng possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.

... The immediate task is to unmask human alienation in its secular form, now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of laws, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Tom Paine

Still brilliant more than 200 years later, here's a wonderfully catty remark about Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man:

I know a place in America called Point-no-Point, because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke's three hundred and fifty-six pages.

On religion:

With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.

Network

Network could easily be just quoted from in its entirety, but here's some of my favourite bits:

Howard Beale: This is not some kind of psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity.

Max Schumacher (about Diana Christensen): I'm not sure she's capable of any real feelings. She's television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny.

Max Shcumacher (to Diana): It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love

.Arthur Jensen: [bellowing] You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU...WILL...ATONE!
Arthur Jensen: [calmly] Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those *are* the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Howard Beale: Why me?
Arthur Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.
Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.