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)