Quotes from Clive James

In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy. —VIRGINIO ROGNONI,

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn't have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows. —GOLO MANN, GESCHICHTE UND GESCHICHTEN, P. 170

Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)

row of damaged books which Davenport had failed to return to the London Library.

a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance.

The past is real but marbled by beliefs That turned to myth as time eroded them.

A film has to star Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris before it begins to pose a bigger threat to the language than yellow journalism.)

Nijinsky got all his master classes over in a single line of explanation.

When he was asked about the technical secret of his jump, he said:

I merely leap and pause." (Either you got the pause or you don't got the pause.)

and Cate Blanchett in the same kitchen, for a cup of tea and a chat. The post-war Australian expatriates were looked at with suspicion by their countrymen early on. Later, they got too much favour. My own view is that, of those among us who sailed away to England in the early 1960s, those who soon sailed back again did best. This especially applied to the theatre. In earlier times, a long and powerfully

Artistic talent is indeed a gift from God, which the artist is obliged to match with the gift of his life.

We rebelled by criminal methods against the joyfulness of the new life." —LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI QUOTING BUKHARIN AT HIS TRIAL, IN MAIN CURRENTS OF MARXISM, VOL. 3, P. 82

Onlookers who fell for Bukharin's big moment would fall for anything.

But we can't expect every great artist to have a great soul. If more of them were like Verdi, we could read artists' biographies for uplift; but we would be so repelled by Wagner that we would forget to listen, or by Picasso that we would forget to look.

It has to be remembered that the typical Polish writer was Bruno Schulz.

But for that to be remembered, Bruno Schulz has to be remembered,

and the main reason he was so easily forgotten is that a Gestapo officer blew his brains out.

It seems a fair inference (I have heard even anti-Zionist Israeli liberals implying it) that terrorizing the Palestinian population into flight was a deliberate policy.

history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.

To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. —EDWARD GIBBON,

As a Jewish teenager in Czechoslovakia she was fated to be swept up by the Nazis,

If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair.