Quotes by Neal Ascherson

Neal Ascherson

All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.

Home

Population

Unique

Broadly speaking, most people lived their lives in a kind of unwilling conformity. The thing was that they were offered, as time went by, various kinds of freedom, most of which were sort of dummy freedoms somehow.

Conformity

Kind

People

But the people did get it. They had lost something — not exactly their fear, but their patience. Suddenly it seemed unbearable to go on accepting these systems, these portly little idiots in their blue suits, for another year, and then for another day, another hour. That special sort of impatience is the power-surge of revolution.

Blue

People

Years

Darwinism did not strip meaning from the world but intensified it, ‘by identifying it in as many aspects of life as possible’.

Aspects Of Life

Evolution

World

English stupidity is an organism so primitive that it is apparently impossible to kill off. It reminds me of Physarum Polycephalum, the gigantic slime mould recently bred by scientists at Bonn. Bright yellow and about two millimetres thick, this monocellular creature–neither plant nor animal–grew to a size of 10 square yards before the scientists took fright and froze it. It can smell its favourite food, and move towards it at a speed of up to two centimetres an hour. This favourite food is porridge.

Animal

Moving

Two

For the past 15 years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are…businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but — ominously — fewer and fewer people laugh at it.

Government

Past

Years

History–the product, not the raw material–is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.

Glasses

Hands

Years

I am always fascinated when people talk about ‘the forging of a nation’. Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so.

Century

Lasts

People

I think England has been in the long-term damaged by Britishness.

England

Long

Thinking

I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I’d do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see — one has to keep oneself afloat.

Littles

Way

Writing

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Animal

Aspects Of Life

Blue

Century

Change

Conformity

Country

Defeat

Educational

England

Ethnicity

Europe

Evolution

Fashion

Father

Function

Giving

Glasses

Government

Hands

Home

Important

Kind

Lasts

Law

Littles

Long

May

Media

Men

Mood

Moving

Numbers

Past

People

Political

Population

Powerful

Pride

Rain

Real

Rocks

Roots

Scotland

Sea

Stupid

Summer

Taken

Thinking

Two

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Quotes by Neal Ascherson

Neal Ascherson

Broadly speaking, most people lived their lives in a kind of unwilling conformity. The thing was that they were offered, as time went by, various kinds of freedom, most of which were sort of dummy freedoms somehow.

Darwinism did not strip meaning from the world but intensified it, ‘by identifying it in as many aspects of life as possible’.

For the past 15 years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are…businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but — ominously — fewer and fewer people laugh at it.

I am always fascinated when people talk about ‘the forging of a nation’. Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so.

I think England has been in the long-term damaged by Britishness.

I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I’d do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see — one has to keep oneself afloat.

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