Lenary of Lenland

It is not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the vote.

Daniel Finkelstein

In cultural matters, it is not demand that creates supply, but the other way round.

Joseph Brodsky

Young men embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of the means; pursue some few principles absurdly; use extreme remedies at first; like an unready horse will neither stop nor turn.

Francis Bacon

They sicken of the calm who knew the storm.

Unnamed Afghan on the sense of anticlimax after a campaign

Charm is the way of getting the answer ‘yes’ without having asked any clear question.

Albert Camus

If you cannot be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

Anon

If someone tells you he is going to make a ‘realistic decision’, you know immediately he has resolved to do something bad.

Mary McCarthy

Being blonde is not just a hair colour; it’s a vocation.

Demise Van Outen

Only second-rate minds are afraid of the obvious.

David Cecil

We humans are always looking for things to do between meals.

Leonard Cohen

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love th when they are not there in front of you.

John Updike

They blather on about warm beer and old maids cycling to church and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom.

Professor Jerry Cohen on the Conservatives

Between an optimist and a pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole.

US writer McLandburgh Wilson