"In 1950 when I was boxing I wanted to put on 3lb so my trainer made me put a teaspoon of powdered gelatine into the cup every time I took tea. It was fairly revolting & might possibly explain the final hammering I took."
Jeffrey Joseph Bernard was an English journalist, best known for his weekly column "Low Life" in The Spectator magazine, and also notorious for a feckless and chaotic career and life of alcohol abuse.
"During one of my annual visits to the great Fred Winters yard I said to him, Good God, Fred, your horses look magnificent. Beautifully fit. Of course they do, you twit, he said. They dont sit up all night drinking gin and tonic and playing cards."
Jeffrey Bernard"Since 1960 or thereabouts, when the Beatles and feminism came to power and destroyed the civilisation I was rather fond of..."
Jeffrey Bernard"I once had to dispense with a literary agent because she drank too much. She was very surprised but I pointed out to her, quite logically I thought, that one of us had to be sober and it certainly wasnt going to be me."
Jeffrey Bernard"[On the Feminist Dale Spender] It staggers me. In fact I have not been so staggered since I last wore 8oz gloves."
Jeffrey Bernard"As for asking me have I ever felt remorse after drinking, I have been living with remorse for years now. She wakes me up every morning. She puts me to bed at night and yea though I run through the valley of Oxford St to the Coach & Horses she is by my side."
Jeffrey Bernard"I could stuff a pillow with the amount of confetti I have had thrown at me. And could I sleep easily on that? No."
Jeffrey Bernard"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"