"Obviously, he was the first — he was the Governor. Right from the start with those very precocious sketches for the Cambridge Footlights and through Beyond the Fringe, he was an exceptional talent... Every 10 years or so you always get a new generation of comedians but they all acknowledge their debt to Peter."
Peter Edward Cook was an English comedian, actor, satirist, playwright and screenwriter. He was the leading figure of the British satire boom of the 1960s, and he was associated with the anti-establishment comedic movement that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s.
"You will probably have noticed that three of the defendants have very wisely chosen to exercise their inalienable right not to go into the witness box to answer a lot of impertinent questions. I will merely say that you are not to infer from this anything other than that they consider the evidence against them so flimsy that it was scarcely worth their while to rise from their seats and waste their breath denying these ludicrous charges..."
"All right, you great git, youve asked for it. Ill cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. Ill fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. Ill make it so noisy and disgusting that even youll be ashamed of yourself! No wonder youve so few friends; youre unbelievable!"
"I drift very easily into becoming E. L. Wisty. I’ve always felt very closely identified with that sort of personality. He is a completely lost creature, he never works, never moves, has no background and suspects everybody is peering at him and trying to get his secrets out of him. Ive never met the man; he came out of me. I’d feel a lot easier if I’d met him and imitated him, as a matter of fact."
"Weve all got royal blood in our veins, you know. Its the best place for it in my view. Weve all got a little bit of royal blood in our veins, were all in line for the succession, and if nineteen million, four hundred thousand, two hundred and eight people die, Ill be king tomorrow. Its not very likely but its a nice thought and helps keep you going."
"We shall move about in peoples rooms and say, "Excuse me, we are the World Domination League. May we dominate you?" Then, if they say "Get out," of course we give up. Well, you have to give up if youre told to get out."
"You are now to retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of "Not Guilty"."
"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)"