"Once a man next to me found the handle of a radiator in his mashed potato; he said nothing, merely moving it to the side of his plate after sucking the mashed potato off it first. Nobody else said anything either. If the truth was known several of us were probably jealous."
Thomas Stewart Baker is an English actor and writer. He is best known for playing the fourth incarnation of the Doctor in the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who from 1974 to 1981, making him the longest-serving actor in the role.
"But it was drama, high drama: fires at night, the fires that burned peoples houses away; bombs fell and left exotically shaped fragments in the form of shrapnel. And we collected it and traded it. As long as we were not hurt -- and I wasnt -- life seemed wonderful."
"Would you like to go to New Zealand to do a commercial?" Thats the sort of question an actor likes to hear from his agent in freezing mid -January."
"We even copied the way the Americans walked, though Father Leonard didnt like that bit of admiration. He disapproved of rolling buttocks."
"The notion that God was everywhere put paid to any possible peace of mind by the time I was six."
"The chaos of our lives suited me; I dont think I wanted it to end."
"When the doctor was there, Alfred refused to believe that hed had a stroke. "I cant have had a stroke," he grated, in a terrible rage, "Ive got 93,000 pounds in my current account."
"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)"