Brian Reade famous quotes

Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for.
-- Brian Reade

#War #Believe #School

When historians get to write the truth about this completely unnecessary referendum [Brexit] they won't say it was a vote demanded by the British people to decide their national destiny. They will say it was the final battle in a decades-long Tory Civil War, at the heart of which was a fight to the death between two Old Etonians, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, for the hollow crown. A sort of Eton Wall Game. Where the poorest are put up against the wall and shot.
-- Brian Reade

#Wall #War #Writing

I genuinely did not expect more than half our nation to choose to walk away from our long-term allies into the arms of our new friends Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump. Or that they would do so without an economic plan, a trading strategy, or a credible leader, making the average Briton's future more uncertain than any time since the Blitz.
-- Brian Reade

#Marine #Average #Long

A public school-educated stockbroker, who wants to shrink the state and let the markets rip, who reinvented himself as a man of the people and convinced millions of disillusioned working-class voters he was on a mission to smash the rich elite he belonged to.
-- Brian Reade

#Rip #School #Men

All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.

Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army.

To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

I believe in instinct, not reason. When reason is right, nine times out of ten it is impotent, and when it prevails, nine times out of ten it is wrong.

I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.

But then, even with sex, I'm more in the school of less is more in movies.

I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school.

Behind the parents stands the school, and behind the teacher the home.