A. N. Wilson Quotes
-
The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.
-
People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
-
I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.
-
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
-
I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
-
Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
-
If only Queen Elizabeth II had the intellectual, political and linguistic skills of Queen Elizabeth I, many people would support giving her some of the powers of an elected president.
-
It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black.
-
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness – perhaps unimaginative of me.
-
If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
-
As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.
-
The scribbler's life is never done.
-
In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
-
We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.
-
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
-
My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.
-
Hitler suffered acutely from meteorism; perhaps he did not suffer so acutely as those around him, since meteorism is uncontrolled farting, a condition exacerbated by Hitler's strictly vegetarian diet.
-
It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
-
I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.
-
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.
-
Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.
-
In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.
-
One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing...When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat...and his army medals.