Some quotes

Un-related sentences that have grabbed me:

How different this country is compared to 1946, when I first arrived here.. Politics mattered, the welfare state was invented.. the church was still strong. We were a very deferential society. There hierarchy and values and obedience. All that’s gone.. Politics is a public utility and a bit of a racket, the church has lost its authority. The monarchy is like a disfunctional family, a super-soap  opera. The tragedy is there is nothing left but consumerism and celebrity, that is all that gives us our values. But celebrity hasn’t been put under any stress… that’s the real problem. The British in the Second World War called on centuries of loyalty to the Crown and civic pride to stand against the Nazis. What would happen now? What do you do now – rush to your nearest retail park?

The late JG Ballard, interviewed on Radio Four’s Front Row programme, 2006

Where once we made things, now we shop and gawp at industrial know-how in ambitious buildings handed down to us by the state or private foundations. In fact, the less we make, the more museums we build, so that we can gurn at what we are no longer capable of making.

BD columnist Jonathan Glancey

Economics has to change. We have to start thinking more about people, the human underpinning behind economics. We have to use all the social sciences and human psychology

Economist Robert Shiller, economist and author of new book Animal Spirits

This is a consensual nation in the end. Only takes a few loudmouths in a parish council meeting, a few mobilised truckers, an unusually dedicated journalist and the boldest of plans get scuppered. Because we’re committed to something we call democracy, which in fact is simply the aggregate will of the greediest and most vocal.

Politician Tessa in the play Resilience by Steve Waters

The old rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe

Closing lines of the Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

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