Queen Elizabeth II, May 14 2007
Helen Mirren may have scooped an Oscar for her portrayal of the Queen, head of state of Britain and 15 Commonwealth countries, but it is Elizabeth Windsor who continues to define the role. It was thrust upon her in 1952 by the premature death of her father, and she has not left the stage since. Yet unlike the celebrities and politicians with whom she regularly exchanges pleasantries, the most famous woman in the world has never given an interview.....
Once, on a walk, she encountered one of her subjects, who exclaimed, "You look just like the Queen!" "How very reassuring," Her Majesty replied. Many Britons feel the same way
- By Catherine Mayer, TIME Magazine May 14, 2007 Edition, Most Influential People in the World, The Time 100.
1. What! All this for a song? [To Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), when ordered to pay Spenser £ 100 .
Quoted in Birch. Life of Spenser] – William Cecil., Lord of Burleigh (1520-1598)
2. The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse. / For Tories own no argument but force: / With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent, / For Whigs admit no force but argument.
[Reply to epigram by Joseph Trapp]- Sir William Browne (1692-1774)
3. In my childhood it was said by all: ‘A child of ten can go on the road of a town playing with a golden ball in perfect safety under British rule.’
[Quoted in The Times]
Brown’s vision of Europe by Martin Kettle, The Guardian, 12/12/2008
Gordon Brown would prefer Europe not to exist. If he had his way, politics would be played out in Britain, the transatlantic relationship and - his current unfortunate conceit - the world. These are the chosen stages, real or delusional, on which our prime minister moves with assurance and a politically dangerous degree of hubris.
Europe, for him, is a sideshow by comparison, a distraction and worse, because in his mind it brings only penalties, not rewards. Not only would Brown prefer not to think about Europe; he would also prefer us to pretend that he does not think about it.
Yet think about it he must. The events of the week remind both us and him of the extent to which this Europe-free vision is a piece of political escapism. As the economic crisis begins to settle into a way of life rather than an adrenalin rush, Europe is emerging through the fog as the international forum in which Britain's economic fate - and Brown's political fate - will be most decisively shaped in 2009.... This is the far-from-ideal context in which events such as this week's serious divisions with Germany, and the prospective second Irish referendum, should be understood. We live in the Europe we have made for ourselves, not in the Europe that we would like (or, in Brown's case, would not like) to inhabit....Midway through his life-enhancing West End stand-up show about the history of everything, Eddie Izzard says something that illuminates why this matters. He tells his audience that human beings never really needed the Ten Commandments in the first place. Actually, we only needed one commandment - to do as you would be done by; and perhaps a second - to remember that what goes around comes around.
The controversial Newsweek interview with the German finance minister Peer Steinbrück exemplifies how, in politics, what goes around always comes around. In the interview, Steinbrück laments the "breathtaking" policy switch that some governments, including Brown's, have made "from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism"..... Not surprisingly, it is to German taxpayers that Europe's more feckless governments, like Italy, are now turning to bail them out of their difficulties.
And when Brown and the other critics point to Germany's much higher level of structural unemployment than ours, with the implication that Britain has been more dynamic in getting its citizens off welfare and into work, let them also remember that only Germany has had to absorb an economically shattered country - the old East Germany - into its borders. If Britain had been faced with 16 million new East British citizens over the past 20 years, the Brown boom might not have been as large as it was, or have lasted as long as it did.
Steinbrück is even right to suggest that some of the apocalyptic talk may be exaggerated and to imply that politicians like Brown are pandering to a yearning for a "Great Rescue Plan". His social democrat colleague Gesine Schwan is also right, in a fascinating piece on Comment is Free this week, that balanced budgets matter and that the state can easily stifle as well as protect. Yet Steinbrück and Schwan must also accept both that fiscal expansion is the crucial, perhaps the only, weapon in governments' hands right now and that, on the European level, fiscal expansion that is not coordinated is likely to fail.
It must be hard for Germans to take lectures from Brown. For more than 11 years he has descended on continental Europe for brief visits - always luridly well-trailed in the Daily Mail and the Sun - in which he has lost no opportunity to lecture Germany from the free-market right about the shortcomings of its social market economic model. Now, with no word of apology, he is lecturing them again, this time from the diametrically opposite statist left.... Nothing in European politics is ever ideal, but both in this crisis and in the development of whatever EU emerges from it, it would be far better for Britain and Germany to learn to work together, not against each other.
4. Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said ‘Let Newton be!” and all was light [Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton]
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
King Abdullah------May 14, 2007
On weekends King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud likes to retire to his Thoroughbred farm outside Riyadh and perhaps catch a horse race on satellite TV. The rest of the week, the 83-year-old Saudi ruler can scarcely catch his breath. Inside the kingdom, he's been busy crushing an internal revolt by al-Qaeda while trying to open up Saudi Arabia's conservative society. Beyond his country's borders, Abdullah has enhanced Saudi influence in the Middle East….
But Abdullah has been insistent on staking his independence from Washington. Abdullah recently stunned the White House with his pronouncement that the U.S. presence in Iraq is an "illegal foreign occupation." In February he mediated the Mecca Accord, which established a Palestinian national-unity government, again against Washington's wishes. "America is a friend," he said in a 2002 TIME interview. "But America cannot be the sole policeman in the world." That view is catching on in America too.
- By Scott MacLeod, TIME Magazine May 14, 2007 Edition, Most Influential People in the World, The Time 100.
5. America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair [Broadcast radio news summary]
– Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975).
6. Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them
– John Updike (1932- )
7. What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar
[Said to Henry M. Rose. Quoted in New York tribune]– Vice President T.R. Marshall (1854-1925)
8. SPIEGEL Online Interview with Henry Kissinger 07/06/2009
SPIEGEL: Do you think it was helpful for Obama to deliver a speech to the Islamic world in Cairo? Or has he created a lot of illusions about what politics can deliver?
Kissinger: Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening. Now he's got to play his hand as he plays his various counterparts. We haven't gotten beyond the opening game move yet. I have no quarrel with the opening move.
SPIEGEL: But is what we have seen so far from him truly realpolitik?
Kissinger: It is also too early to say that. If what he wants to do is convey to the Islamic world that America has an open attitude to dialogue and is not determined on physical confrontation as its only strategy, then it can play a very useful role. If it were to be continued on the belief that every crisis can be managed by a philosophical speech, then he will run into Wilsonian problems.
8. If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe
- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
9. But, Captain, I cannot change the laws of physics
–Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery Scott (Scotty), USS Enterprise.
10. If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber or a peddler. The laws of Physics are too rigid
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
11. Einstein Physics is a field physics where matter as a solid substance does not exists but is instead an indication of denseness in the field. Einstein made this point very clearly in the following statement. “We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense. There is no place in this kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality”.
– F.D. Wilson’s Book "Mind is Time".
12. I am now convinced that theoretical Physics is actual philosophy
– Max Born
13. ‘If I should die’, said I to myself , ‘ I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory- but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’
[Letter to Fanny Brawne] – John Keats (1795-1821).
14. The Congress makes no progress but it dances
[Remark on Congress of Vienna] – Prince De Ligne (1735-1814)
15. My solution to the problem [of North Vietnam] would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age
– General Curtis Lemay (1906-1990)
Ban Ki-Moon (1944-) ---- New York Times
Ban Ki-moon of South Korea was sworn in as the eighth secretary general of the United Nations in December 2006. He succeeded Kofi Annan of Ghana, who served two five-year terms as head of the 60-year-old international organization.
Mr. Ban took over the reins of the 192-member body that has been beset with problems of management lapses and scandals, and which finds itself at the center of many of the world's most intractable problems in places like Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Kosovo and North Korea.
''You could say that I am a man on a mission, and my mission could be dubbed 'Operation Restore Trust': trust in the organization, and trust between member states and the Secretariat,'' Mr. Ban said when he took over the position. ''I hope this mission is not 'Mission: Impossible.' ''
- New York Times.
16. Part of our essential humanity is paying respect to what God gave us and what will be here a long time after we're gone.
– William J. Clinton (1946- )
17. The government I led gave ordinary people peace, security, dignity, and opportunity to progress.
– Benazir Bhutto (The first women Prime Minister in the Islamic world) (1953-2007)
18. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? / All the lonely people, where do they all belong
– John Lennon and Paul McCartney (1942-)
19. Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; / So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and voice; then darkness again and a silence
– H.W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
All Quotations courtesy of "The New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations"
