My commonplace

[andrealdn]

Doing things less well, but together, is faster than doing something different from the person in front.

Anne Watkins. 2019. “Rowing in bad weather and scratch crews.” British Rowing, 13 Dec. https://www.britishrowing.org/2019/12/rowing-in-bad-weather-and-scratch-crews/

[andrealdn]

Perché non sono stato a Roma dal 1935? Ma per la semplice ragione che si possono costruire delle discrete macchine da competizione senza la necessità di scendere nella capitale. Why haven't I visited Rome since 1935? That's simple - because one can build decent racing cars without any need for visiting the capital.

Enzo Ferrari

[andrealdn]

Army, family, school; tightly interwoven threads that bind upper-class Englishmen more tightly than do money or business. The totalitarians of right and left have constantly to describe the faith they have in common. But for these men, and thousands like them, the means was the end; playing in the team was more important than the game, provided that they played together with men like themselves.

Len Deighton. 1979. SS-GB: Nazi occupied Britain 1941. Ch. 14

[andrealdn]

whorehouses always have respectable curtains

Len Deighton. 1979. SS-GB: Nazi occupied Britain 1941. Ch. 22

[andrealdn]

Douglas was a Londoner - with the quick wit, and sophisticated self-interest for which Londoners are renowned

Len Deighton. 1979. SS-GB: Nazi occupied Britain 1941. Ch. 1

[andrealdn]

I remember when I was growing up in the ’60s, Tripoli was regarded a bit like Dubai is today; it was regarded as one of the great open cities.

Tony Blair, Oral evidence: Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options, Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Friday 11 December 2015, Q177

[andrealdn]

you’ve got to put the counterfactual always: what would have happened?

Tony Blair, Oral evidence: Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options, Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Friday 11 December 2015, Q182

[andrealdn]

The Scots that she [Margaret Thatcher] was on a wave of length with were Adam Smith and David Hume; but they didn't have a vote and didn't have much influence on everyday Scots

Ian Lang, cited in the 2009 BBC documentary Thatcher and the Scots

[andrealdn]

It’s a massive application, bigger than all the works of Shakespeare and both Old and New Testiments [sic] of the Bible.

Spitalfields Society’s officer David Donoghu on planning applications, cited in Mike Brooke’s 2015 “Boris takes on Bishopsgate goodsyard plan in battle for ‘heart of east London’.” Hackney Gazette, 28 Sep

[andrealdn]

A man who had qualified as a chartered accountant in the 1960s wrote, ‘At that time, everybody was obliged to act in Good Faith, with the exception of Lloyds of London which was obliged to act with the Utmost Good Faith.’

Peter Oborne’s 2015 “The wonderful, vanishing world of the handwritten letter,” The Spectator, 4 July

[andrealdn]

because we are unelected … it is especially important to meet the standards the public have a right to expect, and to act swiftly when we fail.

Statement from Baroness Stowell, Leader of the House of Lords, on Lord Sewel's resignation

[andrealdn]

When we ask precisely how a society will go about preserving its citizens’ property, we can expect the reply that it will do so by force. […] There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are on the hands of the actual winners. No force will establish this agreement. Indeed, the opposite is the case: It is agreement that establishes force. Only those who consent to a society’s constraints see them as constraints - that is, as guides to action and not as actions to be opposed.

James P. Carse’s 1986 Finite and Infinite Games. A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, section 37

[andrealdn]

Old London, grimy London, workers London — all was once new London. Superficially denigrated by Victorians and Edwardians who decried this new modern way of life. Now the new is old. The once-new is loved. The new-new is loathed.

Ian Mansfield. 2015. A walk around the London Overground with by Iain Sinclair.” IanVisits.com, 5 July

[andrealdn]

The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym, is the pump. [...] Your muscles get a really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute, and it's really tight - it's like somebody blowing air into it, into your muscle. It just blows up, and it feels really different. It feels fantastic. It's as satisfying to me as, uh, coming is, you know?

Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1977 film "Pumping Iron"

[andrealdn]

It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again to-morrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, very like the prison debtors. They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom.

[andrealdn]

Sono socialista, ma il mio socialismo lo faccio io. I am a socialist, but I shall decide myself what sort of socialism to practice.

Michele Ferrero, confectionary industrialist and Italy’s richest man, quoted in Aldo Cazzullo’s 2015 La fabbrica, la Nutella, i successi. Morto Michele Ferrero, il magnate che parlava in dialetto., Corriere.it, 25 febbraio

[andrealdn]

A Roma, se uno ti versa un bicchiere di vino alle undici e mezza di mattina, pensi che sia un pervertito; da noi [in Veneto], e' un gentiluomo. In Rome, someone offering to pour a glass of wine at 11.30am is treated as a deviant; in my land [the Venice region], as a gentleman.

Paolo Crepet, La Zanzara, Radio 24, 2 febbraio 2015