#rita

Britain, however, has ended up specialising in the ones you don't see as much of: defence aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 per cent of the world's mobile phones. And so there's a danger that because it doesn't have a British flag on it, people won't realise that we actually do produce value. ↗

— Evan Davis

#aerospace #because #britain #british #cars

Phyllis is one of the tunnel boring machines for Crossrail and one of the most extraordinary characters I met, visiting some of the most exciting infrastructure in Britain. Crossrail is the new railway which will run from West to East right across London. It is the biggest engineering project in Europe - and Phyllis herself is not exactly dainty. ↗

— Evan Davis

#biggest #boring #britain #characters #dainty

I get irritated, nervous, very tense or stressed, but never bored. ↗

— Catherine Deneuve

#get #i #irritated #nervous #never

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. ↗

— Tony Blair

#causes #crime #labour #law #order

But I am an optimist about Britain; and the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is not that the optimist believes the world is wonderful and the pessimist believes it's beset by challenges; the difference is the pessimist believes we will be defeated by them; the optimist thinks the challenges can be overcome. ↗

— Tony Blair

#am #believes #beset #between #britain

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world. ↗

— Tony Blair

#american #britain #driven #evil #friends

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#critic #deadly #encouragement #give #heavy

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested. ↗

— Roger Ebert

#became #because #born #college #friends

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#countries #ethic #good #latin #mythology

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. ↗

— John A. Lukacs

#george-orwell #orwell #prophecy #puritanism #food