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Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, 10 June 1921 – 9 April 2021) was the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. He was the longest-serving, oldest-ever spouse of a reigning British monarch, and the oldest-ever male member of the British royal family.

Quotes

 * When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.
 * On marriage, as quoted in "48 of Prince Philip's greatest gaffes and funny moments", The Telegraph (2 August 2017).

1960s

 * You have mosquitoes. I have the Press.
 * In a 1966 conversation with the matron of a hospital while on a tour of the Caribbean as quoted in Andrew Duncan The Reality of Monarchy (1970).

 * British women can't cook.
 * Statement of 1966, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002)

1970s

 * The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined.
 * About to disembark on state visit to Brazil (November 1968), as quoted in Andrew Duncan The Reality of Monarchy (1970).

 * It seems to me that it's the best way of wasting money that I know of. I don't think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend.
 * On the U.S. Apollo program, press conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil (November 1968) as quoted in Andrew Duncan The Reality of Monarchy (1970).

 * Education, journalism, technology, entertainment and business may also find better methods for their purpose than books and writing. But this does not mean that tapes and films have made books obsolescent—the contention is almost too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Books are certainly old fashioned, but only people with a very limited perception are silly enough to condemn ideas because of their age. It is, of course, equally silly to condemn the new fangled simply because it is strange, and I am full of admiration for the technologists who have developed all sorts of gadgets for the purpose of improving communications. However, I believe that all these fascinating machines are complementary to, and not substitutes for, books and the printed word.
 * Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 15 (1973).

The Environmental Revolution: Speeches on Conservation, 1962–77 (1978)

 * For conservation to be successful it is necessary to take into consideration that it is a characteristic of man that he can only be relied upon to do anything consistently which is in his own interest. He may have occasional fits of conscience and moral rectitude but otherwise his actions are governed by self-interest. It follows then that whatever the moral reasons for conservation it will only be achieved by the inducement of profit or pleasure.
 * World Wildlife Fund: British National Appeal Banquet, London (1962).

 * The conflict between instinct and reason has reached a critical stage in man's affairs, largely because the explosion of facts has revealed the instincts for what they are and at the same time it has undermined traditional philosophies and ideologies. The explosion of facts has effectively altered mankind's physical and intellectual environment and when any environment changes, the process of natural selection is brutal and merciless. «Adapt or die» is as true today as it was in the beginning.
 * Fawley Foundation Lecture. Southampton University (24 November 1967).

 * Why then be concerned about the conservation of wildlife when for all practical purposes we would be much better off if humans and their domestic animals and pets were the only living creatures on the face of the earth? There is no obvious and demolishing answer to this rather doubtful logic although in practice the destruction of all wild animals would certainly bring devastating changes to our existence on this planet as we know it today...The trouble is that everything in nature is completely interdependent. Tinker with one part of it and the repercussions ripple out in all directions... Wildlife — and that includes everything from microbes to blue whales and from a fungus to a redwood tree — has been so much part of life on the earth that we are inclined to take its continued existence for granted...Yet the wildlife of the world is disappearing, not because of a malicious and deliberate policy of slaughter and extermination, but simply because of a general and widespread ignorance and neglect.
 * World Wildlife Fund Dinner, York, (1969).

 * We talk about over- and underdeveloped countries; I think a more exact division might be between underdeveloped and overpopulated. The more people there are, the more industry and more waste and the more sewage there is, and therefore the more pollution.
 * The sheer weight of numbers of the human population, our habitations, our machinery and our ruthless exploitation of the living and organic resources of the earth; together these are changing our whole environment. This is what we call progress and much of this development is naturally to the direct and welcome benefit of mankind. However, we cannot at the same time ignore the awkward consequences and the most direct and menacing, but not the only consequence of this change, is pollution... Pollution is a direct outcome of man's ruthless exploitation of the earth's resources. Experience shows that the growth of successful organic populations is eventually balanced by the destruction of its own habitat. The vast man-made deserts show that the human population started this process long ago. There are two important differences today. In the first place the process has gone from a walking pace to a breakneck gallop. Secondly we know exactly what is happening. If not exactly in all cases, we know enough to appreciate what is happening and the need to take care... Pollution is no longer a matter of local incidents, today it has the whole biosphere in its grip. The processes which devastated the Welsh valleys a hundred years ago are now at work, over, on and under the earth and the oceans. Even if we bury all this waste underground there still remains the risk that toxic materials through chemical reactions will be washed out and into underground water courses. If ever there was an area of research more closely related to human welfare it is the problem of the safe disposal of waste and effluents... The fact is that we have got to make a choice between human prosperity on the one hand and the total well-being of the planet Earth on the other. Even then it is hardly a choice because if we only look for human prosperity we shall certainly destroy by pollution the earth and the human population which has existed on it for millions of years... If the world pollution situation is not critical at the moment it is as certain as anything can be that the situation will become increasingly intolerable within a very short time. The situation can be controlled and even reversed but it demands co-operation on a scale and intensity beyond anything achieved so far...I realise that there are any number of vital causes to be fought for, I sympathise with people who work up a passionate concern about the all too many examples of inhumanity, injustice, and unfairness, but behind all this hangs a really deadly cloud. Still largely unnoticed and unrecognised, the process of destroying our natural environment is gathering speed and momentum. If we fail to cope with this challenge, all the other problems will pale into insignificance.
 * Edinburgh University Union (24 November 1969).

 * If we are to exercise our responsibilities so that all life can continue on earth, they must have a moral and philosophical basis. Simple self-interest, economic profit and absolute materialism are no longer enough... It has been made perfectly clear that a concern for any part of life on this planet — human, plant or animal, wild or tame — is a concern for all life. A threat to any part of the environment is a threat to the whole environment, but we must have a basis of assessment of these threats, not so that we can establish a priority of fears, but so that we can make a positive contribution to improvement and ultimate survival.
 * It is frequently more rewarding merely to ask pertinent questions. It may get someone to go and look for an answer. If you get a silly answer, which can easily happen, you can return to the charge with even more telling effect. Whatever happens, don't give up and don't despair. Results may not be immediately apparent, but you may have touched a receptive chord without knowing it. Even the most unsympathetic and unenlightened politician, industrialist or bureaucrat begins to take notice when a lot of people write about the same subject.
 * It is an old cliche to say that the future is in the hands of the young. This is no longer true. The quality of life to be enjoyed or the existence to be survived by our children and future generations is in our hands now.
 * The World Wildlife Fund Congress, London, (1970).

 * A new criterion has been added, the conservation of the environment so that in the long run life, including human life, can continue. This new consideration must be taken into account at all levels and in all departments of government and in the boardrooms of every industrial enterprise. It is no longer sufficient simply to quantify the elements of existence as in old-fashioned material economics; conservation means taking notice of the quality of existence as well... The problem is of course to give some value to that quality and perhaps the only way to do this is to try and work out the cost in terms of loss of amenities, loss of holiday and recreation facilities, loss of property values, loss of contact with nature, loss of health standards and loss of food resources, if proper conservation methods are not used. Looked at in that light it may well turn out that money spent on proper pollution control, urban and rural planning and the control of exploitation of wild stocks of plants or animals on land and in the sea, is the less expensive alternative in the long run... The conservation of nature, the proper care for the human environment and a general concern for the long-term future of the whole of our planet are absolutely vital if future generations are to have a chance to enjoy their existence on this earth.
 * The Australian Conservation Foundation, Canberra (April 1970).

 * There may be disagreements about the time scale, but in principle there can be little doubt that the population cannot go on increasing indefinitely. Resources presently being used will not last for ever and pollution in its broadest sense, unless severely checked, is bound to increase with population and industrial activity.
 * Address at the Salford University Degree Ceremony (16 July 1973).

1980s

 * If the world pollution situation is not critical at the moment, it is as certain as anything can be that the situation will become increasingly intolerable within a very short time. The situation can be controlled, and even reversed; but it demands cooperation on a scale and intensity beyond anything achieved so far. I realize that there are vital causes to be fought for, and I sympathize with people who work up a passionate concern about the all too many examples of inhumanity, injustice, and unfairness; but behind all this hangs a deadly cloud. Still largely unnoticed and unrecognized, the process of destroying our natural environment is gathering speed and momentum. If we fail to cope with the challenge, the other problems will pale into insignificance.
 * The Fairfield Osborne Lecture, New York (1 October 1980).

 * Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.
 * In 1981, in reference to an economic recession, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * I suspect that the single most important gift of progress to conservation has been the development of human contraception techniques.
 * Address to All-Party Conservation Committee in London (18 February 1981).

 * Q: What do you consider the leading threat to the environment? A: Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We're in for a major disaster if it isn't curbed--not just for the natural world, but for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they'll consume, the more pollution they'll create, the more fighting they will do. We have no option. If it isn't controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation and war. Q: Is birth control part of the solution? A: Yes, but you can't legislate these problems away. You've got to get people to understand the need for it: the more important people, the ones who have responsibilities have got to do it because they're at the receiving end. They've got to accept the measures.
 * Interview in "Vanishing Breeds Worry Prince Philip, But Not as Much as Overpopulation" People magazine (21 December 1981).

 * It is curious how many philosophers from Plato to Keynes' time have believed in and advocated the control of society by "philosopher kings". According to Plato, "its kings must be those who have shown the greatest ability in philosophy", but--realistically--he added, "and the greatest aptitude for war". Such people may exist in the imagination and occasionally someone with the necessary qualities may briefly dominate the stage of history, but it is a naive appreciation of human nature to imagine that such processed paragons can be invested with the necessary powers and not be tempted to take advantage of their situation.
 * A Question of Balance, Michael Russel (Publishing) Ltd. (1982).

 * As long ago as 1798, Malthus explained what happens when the factors limiting the increase in any population are removed. One of the factors noticed by Darwin was that all species are capable of producing vastly greater populations than can be sustained by existing resources; populations did not increase at the rate at which they are capable was the basis for his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. The relevance to natural selection of this capacity for overproduction is that as each individual is slightly different to all the others it is probable that under natural conditions those individuals which happen to be best adapted to the prevailing circumstances have a better chance of survival. Well, so what? Well, take a look at the figures for the human population of this world. One hundred fifty years ago it stood at about 1,000 million or in common parlance today, 1 billion. It then took about a 100 years to double to 2 billion. It took 30 years to add the third billion and 15 years to reach today's total of 4.4 billion. With a present world average rate of growth of 1.8%, the total population by the year 2000 will have increased to an estimated 6 billion and in that and in subsequent years 100 million people will be added to the world population each year. In fact it could be as much as 16 billion by 2045. As a consequence the demand on resources of land alone will mean a third less farm land available and the destruction of half of the present area of productive tropical forest. Bearing in mind the constant reduction of non-renewable resources, there is a strong possibility of growing scarcity and reduction of standards. More people consume more resources. It is as simple as that; and transferring resources and standards from the richer to the poorer countries can only have a marginal effect in the face of this massive increase in the world population. The object of the WWF is to "conserve" the system as a whole; not to prevent the killing of individual animals. Those who are concerned about their conservation of nature accept that all species are prey to some other species. They accept that most species produce a surplus that is capable of being culled without in any way threatening the survival of the species as a whole.
 * The Chancellor's Lecture, Salford University (4 June 1982).

 * For example, the World Health Organization Project, designed to eradicate malaria from Sri Lanka in the postwar years, achieved its purpose. But the problem today is that Sri Lanka must feed three times as many mouths, find three times as many jobs, provide three times the housing, energy, schools, hospitals and land for settlement in order to maintain the same standards. Little wonder the natural environment and wildlife in Sri Lanka has suffered. The fact [is] ... that the best-intentioned aid programs are at least partially responsible for the problems. The industrial revolution sparked the scientific revolution and brought in its wake better public hygiene, better medical care and yet more efficient agriculture. The consequence was a population explosion which still continues today. The sad fact is that, instead of the same number of people being very much better off, more than twice as many people are just as badly off as they were before. Unfortunately all this well-intentioned development has resulted in an ecological disaster of immense proportions.
 * Address on Receiving Honorary Degree from the University of Western Ontario, Canada (1 July 1983).

 * So long as they [birth control methods] ... remained taboo subjects the chances of making any impression on the human population explosion were that much more remote. In the introduction to the IUCN Red Data Books which list all animals and plants under threat of extinction, it says that virtually everywhere the major threat to a wild species is loss of habitat to a rapidly increasing human population requiring more space in order to build villages and cities and grow more food. But starvation and poverty cannot be eradicated solely by increased food and resources at the expense of what remains of the natural world. Any increase in the provision of food and resources must be accompanied by a drastic reduction in the rate of increase in the human population.
 * Speech at the Margaret Pyke Memorial Trust Dinner in London (14 December 1983).

 * Ninety-five per cent of the Atlantic rainforest in Brazil has disappeared in the last hundred years. There is simply nowhere for the animals to live. At the basis of it all is this colossal increase in the human population which is reaching plague proportions.
 * In a 1984 interview

 * The difference between a free society and one in which all issues are governed by inflexible dogma is the constant change of ideas. I hope this book helps people to see some of the problems of this life from a different point of view.
 * In the book "Men, Machines and Sacred Cow" (1984)

 * If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.
 * 1986 statement as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002)

 * If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed.
 * Said to a group of British students in China in 1986, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * As its name implies, World Wildlife Fund is in the business of raising money for the conservation of nature and to that end Fleur Cowles — a long time and dedicated supporter of the Fund — has offered a proportion of the royalities from the sale of this book to WWF. It is easy enough to feel an affinity to a particular species of animal, but I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings towards the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist and by sheer indifference had destroyed any chance of it finding a mate and producing a family? There are not just a few such species, there are a great many and the list is getting longer every day. When I look at the shelf with all the volumes of the Red Data Books listing endangered species I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus, but that is perhaps going too far. I would much rather see the human species voluntarily restrict its numbers out of consideration for the rest of the living world with which it still has a chance of sharing this planet.
 * Foreword to If I Were an Animal (1986) by Fleur Cowles; United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd. ISBN 9780688061500

 * The great difficulty about "life" is that we humans are part of it, and it is therefore almost impossible to study objectively.... It therefore tends to be anthropocentric and gives scant attention to the welfare of all the other life-forms which share this planet with us. ...When the Bible says that man shall have "dominion" over God's creation, the choice is between understanding dominion as in "having power over", or dominion as "having responsibility for". Once you have interfered with the balance of nature it becomes necessary to maintain the balance by artificial means. This means that some animals have to be killed in the interest of maintaining the health and viability of the species as a whole as well as the benefit of other more vulnerable species. Unfortunately there are many people who object to that sort of thing. Ecology is not concerned with the fate of individual animals. It accepts the concept of the exploitation of surplus natural resources because that is in the way the natural system works, but it must always be done on the principle of maintaining a sustainable yield. ...The inexorable rule of nature is that if you mess up your environment you will have to pay a heavy price sooner or later.... Just look around the globe today and you cannot fail to notice areas which at one time supported highly successful and civilized populations are either deserts or they have reverted to jungle. The reason is quite simple: they over-exploited their natural resources and they paid the price. It is naive to think that we can escape the same fate for very much longer. We are only managing to put off the evil hour by frantically digging up and using mineral resources that can never be renewed. As if that were not enough, we are polluting the atmosphere, the land and the waters with every kind of noxious substance. The "greenhouse effect" alone could well have devastating consequences for all life on earth. This is a reflection of the duality of man's brain. The left brain produces the reasonable answers after objective scientific research, while the right brain prefers the acceptable and the emotionally satisfactory answers. How often do people say, "That may be so, but I prefer to 'believe' or I like to believe ... this, that or the other?" The duality of the brain has created great problems for modern man.... It is ... significant that successful engineering makes money. This is in stark contrast to the supernatural, whether it is religious or mythological. In the latter cases the truth may be equally certain, but it is not verifiable, and the outcome of following rules is seldom predictable. It is, of course, possible to exploit magic and mythology commercially, but it could hardly be described as a manufacturing industry... There is an understandable public pressure for schools and colleges to concentrate on utilitarian subjects to the exclusion of cultural and aesthetic development. In other words, the development of the left brain is given a great deal more attention than that of the right brain.... The trouble is that neglect of the development of the right brain leaves it in a state of vacuum.... This means that the right brain is ready to absorb the first plausible ideas it happens across. The occult, obscure religious rites, parapsychology, astrology and similar attractive but irrational notions are sucked into the vacant space without any discrimination or critical faculty.... I also suspect that the use of drugs might be seen as a substitute, or short cut, to filling the vacuum of the right brain. ... I mention all this because man's attitude to nature is partly a function of the left brain and partly a function of the right brain. It is easy enough to encourage an emotional concern for nature and the living world.... Everyone can comprehend the idea of cruelty, very few can comprehend the extinction of a species.
 * Lecture to the European Council of International Schools. Montreaux, Switzerland (14 November 1986)

 * I do believe ... that human population pressure--the sheer number of people on this planet--is the single most important cause of the degradation of the natural environment, of the progressive extinction of wild species of plants and animals, and of the destabilization of the world's climatic and atmospheric systems. The simple fact is that the human population of the world is consuming natural renewable resources faster than it can regenerate, and the process of exploitation is causing even further damage. If this is already happening with a population of 4 billion, I ask you to imagine what things will be like when the population reaches six and then 10 billion.... All this has been made possible by the industrial revolution and the scientific explosion and it is spread around the world by the new economic religion of development.
 * Address to the Joint Meeting of the All-Party Group on Population and Development and the All-Party Conservation Committee in London (11 March 1987).

 * I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the "cull" to the size of the surplus population. It took about three and a half billion years for life on earth to reach the state of complexity and diversity that our ancestors knew as recently as 200 years ago. It has only taken industrial and scientific man those 200 years to put at risk the whole of the world's natural system. It has been estimated that by the year 2000, some 300,000 species of plants and animals will have become extinct, and that the natural economy, upon which all life depends, will have been seriously disrupted. The paradox is that this will have been achieved with the best possible intentions. The human population must be properly fed, human life must be preserved and human existence must be made safer and more comfortable. All these things are obviously highly desirable, but if their achievement means putting the survival of future generations at risk, then there is a pressing obligation on present generations to apply some measure of self-restraint. What has been described as the «balance of nature» is simply nature's system of self-limitation. Fertility and breeding success create the surpluses after allowing for the replacement of the losses. Predation, climatic variation, disease, starvation--and in the case of the inappropriately named Homo sapiens, wars and terrorism--are the principal means by which population numbers are kept under some sort of control. Viewed dispassionately, it must be obvious that the world's human population has grown to such a size that it is threatening its own habitat; and it has already succeeded in causing the extinction of large numbers of wild plant and animal species. Some have simply been killed off. Others have quietly disappeared, as their habitats have been taken over or disturbed by human activities.
 * Introduction to "The Population Factor" section of Down to Earth (1988).

 * It looks like a tart's bedroom.
 * On seeing plans for the Duke and Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park in (1988), as quoted in "48 of Prince Philip's greatest gaffes and funny moments", The Telegraph (2 August 2017).

1990s

 * It is now apparent that the ecological pragmatism of the so-called pagan religions, such as that of the American Indians, the Polynesians, and the Australian Aborigines, was a great deal more realistic in terms of conservation ethics than the more intellectual monotheistic philosophies of the revealed religions.
 * Press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on the occasion of the "Caring for Creation" conference of the North American Conference on Religion and Ecology (18 May 1990).

 * People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.
 * Said on a visit to Lockerbie in 1993 to a man who lived in a road where eleven people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet, as quoted in "Prince Philip's gaffes", BBC News (10 August 1999).

 * You can't have been here that long—you haven't got a pot belly.
 * Said to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary in 1993, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * Aren't most of you descended from pirates?
 * Said in 1994 to an inhabitant of the Cayman Islands as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * I sympathise desperately with the people who are bereaved at Dunblane, but I'm not altogether convinced that it's the best system to somehow shift the blame onto a very large and peaceable part of the community. I mean if ... look, if somebody ... if a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat which he could do very easily, I mean are you going to ban cricket bats? I'm not sure that the reaction is the most rational. I think one's got to make a difference between what the weapons can do and what the people can do.
 * Interview on BBC Radio Five Live (18 December 1996); Said in relation to the proposal to ban firearms in the UK following the Dunblane shooting, as quoted in "48 of Prince Philip's greatest gaffes and funny moments", The Telegraph (2 August 2017).

 * Welcome Mr. Reich Chancellor.
 * Said in 1997 during a visit by the Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, as quoted in "Willkommen, Herr Reichskanzler" welt.de

 * It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.
 * Of a fuse box, whilst on a tour of a factory in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1999, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002)

 * Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.
 * On a visit to the new National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, said to a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, as quoted in "Deaf insulted by duke's remark" BBC News (27 May 1999).

 * What’s the matter with these people? Can’t they see what’s good for them?
 * Reportedly said in response to the Australian people voting to retain the monarchy in the 1999 republic referendum. "Monarchy and the End of Empire" Philip Murphy (2013).

2000s

 * You are a woman, aren't you?
 * After accepting a gift from a Kenyan woman, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes" BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?
 * Asked of a driving instructor in Scotland, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * You managed not to get eaten then?
 * Said to a British student in Papua New Guinea, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes" BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * Do you still throw spears at each other?
 * Said in 2002 to an Indigenous Australian businessman, as quoted in "Prince Philip's spear 'gaffe'", BBC News (1 March 2002).

 * Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?
 * Said to a blind, wheelchair-bound woman who was accompanied by her guide dog, as quoted in "Philip tells blind woman: 'They've got eating dogs for anorexics'" in The Telegraph (3 May 2002).

 * You look like you’re ready for bed!
 * Said in 2003 to President of Nigeria, who was in national dress, as quoted in "Prince Philip quotes: Relive 65 classic gaffes as Duke of Edinburgh celebrates 65th wedding anniversary"

 * Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages.
 * Said while presenting a Duke of Edinburgh Award to a student. When informed that the young man was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans and was told that he was not, as quoted in "Duke under fire for Romanian orphans 'joke'" in The Scotsman (8 July 2006).

 * The food prices are going up – everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food but it's really that demand is too great, [there are] too many people. It’s embarrassing and no one knows how to handle it because nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by Government... overpopulation is to blame for many of the problems afflicting millions of people around the world... It seemed to me that most religions attributed the world to some special creation and I said, ‘Well, look, if you believe God created the world, you ought to take an interest in its wellbeing... People don’t realise it is the species that matter – not the individual – from the conservation point of view. You’ve got to be fairly hard-hearted about it. Conservation is not a romantic business. It’s a very practical business, trying to ensure as many different species of wildlife can exist, and which means in some cases controlling some so the others can have a better chance.
 * Television interview with Sir Trevor McDonald for the ITV documentary The Duke: A Portrait of Prince Philip (2008)

 * Can you tell the difference between them?
 * Said to United States President Barack Obama after being told that Obama had met with the Chinese and Russian ambassadors along with David Cameron, "Prince Philip makes a faux pas" at Youtube (1 April 2009).

 * Well, you'll never fly in it, you're too fat to be an astronaut.
 * Said at the University of Salford to a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut, who was wishing to fly the NOVA rocket, as quoted in of the gaffe: Prince Philip’s top ten embarrassing moments" in the Daily Mirror (14 December 2009).

 * Are you all one family?
 * Said to multi-racial dance troupe Diversity at the 2009 Royal Variety Performance, as quoted in Prince Philip asks Diversity, 'Are you all one family?'" in The Mirror (20 December 2009)

2010s

 * Oh, what, a strip club?
 * Response to Elizabeth Rendle, a 24-year-old, who, when introduced to the prince, said that she worked as a barmaid in a nightclub, as quoted in "Prince Philip in strip club gaffe" Yahoo! News (12 March 2010).

 * Constitutionally I don't exist.
 * As quoted in "Royal wedding: Should the royals have real jobs?", BBC News (27 January 2011).

 * There is nothing like it for morale to be reminded that the years are passing—ever more quickly—and that bits are dropping off the ancient frame. But it is nice to be remembered at all.
 * Said in a letter to The Oldie magazine after being voted "Consort of the Year", as quoted in "Prince Philip voted 'Consort of the Year'", BBC News (11 February 2011).

 * Is it made with Liffey water?
 * Said about a pint Guinness at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, as quoted in "'Is it made with Liffey water?' Philip enquires of Guinness" in Irish Independent (18 May 2011).

 * Q: "What do you see as the biggest problem in conservation?

A: "Well, the growing human population. From where we are, there's nothing else."

Q: And do you have views about what should be done about that?"

A: "Well, I think it might be described as voluntary family limitation."
 * From an interview for the BBC documentary "The Duke at 90" (2011)

 * Have you run over anybody?
 * Said to the Mayor of Waltham Forest who uses a mobility scooter, as quoted in "Duke of Edinburgh has fun with mobility scooter jokes on London visit", Metro (29 March 2012).

 * Just take the thing! Just take the fucking picture!
 * Said during an official photo shoot of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain in 2015.

Quotes about Prince Philip

 * Philip was the unsettling definition of a full-on alpha male: devastatingly handsome, vigorously self-assured, impatient with fools — and not just fools. When he leaned from his considerable height and bore down on a recalcitrant fact or factotum, it could be a shriveling experience for whoever had got it wrong.
 * Tina Brown "Prince Philip, the Man Who Walked Two Paces Behind the Queen", The New York Times (9 April 2021)

 * Then we go back to the Duke of Edinburgh; I recall an amazingly ridiculous campaign against him because, on a visit to India, he was invited to go tiger-shooting (such an invitation is a great honour there) and after a few days of the newspapers back home yelling and screaming and jumping up and down, he had to pretend that he had a whitlow on his trigger-finger and so couldn't shoot anything, not even a tabloid journalist.
 * Bernard Levin, "Uneasy Lies the Head" The Times (23 January 1989).

 * My father, for I suppose the last 70 years, has given the most remarkable devoted service to the queen, to my family, to the country and also to the whole of the Commonwealth.
 * Charles told reporters, wearing a black necktie of mourning (2021).

title: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh


text:
Wikiquote talk:Quotes of the Year

Krhm. I don't mean to be obnoxious, but the quote "Ars longa, vita brevis." is quite likely not attributable to Horace... -- Cimon Avaro

 * That's not being obnoxious at all. Authenticity is one of the main goals of this site, which is why we set up Verified and Attributed in the first place. If you don't think it is authentic, even as an Attributed phrase, move it. I noticed on Talk:Horace you suggested it is attributed to Seneca. Just create a page for them and move the quote. Nanobug 20:38, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Actually, let me backpedal a little. I googled, and did in fact find an occurence where it was attributed to Horace. And Seneca seems to have used an inverted word ordering. Let it stay attributed to Horace. In any case it is a translation from the Greek of Hippocrates, and may have been used by quite a few orators and penmen... -- Cimon avaro 00:31, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)

The phrase that someone posted for June 6th, 2004 '' "Do no work but get everything done." '' though probably based on a passage of the Dao De Jing does not appear in any published translations that I could find, (I own over a dozen) and is not actually a coherent expression, contradicting itself in ways that are more than merely apparent and paradoxical. Wikimedia technical difficulties prevented me from making a timely ammendment of this post, and I am archiving it only here, and adding to the normal archive two alternate translations of the phrase that are not self-contradicting and better convey the wisdom of the expression, rather than making it seem extremely absurd. These are both published translations of section 48 of the Dao De Jing, which is the passage of the book by Lao Zi which is most likely to be the ultimate source of the attempt at translation that was posted. Chapter 2, Chapter 63, and a few others have similar statements, but I believe this is the closest match to what was posted. ~ Kalki 03:28, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Wisdom
"Only a gobal wisdom can help us for reach to the human top advancement. This would be our vision".--62.60.186.229 07:50, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC) Sima Mohazab Iran.

Maybe Jordan MBORO (talk) 17:45, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Introduction of my quote
"ᴛʜɪɴᴋ ʙᴇʏᴏɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏʙᴠɪᴏᴜs" You'll discover that there is more to life than you've ever thought" Derrick Ndahiro Ndahiro derrick (talk) 02:34, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Wikiquote talk:Quotes of the Year


text:
Talk:Horace

While I cannot prove Horace never said "Ars longa, vita brevis.", it is common to attribute this to Seneca, and to remark that it was a paraphrase of Hippocrates... -- Cimon avaro
 * Don't feel bad. No one could ever prove that Horace never said, "Ars longa, vita brevis." MisterJayEm 21:48, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

"Aetas" definition?
QUERY: I am confused. What does "Aetas" mean in this context? The English translation seems to me to skip over the word or should the word be considered as part of the 1st line? I know no Latin except for "carpe diem" .^_^.

"Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

 * As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow."

Wiktionary says ..... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aetas

 * 1) (principally): the period of a life: lifetime, lifespan
 * 2) time of life, period of life, age quotations ▼
 * 3) an undefined, particularly long period of time: an age, an era, a term, a duration
 * 4) (metonymically) a generation

Thank you for your help, Wordreader (talk) 23:52, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Horace


text:
Cyril Connolly

Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was an English author, editor and critic.

Quotes

 * Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
 * The New Statesman (1933-02-25)

 * Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.
 * The Observer (1937-03-07)

 * Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.
 * 'Loser Take All', Sunday Times, p. 5 (27 May 1956)

 * He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
 * On his friend, George Orwell, in The Sunday Times (1968-09-29); reprinted in The Evening Colonnade (New York, 1973)

Enemies of Promise (1938)

 * Andre Deutsch Limited, ISBN 0-233-96488-6

Part 1: Predicament

 * I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.
 * Ch. 1: The Next Ten Years (p. 5)

 * I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
 * Ch. 2: The Mandarin Dialect (p. 13)

 * The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of Donne, Browne, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon, de Quincey, Landor, Carlyle and Ruskin as opposed to that of Bunyan, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, Cowper, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Southey and Newman. It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits. Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It is Ciceronian English.
 * Ch. 3: The Challenge to the Mandarins (p. 17-18)

 * Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.
 * Ch. 3: The Challenge of the Mandarins (p. 19)

 * We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four rôles: the High Priest (Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats), the Dandy (Firbank, Beerbohm, Moore), the Incorruptible Observer (Maugham, Maupassant) or the Detached Philosopher (Strachey, Anatole France). What he will not be is a Fighter or Helper.
 * Ch. 4: The Modern Movement (p. 30)

 * The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
 * Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p. 36)

 * So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.
 * Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p. 37)

 * The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
 * Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p.38)

Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade

 * Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.
 * Ch. 13: The Poppies (p. 109-110)

 * There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
 * Ch. 14: The Charlock’s Shade (p. 116)

 * Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?
 * Ch. 15: The Slimy Mallows (p. 122-123)

 * It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
 * Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 136)

 * Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
 * Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 136-137)

 * It is by a blend of lively curiosity and intelligent selfishness that the artists who wish to mature late, who feel too old to die, the Goethes, Tolstoys, Voltaires, Titians and Verdis, reach a fruitful senescence. They cannot afford to associate with those who are burning themselves up or preparing for a tragedy or whom melancholy has marked for her own. Not for them the accident-prone, the friend in whom the desire for self-destruction keeps blistering out in broken legs or threatening them in anxiety-neuroses. Not for them the drumming finger, the close-cropt nail, the chewed glasses, the pause on the threshold, the wandering eye, or the repeated ‘um’ and ‘er.’
 * Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 137)

Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood

 * To this period [age seven] I trace my worst faults. Indecision, for I found that by hesitating for a long time over two toys in a shop I would be given both and so was tempted to make two alternatives always seem equally attractive; Ingratitude, for I grew so used to having what I wanted that I assumed it as a right; Laziness, for sloth is the especial vice of tyrants; the Impatience with boredom that is generated by devotion; the Cruelty which comes from a knowledge of power and the Giving way to moods, for I learnt that sulking, crying, moping and malingering were bluffs that paid.
 * Ch. 18: The Branching Ogham (p. 149)

 * Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
 * Ch. 24: Vale (p. 253)

 * You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them.
 * Ch. 24: Vale (p. 258)

 * No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
 * Ch. 24: Vale (p. 259)

The Unquiet Grave (1944)

 * Persea Books, 1981, ISBN 0-89255-058-9

 * Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 6)

 * 'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.'
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 11)

 * The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 17)

 * A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 20)

 * Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 23)

 * No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 35)

 * Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.
 * Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 37)

 * Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
 * Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 58)

 * There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
 * Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 62)

 * A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless.
 * Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p.64)

 * The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
 * Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 64)

 * Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
 * Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 70)

 * The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
 * Part II: Te Palinure Petens

 * Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
 * Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 91)

 * Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.
 * Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 93)

 * Ridiculous as may seem the dualities of conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
 * Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 98)
 * Variant: Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
 * As quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970) compiled by Rhoda Thomas Tripp. This version has also appeared in earlier published sources, but it may be a misquotation.

 * There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas or of the kind of people whom we have once loved and whose faces are preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
 * Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.103)

 * Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.
 * Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.115)

The Condemned Playground (1945)

 * Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
 * "Told in Gath" (a parody of Aldous Huxley)

 * "Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, a Choctaw blood-mask, the prose of Scaliger the Elder, a painting by Fuseli, an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet à la Khmer,' a Pong vase. Simple tastes, you will agree, and it is my simple habit to indulge them!"
 * "Told in Gath"

 * Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
 * "What Will He Do Next?" (a lampoon on military analysis)

Misattributed

 * The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
 * Edward Thomas, "Early One Morning" from Poems (1917)

Quotes about Cyril Connolly

 * Cyril Connolly was right when he said that art needs clean hands.
 * Elena Poniatowska "A Question Mark Engraved on my Eyelids" in The Writer on Her Work (1992), translated from Spanish by Cynthia Steele

 * We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years?
 * Colin Wilson in Tree By Tolkien, p. 11 (1974)

title: Cyril Connolly


text:
User:Phillip Senn

UNCG [uncg] UNCG

title: User:Phillip Senn


text:
User talk:Phillip Senn

Hi Phillip, welcome to Wikiquote.

A lot of html doesn't work here, we prefer mostly plain text for ease of editing. Internal links are done with double square brackets (e.g. List of people by name goes to List of people by name), and external links with singles (e.g. UNCG goes to UNCG). Check out How to edit a page. Nanobug 03:50, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)

title: User talk:Phillip Senn


text:
Human, All Too Human

Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits is a book by 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1878. A second part, Assorted Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche), was published in 1879, and a third part, The Wanderer and his Shadow (Der Wanderer und sein Schatten), followed in 1880.

The book is Nietzsche's first in the aphoristic style that would come to dominate his writings, discussing a variety of concepts in short paragraphs or sayings. Reflecting an admiration of Voltaire as a free thinker, but also a break in his friendship with composer Richard Wagner two years earlier, Nietzsche dedicated the original 1878 edition of Human, All Too Human “to the memory of Voltaire on the celebration of the anniversary of his death, May 30, 1778.” Instead of a preface, the first part originally included a quotation from Descartes' Discourse on the Method. Nietzsche later republished all three parts as a two-volume edition in 1886, adding a preface to each volume, and removing the Descartes quote as well as the dedication to Voltaire.

Of First and Last Things

 * Esteeming humble truths. It is the sign of a higher culture to esteem more highly the little, humble truths, those discovered by a strict method, rather than the gladdening and dazzling errors that originate in metaphysical and artistic ages and men. At first, one has scorn on his lips for humble truths [-] But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher;...
 * Translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 3

 * Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further -- and does in fact acquire it.
 * Translated by R. J. Hollingdale
 * Aphorism 6

 * So weiss jeder aus Erfahrung, wie schnell der Traeumende einen starken an ihn dringenden Ton, zum Beispiel Glockenlaeuten, Kanonenschuesse in seinen Traum verflicht, das heisst aus ihm hinterdrein erklaert, so dass er zuerst die veranlassenden Umstaende, dann jenen Ton zu erleben meint.
 * Everyone knows from experience how fast the dreamer can incorporate into his dream a loud sound he hears, bell ringing, for example, or cannon fire, how he can explain it after the fact from his dream, so that he believes he is experiencing first the occasioning factors, and then that sound.
 * Aphorism 13

 * Das Traumdenken wird uns jetzt so leicht, weil wir in ungeheuren Entwickelungsstrecken der Menschheit gerade auf diese Form des phantastischen und wohlfeilen Erklaerens aus dem ersten beliebigen Einfalle heraus so gut eingedrillt worden sind. Insofern ist der Traum eine Erholung fuer das Gehirn, welches am Tage den strengeren Anforderungen an das Denken zu genuegen hat, wie sie von der hoeheren Cultur gestellt werden.
 * Dream-thought is so easy for us now because, during mankind's immense periods of development, we have been so well drilled in just this form of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best idea. In this way dreaming is recuperation for a brain which must satisfy by day the stricter demands made on thought by higher culture.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 13

 * Allem Glauben zu Grunde liegt die Empfindung des Angenehmen oder Schmerzhaften in Bezug auf das empfindende Subject. Eine neue dritte Empfindung als Resultat zweier vorangegangenen einzelnen Empfindungen ist das Urtheil in seiner niedrigsten Form.
 * All belief is based on the feeling of pleasure or pain in relation to the feeling subject. A new, third feeling as the result of two preceeding feelings is judgement in its lowest form.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 18

 * Ein wesentlicher Nachtheil, welchen das Aufhoeren metaphysischer Ansichten mit sich bringt, liegt darin, dass das Individuum zu streng seine kurze Lebenszeit in's Auge fasst und keine staerkeren Antriebe empfaengt, an dauerhaften, fuer Jahrhunderte angelegten Institutionen zu bauen.
 * One crucial disadvantage about the end of metaphysical views is that the individual looks his own short life span too squarely in the eye and feels no strong incentive to build on enduring institutions, designed for the ages.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 22

 * Man glaubt einer Philosophie etwas Gutes nachzusagen, wenn man sie als Ersatz der Religion fuer das Volk hinstellt.
 * One thinks he is speaking well of philosophy when he presents it as a substitute religion for the people.
 * Source: Project Gutenberg
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 27

 * Der Irrthum hat den Menschen so tief, zart, erfinderisch gemacht, eine solche Bluethe, wie Religionen und Kuenste, herauszutreiben. Das reine Erkennen waere dazu ausser Stande gewesen.
 * Error has made man so deep, delicate, inventive as to bring forth such blossoms as religion and arts. Pure knowledge would never have been capable of it.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 29

 * Often enough, and always with great consternation, people have told me that there is something distinctive in all my writings, from The Birth of Tragedy to the most recently published Prologue to a Philosophy of the Future. All of them, I have been told, contains snares and nets for careless birds, and almost, unperceived challenge to reverse one's habitual estimations esteemed habits. 'What's that? Everything is only-human, all to human?
 * Aphorism 1, Preface
 * Bison Books Edition, translated by Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann

 * Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception - but wouldn't you know it?
 * Aphorism 1, Preface
 * Bison Books Edition, translated by Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann

 * It is still a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these experimental years, to that enormous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an instrument and fishhook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of the spirit which is fully as much self-mastery and discipline of the heart, and which permits paths to many opposing ways of thought. It is a long way to inner spaciousness and cosseting of a superabundance which precludes the danger and the sprit might lose itself on its own paths and fall in love and stay put, intoxicated, in some nook; a long way to that excess of vivid healing, reproducing, reviving power, the very sign of great health, an excess that gives free spirit the dangerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally.
 * Aphorism 6, Preface
 * Bison Books Edition, translated by Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann

 * Esteeming Humble Truths. It is the sign of a higher culture to esteem more highly the little, humble truths, those discovered by a strict method, rather than the gladdening and dazzling error that originate in metaphysical and artistic ages and men. At first, one has scorn on his lips for humble truths, as if they could offer no match for the others: they stand so modest, simple, sober, even apparently discouraging, while the other truths are so beautiful, splendid, enchanting, or even enrapturing. But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher; to keep to them i many and shows bravery, simplicity, restraint. Eventually, not only the individual, but all mankind will be elevated to this manliness when men finally grow accustomed to the greater esteem for durable, lasting knowledge and have lost all belief in sinpiration and a seemingly miraculous communication of truths.
 * Aphorism 3, Of First and Last Things
 * Bison Books Edition, translated by Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann

On the History of Moral Feelings

 * Ohne die Irrthuemer, welche in den Annahmen der Moral liegen, waere der Mensch Thier geblieben. So aber hat er sich als etwas Hoeheres genommen und sich strengere Gesetze auferlegt. Er hat desshalb einen Hass gegen die der Thierheit naeher gebliebenen Stufen.
 * Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal. But as it is he has taken himself to be something higher and has imposed stricter laws upon himself. He therefore has a hatred of those stages of man that remain closer to the animal state.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 40

 * Die Kuerze des menschlichen Lebens verleitet zu manchen irrthuemlichen Behauptungen ueber die Eigenschaften des Menschen.
 * The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of mans feelings.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 41

 * Die Menschen, welche jetzt grausam sind, muessen uns als Stufen frueherer Culturen gelten, welche  uebrig geblieben sind: das Gebirge der Menschheit zeigt hier einmal  die tieferen Formationen, welche sonst versteckt liegen, offen. ... Sie zeigen uns, was wir Alle waren, und  machen uns erschrecken: aber sie selber sind so wenig verantwortlich,  wie ein Stueck Granit dafuer, dass es Granit ist.
 * We must think of men who are cruel today as stages of earlier cultures, which have been left over ... They show us what we all were, and frighten us. But they themselves are as little responsible as a piece of granite for being granite.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 43

 * Der Grund, wesshalb der Maechtige dankbar ist, ist dieser. Sein Wohlthaeter hat sich durch seine Wohlthat an der Sphaere des Maechtigen gleichsam vergriffen und sich in sie eingedraengt: nun vergreift er sich zur Vergeltung wieder an der Sphaere des Wohlthaeters durch den Act der Dankbarkeit. Es ist eine mildere Form der Rache.
 * The powerful man feels gratitude for the following reason: through his good deed, his benefactor has, as it were, violated the powerful man's sphere and penetrated it. Now through his act of gratitude the powerful man requites himself by violating the sphere of the benefactor. It is a milder form of revenge.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 44

 * Freilich solle man Mitleiden bezeugen, aber sich hueten, es zu haben: denn die Ungluecklichen seien nun einmal so dumm, dass bei ihnen das Bezeugen von Mitleid das groesste Gut von der Welt ausmache.
 * Of course one ought to express pity, but one ought to guard against having it; for unfortunate people are so stupid that they count the expression of pity as the greatest good on earth.
 * das Mitleiden, welches Jene dann aeussern, ist insofern eine Troestung  fuer die Schwachen und Leidenden, als sie daran erkennen, doch  wenigstens noch Eine Macht zu haben, trotz aller ihrer Schwaeche: die  Macht, wehe zu thun.
 * The pity that the spectators then express consoles the weak and suffering, inasmuch as they see that, despite all their weakness, they still have at least one power: the power to hurt.
 * Aphorism 50
 * Note: The latter quote is part of a counter to the former.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann

 * Aber wird es viele Ehrliche geben, welche zugestehen, dass es Vergnuegen macht, wehe zu thun?
 * But will there be many people honest enough to admit that it is a pleasure to inflict pain?
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 50

 * Einer der gewoehnlichen Fehlschluesse ist der: weil Jemand wahr und aufrichtig gegen uns ist, so sagt er die Wahrheit.
 * One common false conclusion is that because someone is truthful and upright towards us he is speaking the truth.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 53

 * Isn't it clear that, in all these cases [of selflessness] man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself, that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other?
 * Aphorism 57

 * Man kann Handlungen versprechen, aber keine Empfindungen; denn diese sind unwillkuerlich. Wer jemandem verspricht, ihn immer zu lieben oder immer zu hassen oder ihm immer treu zu sein, verspricht Etwas, das nicht in seiner Macht steht.
 * One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 58

 * Die Leidenschaft will nicht warten
 * Passion doesn't want to wait.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 61

 * [V]ielleicht die allermeisten Menschen haben, um ihre Selbstachtung und eine gewisse Tuechtigkeit  im Handeln bei sich aufrecht zu erhalten, durchaus noethig, alle  ihnen bekannten Menschen in ihrer Vorstellung herabzusetzen und zu  verkleinern.
 * [P]erhaps the great majority of men find it necessary, in order to maintain their self respect and a certain effectiveness in their actions, to lower and belittle the image they form of everyone they know.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 63

 * If looks could kill, we would long ago have been done for.
 * Aphorism 64

 * Er erregte erst Anstoss, dann Verdacht, wurde allmaehlich geradezu erfehmt und in die Acht der Gesellschaft erklaert, bis endlich die Justiz sich eines so verworfenen Wesens  erinnerte, bei Gelegenheiten, wo sie sonst kein Auge hatte, oder  dasselbe zudrueckte.
 * At first, he gave offense, then he awoke suspicion, and at length he was virtually ostracized and banished. Finally, justice remembered this depraved creature on occasions when it otherwise averted or winked its eye
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann

 * Aphorism 65

 * In truth, [hope] is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment.
 * Aphorism 71

 * Man wird selten irren, wenn man extreme Handlungen auf Eitelkeit, mittelmaessige auf Gewoehnung und kleinliche auf Furcht zurueckfuehrt.
 * One will seldom go wrong to attribute extreme actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit and petty ones to fear.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 74

 * [I]t is automatically assumed that the perpetrator and sufferer think and feel the same, and the guilt of one is therefore measured by the pain of the other.
 * Aphorism 81

 * Wenn die Tugend geschlafen hat, wird sie frischer aufstehen.
 * When virtue has slept, it will arise refreshed.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 83

 * Die Menschen schaemen sich nicht, etwas Schmutziges zu denken, aber wohl, wenn sie sich vorstellen, dass man ihnen diese schmutzigen Gedanken zutraue.
 * Men are not ashamed to think something dirty, but they are ashamed when they imagine that others might believe them capable of these dirty thoughts.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 84

 * Die meisten Menschen sind viel zu sehr mit sich beschaeftigt, um boshaft zu sein.
 * Most men are much too concerned with themselves to be malicious.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 85

 * Man lobt oder tadelt, je nachdem das Eine oder das Andere mehr Gelegenheit giebt, unsere Urtheilskraft leuchten zu lassen.
 * We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunity for our powers of judgement to shine.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 86

 * Wer sich selbst erniedrigt, will erhoehet werden.
 * He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.
 * translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
 * Aphorism 87
 * Notes: 'improvement' of Luke 18:14 - He who humbleth himself shall be exalted.

 * [T]he initial character of justice is barter.
 * Aphorism 92

 * Unusquisque tantum juris habet, quantum potentia valere creditur - Each has as much right as his power is assessed to be.
 * Aphorism 93
 * Note: based on a quote by Spinoza; Unusquisque tantum juris habet, quantum potentia valet - Each has as much right as his power is worth.

 * [W]e all still suffer from too slight a regard for our own personal needs; it has been poorly developed.
 * Aphorism 95

 * Socrates and Plato were right: whatever man does, he always acts for the good; that is, in a way which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the prevailing measure of his rationality.
 * Aphorism 102

 * Is Schadenfreude devilish ... Is the knowledge, then, that another person is suffering because of us supposed to make immoral the same thing about which we would otherwise feel no responsibility?
 * Aphorism 103

 * If one does not know how painful an action is, it cannot be malicious; thus the child is not malicious or evil to an animal: he examines and destroys it like a toy.
 * No life without pleasure, the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life.
 * Aphorism 104

 * Between good and evil actions there is no difference in type; at most a difference in degree. Good actions are sublimated evil actions; evil actions are good actions become coarse and stupid.
 * Aphorism 107

Religious Life

 * The thinking of men who believe in magic and miracles is bent on imposing a law on nature; and in short, religious worship is the result of this thinking.
 * Aphorism 111

 * When we hear the old bells ringing out on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves: can it be possible? This is for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was the son of God. The proof for such a claim is wanting.
 * Aphorism 113

 * Christianity came into being in order to lighten the heart; but now it has to burden the heart first, in order to be able to lighten it afterwards. Consequently it will perish.
 * Aphorism 119

 * Without blind disciples, no man or his work has ever gained great influence.
 * Aphorism 122

 * There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.
 * Aphorism 129

 * In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as a god and also finds it necessary to diabolify the rest.
 * Aphorism 137

From the Soul of Artists and Writers

 * What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.
 * Aphorism 149

 * Art renders the sight of life bearable by laying over it the gauze of impure thinking.
 * Aphorism 151

 * Every great phenomenon is followed by degeneration, particularly in the realm of art. The model of the great man stimulates vainer natures to imitate him outwardly or to surpass him; in addition, all great talents have the fateful quantity of stifling many weaker forces and seeds, and seem to devastate the nature around them. The most fortunate instance in the development of an art is when several geniuses reciprocally keep each other in check; in this kind of a struggle, weaker and gentler natures are generally also allowed air and light.
 * Aphorism 158

 * Just as youth and childhood have value in and of themselves ... so too do unfinished thoughts have their own value.
 * Aphorism 207

 * Every writer is surprised anew when a book, as soon as it has been separated from him, begins to take on a life of its own ... it goes about finding its readers, kindles life, pleases, horrifies, fathers new works, becomes the soul of others' resolutions and behaviour. In short, it lives like a being fitted out with a mind and soul—yet it is nevertheless not human.
 * Aphorism 208

Woman and Child

 * Jedermann traegt ein Bild des Weibes von der Mutter her in sich: davon wird er bestimmt, die Weiber ueberhaupt zu verehren oder sie geringzuschaetzen oder gegen sie im Allgemeinen gleichgueltig zu sein.
 * Everyone carries within him an image of woman that he gets from his mother; that determines whether he will honor women in general, or despise them, or be generally indifferent to them.
 * Aphorism 380
 * Translation source: Helen Zimmern

 * In jeder Art der weiblichen Liebe kommt auch Etwas von der muetterlichen Liebe zum Vorschein.
 * In every kind of female love, something of maternal love appears also.
 * Aphorism 392
 * Translation source: Helen Zimmern

 * Wenn die Ehegatten nicht beisammen lebten, wuerden die guten Ehen haeufiger sein.
 * If spouses did not live together, good marriages would be more frequent.
 * Aphorism 393
 * Translation source: Helen Zimmern

 * Mit der Schoenheit der Frauen nimmt im Allgemeinen ihre Schamhaftigkeit zu.
 * Women's modesty generally increases with their beauty.
 * Aphorism 398
 * Translation source: Helen Zimmern

 * Man soll sich beim Eingehen einer Ehe die Frage vorlegen: glaubst du, dich mit dieser Frau bis in's Alter hinein gut zu unterhalten? Alles Andere in der Ehe ist transitorisch, aber die meiste Zeit des Verkehrs gehoert dem Gespraeche an.
 * When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation.
 * Aphorism 406
 * Translation source: Helen Zimmern

 * Nach einem persoenlichen Zwiespalt und Zanke zwischen einer Frau und einem Manne leidet der eine Theil am meisten bei der Vorstellung, dem anderen Wehe gethan zu haben; waehrend jener am meisten bei der Vorstellung leidet, dem andern nicht genug Wehe gethan zu haben, wesshalb er sich bemueht, durch Thraenen, Schluchzen und verstoerte Mienen, ihm noch hinterdrein das Herz schwer zu machen.
 * After a personal disagreement and quarrel between a woman and a man, the one party suffers most at the thought of having hurt the other; while that other party suffers most at the thought of not having hurt the first enough; for which reason it tries by tears, sobs, and contorted features, to weigh down the other person's heart, even afterwards.
 * Aphorism 420
 * Translation source: Helen Zimmern

title: Human, All Too Human


text:
Talk:Human, All Too Human

I wrote these down on scraps of paper; I'm just going to type them all in and prune them later. These quotes are taken from the translation by Marion Faber & Stephen Lehmann translation (ISBN 0140446176); what's the preferred way of crediting sources? -- Jimregan 13:11, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)

 * The Template may have what you were after: anything other than that we have not yet discussed. Nanobug 14:37, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

 * I saw that, and should have been more specific - I mean for all of the quotes on a page. Having given some further thought to it, I'd assume it's alright to give the full citation for the first quote and an abbreviation thereafter - is that OK? -- Jimregan 19:29, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

The German text is available here; I'm putting in source information and the original quotes as I can find them. I only studied German for 3 years, and reading Nietzsche in German is outside of my abilities, so some help would be nice! -- Jimregan 20:13, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

 * Yes, I only studied German for 3 years as well. However since you also have a source for the translations, do you think we should tweak them or leave them as is? (I also find reading the German and then the translations helps to bring back all those words I thought I had forgotten.) Nanobug 02:05, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

 * Well, truth is I no longer have the source of the translations; I was just jotting them down from a friends books as I read them (while on holiday). I did make sure to keep note of the ISBN, translator(s) and publisher, and have checked that the books are available, so as soon as I recover financially from my holiday, I'll buy the books. For the most part, the differences between the public domain e-texts and the books I read are simply that more modern English was used in the books, but I've left notes where I thought there was an important difference. -- Jimregan 02:31, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

- This is the template I'm using for entries, I'm just putting it here to have a convenient place to copy and paste from :) I'll be using public domain sources for all further quotes (I may even replace existing quotes) for the following reasons:

 * 1) More compatible with GFDL
 * 2) Sources from the net are more easily inspected
 * 3) I'm broke at the moment :)

* "" **Translation: "" **Aphorism **Source: Project Gutenberg **Translation source: Helen Zimmern

-- Jimregan 02:32, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

title: Talk:Human, All Too Human