"The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion, indeed, but for any considerable time."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations

"Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open the gates of despondency - welcome to a day in the average office."

David Brent - The Office

We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

Old saying from the USSR

People in the United States have a broadly similar attitude toward politics with people of the Soviet Union. In the U.S., this is often referred to as "voter apathy", but it might be more accurately described as non-voter indifference. The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held a monopoly on power. The U.S. has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable, and which together hold a monopoly on power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States it organized itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike.

Dmitry Orlov - Post Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century

"IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT!"

The Sun headline on John Major's election victory in 1992

"So what are we Little Englanders seeking to protect from European contamination? The Monarchy, Parliament, The Church of England, the English language, the island race? It is far too late. The damage has already been done - largely by our own hands. Compared to the damage already done by, say, Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Neil, that done by Mr Delors is not serious at all. Indigenous popularism, philistinism and cultural vandalism are a much deeper threat than anything emanating from Brussels."

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Sunday Telegraph, 1 January 1995

"Dude, where's my country?"

Michael Moore, book title

"There's no point in having a future if I don't have a country."

Iain Duncan Smith, reported in the Telegraph, 9 October 2002 

 "Il faut cultiver notre jardin"

Candide, Voltaire

"I don't wanna work on Maggie's farm no more"

Bob Dylan

"I wonder who's going to win the election. Steve Hilton or Andy Coulson? It looks like a close run thing at the moment. I don't suppose Dave cares much one way or the other."

anon

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity"

King Solomon, allegedly

"I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins. The Roman As, in the latter ages of the Republic, was reduced to the twenty-fourth part of its original value, and, instead of weighing a pound, came to weigh only half an ounce. The English pound and penny contain at present about a third only; the Scots pound and penny about a thirty-sixth; and the French pound and penny about a sixty-sixth part of their original value. By means of those operations the princes and sovereign states which performed them were enabled, in appearance, to pay their debts and to fulfil their engagements with a smaller quantity of silver than would otherwise have been requisite. It was indeed in appearance only; for their creditors were really defrauded of a part of what was due to them. All other debtors in the state were allowed the same privelege, and might pay with the same nominal sum of the new and debased coin whatever they had borrowed in the old. Such operations, therefore, have always proved favourable to the debtor and ruinous to the creditor, and have sometimes produced a greater and more universal revolution in the fortunes of private persons, than could have been occasioned by a very great public calamity."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations 

"The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."

Ben Bernanke, 2002

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be;"

Polonius' advice to Hamlet, William Shakespeare

"I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."

Alan Greenspan

"I think some of it is socially useless activity."

Adair Turner

"Eton’s motto is often thought to be Floreat Etona, which can be translated as “May Eton Flourish” or “Let Eton Flourish”; but Esto perpetua ("May it last forever") came into usage if anything a little earlier.   In fact, neither phrase is officially a motto; they are unofficial creations that, over time, have stuck. "

Eton College website

"The world famous Eton College was founded in 1440 by Henry VI to provide free education for 70 poor students, who then went on King's College, Cambridge. The school is popular with the Royal family and both Princes William and Harry attended, as well as 19 former Prime Ministers."

The Waterman's Arms website. (A pub in Eton.)

"The show must go onnnn."

Freddie Mercury

"Who wants to live forever?"

Freddie Mercury

"Ted was a very good No. 2....Not a leader...

Now you have a real leader......

Whether she is leading you in the right direction?..."

Harold MacMillan

"Were One Nation Toryism and pre-zanu-labor Labour really all that different from each other? Certainly a lot less than either of them from Thatcherism or Zanu Labor. Or from Zac-Goldsmith-George-Monbiotism, which is probably what we'll get next. Expect a lot more cosy chats between Boris and George (George M. that is)..."

anon

"I see little glory in an empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers."

Winston Churchill

"Fabula Cincinnati est fabula virorum Romanorum multorum. Cincinnatus viros in pugnam pro Roma duxit. Etiam erat agricola. In casa parva habitabat et agros amabat. Ubi in castris non erat, in agris laborabat. Ubi Romani (with) inimicis bellum gerebant, Cincinnatus Romanis auxilium donavit. Viros armis pugnare fere iussit. "Pugnate et Romam memoria tenete!" clamavit. Inimici superati sunt. Nunc, tutus, multos annos in agris remanebit."

obid

"Please God, let there be victory before the Americans arrive."

General Sir Douglas Haig, 1917

"Toryism in other days had two legs to stand upon: a sound leg and a lame leg. Its sound leg was reverence: its lame leg was class interest. Reverence it has almost forgotten. It no longer leans upon that leg. It leans now upon its lame leg, the leg of class interest, more, much more; and to mend the matter as it stumps along, it calls out progress."

William Ewart Gladstone

"By the Conservative cause, I mean the splendour of the Crown, the lustre of the peerage, the privileges of the Commons, the rights of the Poor. I mean that harmonious union, that magnificent concord of all interests, of all classes, on which our national greatness depends."

Benjamin Disraeli

"A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts - and they are just as great a terror - and they last longer..."

David Lloyd George

"A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination, that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponents and glorify himself."

Benjamin Disraeli on Gladstone. 

"By God! I've lost my leg!"

"Have you, by God?"

Lord Uxbridge and the Duke of Wellington

"I have come too late; men are too enlightened; there is nothing great left to do... Look at Alexander; after he had conquered Asia and been proclaimed to the peoples as the son of Jupiter, the whole of the East believed it... with the exception of Aristotle and some Athenian pedants. Well, as for me, if I declared myself today the son of the eternal Father, there is no fishwife who would not hiss at me as I passed by."

Napoleon

"...perhaps I'm overly pessimistic here. I often am; it goes with the territory. (Though what could be more frightening, out here at the deep end of the 20th century, than a genuinely optimistic science fiction writer?)"

"The history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem. It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again."

E.H.Gombrich, A Little History of the World (1936)