Peter Kavanagh > Peter's Quotes

“The whiskey kicked like a mugger.”
― Ken Bruen, Blitz

“Your life is in some bizarre state when priests are throwing abuse at you on the street.”
― Ken Bruen, The Magdalen Martyrs

“The national sport in Ireland, apart from talking, is hurling.”
― Ken Bruen, The McDead

“Even Def Leppard couldn’t get him out of his funk. When the Def couldn’t crank you, it was way past time to shoot someone.”
― Ken Bruen, Bust

“I had me one sharp knife, a throwback to my glory days of the swans, and it’s sharp as a nun on her second sherry.”
― Ken Bruen, The Devil

“On the whole it’s not wise to remind the devil that he’s the devil, especially when we were getting on so well.”
― Philip Kerr, The Lady from Zagreb

“Sometimes I think God is just the devil pretending to be nice.”
― Philip Kerr, Prayer

“It was an interesting dilemma and pointed up a real point of difference between Nazism and Communism as forms of government: there was no room for the individual in Soviet Russia; conversely not everything was state-managed in Germany. The Nazis never shot anyone for being stupid, inefficient or just plain unlucky. Generally speaking the Nazis looked for a reason to shoot you, the commies were quite happy to shoot you without any reason at all - but when you're going to be shot, what's the difference?”
― Philip Kerr, A Man Without Breath

“Compared with the person who had decorated and furnished the place, the Archduke Ferdinand had been blessed with the taste of a troupe of Turkish circus dwarves.”
― Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem

“I didn’t know you were interested in politics,’ I said. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country?”
― Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem

“Horror does not need the dark, and sometimes a truly evil deed shuns the shadows.”
― Philip Kerr

“At a dinner party in north London, I listened to friends bragging about buying Porsches with their bonuses and sending out from their offices for pizzas and clean shirts because they were clinching a deal and could not leave their desks. I wanted to tell them of a place where every family had lost a son or a husband or had a leg blown off, almost every child seen someone die in a rocket attack and where a small boy had told me his dream was to have a brightly coloured ball. But, when I began to talk about Afghanistan, I watched eyes glaze and felt as if I was trying to have a conversation about a movie no one else had seen.”
― Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan

“Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.”
― Graham Greene

“the remark of a Middlesex Regiment officer in 1918. “Intelligence services,” the man had said, “are prone to looking up their own arses and wondering why it’s dark.”
― David Downing, Zoo Station

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
E'en in Australia art thou still more hot
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
(Since that's your winter it don't mean a lot)
Sometimes too bright the eye of heaven shines
And bushfires start through half of New South Wales
Just so, when I do see thy bosom's lines
A fire consumes me and my breathing fails

But thine eternal summer shall not fade
This is in no way due to global warming;
Nay, from thy breasts shall verses fair be made
So damn compulsive they are habit-forming
So long as men can read and eyes can see
So long lives this, thou 34DD

(Based on an idea by William Shakespeare. I'm sure he'd agree that I've improved it)”
― Manny Rayner

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The first colonial teenagers rejected their parents’ values, as teenagers have done ever since Cain and Abel decided to get away from all that hippy nature stuff. They were sober, industrious and, if truth be told, not much fun. They laboured uncomplainingly in the sun, exercised in the fresh air, swam in the sea and were, on average, six inches taller than the malnourished British stock from which they had sprung. Within a single generation, the Artful Dodger had transformed into Chesty Bond.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.”
― Thomas E. Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the Politics of Extremism

“Climate change denialists are therefore engaged in intergenerational economic warfare on their own societies. They won’t witness the worst aspects of climate change—luckily for them they’ll die before they occur. But their children and grandchildren will be affected by them. The refusal of older people, and particularly old white males, to accept the need for climate action shifts costs that they themselves are causing onto their descendants, all of whom will pay higher prices, higher taxes and higher insurance premiums and enjoy poorer health, lower economic growth and fewer jobs because of climate change. Denialists are a form of economic parasite preying on their own offspring, running up a bill they’ll die before having to pay. And every year of delay increases the costs that future generations will have to bear.”
― Bernard Keane, A Short History of Stupid

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn't a professional, the knife had butter on it.”
― Rodney Dangerfield

“Once I pulled a job, I was so stupid. I picked a guy's pocket on an airplane and made a run for it.”
― Rodney Dangerfield

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Where I go, the ghosts go. I go where the evil is.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2

“I said to myself – wait for me in hell, I’ll come to you.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2

“There are times, I don’t know if they come to everyone, when I feel that the future is beyond my strength: too much horror to deal with and no help to turn to.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2

“killers are like the army, dull and dangerous simultaneously.”
― Derek Raymond, The Devil's Home On Leave: Factory 2