We Are Led By The Least Intelligent And The Least Noble

Truly Terrifying.
I’ve been trying for almost three years to land an interview with Sarah Palin, one of the most polarising and divisive characters in American politics.
Today, she finally gave me her answer, by way of an extraordinary photo she posted on Facebook.
It depicted a smirking Ms Palin in hunting combat fatigues, astride a dead bloodied bear, and with an assault rifle across its torso.
‘Piers’, she’d scrawled in her own writing across the alarmingly horrific image, “Kind of busy right now.”

This woman was at one stage the running mate to a Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain.
If he’d beaten Barack Obama in 2009, Sarah Palin would have almost certainly been his Vice-President, and thus, as the macabre saying goes, a heartbeat away from the Presidency itself.
Just imagine that itchy finger on the nuclear trigger.
Truly terrifying.
( Piers Morgan, 25.10.2013 )

We Wouldn’t Be Human.
We all do things in our lives and we look back and think, ‘should have done this, could have done that’.
At the end of the day it’s part of your experience, part of what makes you as a person.
It’s the past.
I wouldn’t want to have missed out on the good parts, and there were good parts.
I don’t think anyone expects to go through life totally unscathed and making all the right decisions and being 100 per cent sunny every day.
If we didn’t feel stress, anxiety, regret, pain – we’d be monsters.
We wouldn’t be human.
( Jennifer Lopez )

The reason for all our problems, misery and suffering today?
We are ruled by the powerful, the rich, the greedy, and the selfish.
Not by the smartest or the kindest.
( R S Hutchison )

The Trick Is Being Able To Control Your Body Temperature.
Part extrovert, part wallflower.
I was a daredevil, always trying to ingratiate myself with my peers by doing risky things like jumping off walls.
I was naughty and I hope I still am.
Hopefully I’m more extrovert than introvert now.
I guess I prefer to be quite private.
It’s a myth that actors are exhibitionists.

It’s the research and working with other people that fascinates me.
When I came out of drama school I was in a shared house in Sydney.
I literally had to ration my money so that I could have a coffee in a cafe every alternate day.
I worked in an old folks’ home.
I’d go after school and heat up the food the cook had left and serve it, talk to the patients and then clear up and wash up afterwards.

I grew up listening to music and going to the theatre.
I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and I read a lot of detective novels.
But one of the performances that made me want to become an actress was seeing Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
That was quite extraordinary.
I never get embarrassed.
If I ever feel embarrassed, I’m able to completely hide it.

When I feel like I’m about to blush I can will it not to happen.
The trick is being able to control your body temperature.
It’s such a gift and might partly explain why I’ve got to where I am in life.
I’m beyond embarrassment.
Like any mum I fear some mysterious illness befalling my children.
Apart from that I’m not good with spiders.
People who say there’s nothing to fear from spiders have clearly never been to Australia.
( Cate Blanchett )

Many people will have to choose between keeping warm and eating and I don’t think that is acceptable.
( Former Prime Minister Sir John Major demands a windfall tax on energy firm profits after big price hikes )

Politicians questioning the honesty and integrity of the police?
If you didn’t laugh you’d cry.
( Norman Woods )

The number of property millionaires in the UK has risen by almost 78,000 in a year.
A house price rich list has estimated that 323,684 UK homes are now worth over £1million. A rise of a third in a year.
( Fred O. Wilson )

Technology has taken over our lives and I want it to stop.
If you see me on the train I’ll be the one looking dreamily out of the window rather than plugged into an iPod.
I see couples on the train now and they spend the entire journey listening to their separate devices.
Not a word is exchanged between them.
( Emilia Fox )

The United States does not simply interfere, but is an active participant in the internal political life of Central European countries.
( Viktor Orban, Hungarian Prime Minister )

Some welfare reforms, especially in the field of housing benefit, seem almost designed to destabilise people’s relationships with their local communities.
Where the poor and vulnerable carry a disproportionate share of the burden created by the financial crisis, something is wrong.
( Church of England report, July, 2013 )

I Hated Being Skinny And Funny Looking.
I was the first working-class model.
Before me, it was only middle and upper-class families that could afford to send their daughters to modelling school.
My life was turned upside down at the age of 16.
The journalist Deirdre McSharry called me the “Face of 1966” in the Daily Express on 27 February and that was the day my life changed for ever.

I didn’t understand the fuss over me.
I was being whisked around the world, put in beautiful clothes, told I was gorgeous and earning lots of money.
I just remember thinking, “God, they’re all mad !”
I hated being skinny and funny looking and desperately wanted a bosom.

Everyone calls me Twiggy.
One of my early boyfriend’s brothers nicknamed me Twiggy because of my skinny legs and it stuck.
It’s only my sisters who call me Lesley.
( Twiggy )

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.
( Voltaire )

We are led by the least among us.
The least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.
( Terence McKenna )

The Conservative Party is an eternally irritating force for wrong that appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men, faded entertainers and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with some essential part of their soul missing.
( Charlie Brooker )

Great Britain, Love It Or Leave It, Please.
My own life tells me that this is the most tolerant country on the planet.
I grew up in a white working class community in what was very much an overwhelmingly homogenous Britain.
But now I live in a country where the fastest growing ethnic community is mixed race – and my beautiful 10-year-old daughter is one of them.

For more than 20 years I have been married to someone who was born on the other side of the planet.
Two languages are spoken in my home.
I was born into one kind of Britain and now I live in another kind of Britain. And it works.
This is a healthy, happy, tolerant land.

But there is no reason why we should learn to tolerate the intolerable.
And if our country is going to have a future, then we have to share some basic human values.
Personally, I don’t care what cricket team you support and I don’t care where you were born and I don’t care what God you worship.

But if we are to live together, and if our children and our grandchildren are to share a future, then we need to share some basic humanity, some common decency and some sense of what is good and evil.
There are too many ghettos in this country.
There are too many people who live here but who feel nothing for our country, or even loathing and contempt.

I think of the decent Muslim families I have known.
I think of the little Muslim girls who played with my daughter.
And I think of them today because I know that there will be more racism in the hearts of my countrymen.
Hatred breeds nothing but hatred.

Oh, we really need to start believing in the same things!
But it is hard when there are millions of people who do not share the ordinary citizen’s views on women, politics, gays and the armed forces.
How do we live together without killing each other?
We need to believe in the same core of goodness.

No matter what our political beliefs or where we worship, we need to love this country.
There is truly no other way for us to live in peace.
I am proud that the people of my country have never crawled in the face of cowardly murder.
They never will. Great Britain, love it or leave it, please.
( Tony Parsons, 25.05.2013 )