Ferdinand Mount > Quotes

“The irreducible, ultimate element in religious faith is the insistence that we are created things; male and female He created them; without God we are nothing. And yet, when men and women have children and become parents, they unmistakably become creators, incompetent, accidental and partial creators, no doubt, but creators none the less. It is their inescapable duty, and, with luck, their occasional delight to care and watch over their creations; even if this creative power is partly illusory because chromosomes and chance decide the whole business, parents cannot act as if it is illusory; they cannot sincerely believe in their ultimate helplessness. They must behave like shepherds, however clumsy, and not like sheep, however well trained.

The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon. But it is a sermon for bachelors.”
― Ferdinand Mount, Subversive Family

“Sometimes, strolling through the ruins of earlier civilizations, we idly wonder what it must have been like to live through the end of one of them . Now we know four ourselves.”
― Ferdinand Mount, The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905

“Brutality, but also vulgarity. Propaganda, Hitler tells us, must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses . . . All propaganda must be popular, and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to . . . The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan . . . only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.34”
― Ferdinand Mount, Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson

“hookah.”
― Ferdinand Mount, The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905