Alistair Haycock > Alistair's Quotes

“I don't want some other man's version of perfect.
I don't want society's perfect.
I want my perfect.
I want you.”
― Kirk Diedrich

“Tellingly, Ralf has revealed himself as an Internet sceptic. One suspects he thinks the World Wide Web has made things too easy for people, certainly too easy to ‘pollute’ the world with the meaningless and the inconsequential. ‘I am not a fan of the Internet, I think it’s overrated. Intelligent information is still intelligent information and an overflow of nonsense does not really help. In Germany it’s called Datenmüll: data rubbish.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Secretly, many punks were in love with Genesis and Pink Floyd, but to say that in an interview would have been the end of a bright career. And,”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“One of the songs which certainly impacted greatly in the summer of 1977 was a song which sounded as if Kraftwerk had gone potty and recruited a bona fide American soul singer. In fact, it wasn’t Kraftwerk, but Italian musician and producer Giorgio Moroder. ‘One day in Berlin,’ says Bowie, ‘Eno came running in and said, “I have heard the sound of the future.” … He puts on “I Feel Love”, by Donna Summer … He said, “This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” Which was more or less right.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“The year 1968 was also ground zero for popular music in Germany. Karl Bartos, in 1968 a 16-year-old gifted classical musician, puts it like this: ‘We don’t have the blues in our genes and we weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta. There were no black people in Germany. So instead we thought we’d had this development in the twenties which was very, very strong and was audio-visual. We had the Bauhaus school before the war; and then after the war we had tremendous people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and the development of the classical and the electronic classical. This was very strong and it all happened very close to Düsseldorf, in Cologne, and all the great composers at that time came there. During the late forties up until the seventies they all came to Germany; people like John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, and they all had this fantastic approach to modern music, and we felt it would make more sense to see Kraftwerk as part of that tradition more than anything else.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under has changed dramatically. It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count. It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t. Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“The Stereophonics were nice guys and we got along fine, though the differences between us were marked. Before they played they would practise their harmonies by playing the Extreme song ‘More Than Words’, with the whole band singing along with Kelly, the singer, and his acoustic guitar. For our pre-gig ritual we would sniff as many poppers as we could and listen to ‘Raw Power’ by The Stooges at ear-splitting volume.”
― Stuart Braithwaite, Spaceships Over Glasgow: Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth

“I love music writing and have a lot of time for journalists, but I’m often bemused when criticism is levelled against music for what it is not, rather than how successfully it has managed to be what it actually is. With music you are trying to achieve what you want, whether you successfully manage it is the issue. To say something is at fault because it is not what you (the writer) want it to be is ludicrous.”
― Stuart Braithwaite, Spaceships Over Glasgow: Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth

“If you don’t respect fear then there’s no way you can handle it. Fear can be damn dangerous, but if you can come to grips with it, wrestle it, understand it, then you’ve got a chance to work around it.”
― Charlie A. Beckwith, Delta Force: A Memoir by the Founder of the U.S. Military's Most Secretive Special-Operations Unit

“Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.”
― Aphra Behn

“There is no sinner like a young saint.”
― Aphra Behn

“dont let the same dog bite you twice”
― Chuck Berry

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“Save the big chats and honest words for people who you know have you in their hearts full-time.”
― Fearne Cotton, Happy: Finding Joy in Every Day and Letting Go of Perfect

“All we have to remember is that how someone else processes your truth is not your responsibility. Their reaction says much more about them than it does about you and your truth.”
― Fearne Cotton, Speak Your Truth: Connecting With Your Inner Truth and Learning to Find Your Voice

“When we forget to make sure we are doing okay, we can’t then give our best to the people we care about.”
― Fearne Cotton, Happy: Finding Joy in Every Day and Letting Go of Perfect

“the selfish gladly consoled themselves with the thought that though it was merciful at least it was not liberal;”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“Robert Owen’s was a true insight: market economy if left to evolve according to its own laws would create great and permanent evils.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“Yet the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“The most recent global financial crisis reminded the current generation of the lessons that their grandparents had learned in the Great Depression: the self-regulating economy does not always work as well as its proponents would like us to believe.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“In reality, the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system.

During the period 1917-23 governments occasionally sought fascist help to restore law and order: no more was needed to set the market system going. Fascism remained undeveloped.

In the period 1924-29, when the restoration of the market system seemed ensured, fascism faded out as a political force altogether.

After 1930 market economy was in a general crisis. Within a few years fascism was a world power.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”
― D.H. Lawrence