David > David's Quotes

“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”
― Roald Dahl

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep—it can't be done abruptly.”
― Colm Tóibín

“You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they're dull as a brick. But then there's other people, and you meet them and you think 'not bad, they're okay', and then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality's written all over it, and they just they turn into something so beautiful...”
― Amy Pond Doctor Who series

“We have forgotten that the prosperity, safety, life expectancy, stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky. They were built, over centuries, on philosophical and moral foundations that have withstood the test of time. They were defended over and over again by our ancestors who bled to defend them. They were refined in the crucible of fierce political and ideological debates.”
― Konstantin Kisin, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

“suppression of free speech is a symptom of tyranny.”
― Konstantin Kisin, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

“it’s important for everyone to do their bit in defending free speech. Including you. Yes, technically we already have it. But every successive generation still needs to defend it. Why? Because it’s constantly at risk of attack from people who think they know better. And how free is speech if there are serious consequences, such as unemployment and character assassination?”
― Konstantin Kisin, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

“The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally,” he wrote later. “In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Nowhere”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“In California, banning plastic bags resulted in more paper bags and other thicker bags being used, which increased carbon emissions due to the greater amount of energy needed to produce them.77 Paper bags would need to be reused forty-three times to have a smaller impact on the environment.78”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Urbanization, industrialization, and energy consumption have been overwhelmingly positive for human beings as a whole. From preindustrial times to today, life expectancy extended from thirty to seventy-three years.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“France is a perfect example. After investing $33 billion during the last decade to add more solar and wind to the grid,20 France now uses less nuclear and more natural gas than before, leading to higher electricity prices and more carbon-intensive electricity.21 Between 2016 and 2019, the five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies—ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Corporation, BP, and Total—invested”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.70 Solar panels often contain lead and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Cities require concentrated energies. Today, humankind relies upon fuels that are up to one thousand times more power-dense than the buildings, factories, and cities they power. The low power densities of renewables are thus a problem not only for protecting the natural environment but also for maintaining human civilization.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“In 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it. Why? “Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,” concludes historian Robert Mayhew. “Indians are breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war,” Churchill claimed, falsely. Partly as a result of his decisions, three million people died in the Bengali famine of 1942 to 1943, which was three times the death toll of the Great Irish Famine.55”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Ehrlich accepted a redistributive agenda of rich nations assisting poor nations with development aid so long as that money went to charity and not things like infrastructure. This was the seed of what the UN would christen “sustainable development.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly.”
― Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

“Gentlemen of the human race, I say to hell with the lot of you.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Do you not trust the government to have its citizen’s best interests at heart?”
― Mark Hood, The Return of the Martians

“The BLM-antifa narrative that police are murdering black and brown people in epidemic proportions needs to be thoroughly debunked. It is not supported by the evidence or data. This should be the job of the media, but it has been they who fan the flames of racial division through one-sided wall-to-wall coverage.”
― Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy

“This represents more than ‘cancel culture’, more than another cynical effort by the elites to circumscribe what may be said on a particular issue. It represents an overturning of the virtues of the Scientific Revolution itself, and of that central freedom of Enlightenment: the freedom to question authority.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“when it comes to climate change, we’re not really talking about science. We’re talking about scientism. We’re talking about the use of science to fortify political agendas. We’re talking about the way the technocratic elites now marshal expertise in their fearful moral favour. And we’re talking about the treatment of science, this science at least, as a god for a godless age, whose decrees must be blindly obeyed.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“Have sex online, too, some said. And people did. A survey of 6,654 Brits aged 18 to 59 found that 53 per cent had engaged in virtual sexual activity during the first lockdown in 2020.10 Being friendly to neighbours was out, wanking online was in.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“Spinoza said. ‘Government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and a usurpation of the rights of subjects.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable