Aa Gill Quotes

You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff.

before Detroit was called the Paris of the West it was known as the Arsenal of Liberty.

Knowledge acquired outdoors always seems to have a greater, hardier wisdom than the stuff you find at a desk on a computer.

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance.

Most journeys in all of the world start not with bright expectations, a sense of adventure or a bucket and spade, but an empty stomach.

When you’re a visitor to a city, you like to hurry up the habits, lay down a pattern, gain predictability in place of roots.

America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth.

respect to the Indians, because the very idea of America belongs to immigrants.

America has always understood that it is defined by what it stands against more than what it stands for.

The definition of wit is a joke that doesn't make you laugh.

In America, immigration is the story of hope and achievement, of youth, of freedom, of creation. But all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere.

America is Europe’s greatest invention.

cleverness that the French adore and always mistake for wisdom.

Walden, which is a diary that oscillates between eye-rolling minute tedium and laughable hyperbole, with sections of profound whimsy and social condescension.

It is in Europe that we are born and bred to a single role. America is populated by second acts, encores and revivals.

The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: ‘There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

There is no tragedy so utter that a Belgian, with the best will in the world, can’t make worse.

Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilization, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew.

What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie.

Death lends everything a metaphoric imperative. Mundane objects become fetishes when the departed no longer need them, and breakfast conversations grow runic and wise from behind the shadows.

The Swiss—also a federation of semi-independent states—are even more attached to their guns than Texans, and they have a greater number per capita, but death by shooting is so rare they don’t even collate the figures.

deaths by bullet per 100,000. In at number one is Colombia, with a whopping 51.8 whacks. Next is Paraguay with 7.4, then Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Costa Rica, Belarus, Barbados, and the United States with 2.97—just ahead of Uruguay.

Europe is, for the most part, a hugger-mugger continent that works best on the consensus of inertia and precedent. Those who have dogmatic and contrarian beliefs can cause disproportionate ructions and ripples in our overcrowded and hierarchical communities.

So much of the Western tradition deals with the most despairing and angst-ridden emotions, but they’re movies made for kids. It’s as if America was trying to pass on an unpleasant but necessary lesson of life: that you were alone, and you needed to toughen up and shut up.

The noisy, lumpy, hilarious breath runs through me like a great brightness. Magical, free laughter that spins me back to being a child; a hiccuping, chorus-rolling, crashing, howling, sobbing laughter, so unexpected, so strange, like finding that all together we can sing.

Cannibalism is a Western, white imposition. A retrospective racism. Tribal memory, collective dreams and wishful thinking should, if not silence, then at least reduce to a tearful academic whisper any attempt to discredit the lives of Indians. Haven’t they suffered enough?

in the Edwardian way of things, collected indiscriminately and rigorously, with the global kleptomania of empire and the desire to own, calibrate, measure and stuff everything possible, to put all of creation into its place, and place as much of it as possible in glass cases.

There is a theory that bravery and intrepidness and extreme risk taking are all sorts of madness, and that only one person in 1,000 or 100,000 is born without the normal safety rail of self-preservation, the pressing need to turn around and go home when it’s dark, cold and frightening.

New York bakes in a cess of gritty fug all summer, and congeals into gray slush all winter. There are a couple of days in the spring and autumn when the sky is madonna blue, the air crisp, and the light bright and sparkling, and that’s when they take the pictures and make the romantic comedies.

The first lift shaft was built four years before the first lift. In 1852 Peter Cooper was constructing the Cooper Union building in New York with an elevator shaft, in the sure and certain knowledge that if he built it, the lift would come. That isn’t an act of impatience, it’s an act of faith, and it is, archetypally, the act of an American.

There is a name for this sudden slap of art, this falling through the rabbit hole of civilisation. It’s Stendhal’s syndrome: being overcome by beauty. They say that the guards in the Uffizi are trained to deal with collapsing Americans who have lived lives of blameless comfort in Midwestern ugliness and can’t compute the full beam of a Bronzino.

The purpose of an army must surely be to put itself out of business.

The only type of humor that is excused lower classness is satire, and satire is the chamber music of comedy - a joke that many people profess to enjoy, but few actually get.

Derringer, who invented the gun that killed Lincoln, made as much money in lawsuits as he did selling guns.

a tax on salt cod that precipitated the War of Independence.

At the end of the eighteenth century, science was one of the few areas in old Europe where illegitimacy could not overshadow accomplishment.

The best way to imagine how big the emptiness of nature is, is to jam it with humanity.

Emerson lectured and wrote treaties and essays, and masses of clotted, cabbagey poetry. Reading him is like trying to hack your way through a swamp of creeping verbiage.

Old guns rarely die, they just hang on walls.

nothing transformed the politics, the economy and the table of Europe like the potato. The tuber from Peru.

It is a miserable irony that the potato came from America and sent these people back to America as desperate economic refugees.

Niagara Falls Power Company chose to go with AC current to feed the industry of Buffalo, which became briefly known as the electric city of the future.

By 1927, only the richest 2 percent of Americans paid any federal tax at all.

New York is like a divorcée looking for a richer second country.

proportionately, being a journalist in a war is more dangerous than being in the Special Forces, and more important.

There is only a sparse handful of exceedingly rich countries that could begin to afford to maintain the bulimically wasteful expense of an American democracy.

Catholicism was trying to avoid hell, but Protestantism was trying to achieve heaven.

The one nation America has seemed to gain something of a special relationship with is Israel, the sliver of the Middle East that has no oil and little strategic importance.

But they also confuse two distinct occupations: cooks and chefs. Cooks do it at home for love. Chefs do it in public for money. Dinner parties are karaoke cheffery. There

History is always personal—never more so than for those who find theirs is written by the enemy. It strips the defeated and the displaced of their dignity. It is a posthumous insult.

Trojan is giving away Magnum large condoms (do you think they were named after a large wooden animal inside which thousands of little men were hiding, ready to jump out and ruin your life?)

The New World failures may have been greater, the disasters more excessive, the consequences more brutal, but there’s a bounce in every fall, a spit on the palm’s new start for every setback.

Lawyers are the new three-button, white-collar, cuff-shooting cowboys. They fulfill all the cowboy criteria. Workingmen with arcane skills. They can be both good and bad, sheriffs and gunslingers.

Crack cocaine is the contemporary beaver, an international fad that has radically altered the economics of the poorest, marginal people, indigenous America. The gangs are the tribes of the New World.

Of the 1,223 new medicines developed between 1975 and 1997, just 13 were for tropical diseases. Only four sprang from the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to cure humans. None were found on purpose.

I told them this was their language, this English, this most marvellous and expressive cloak of meaning and imagination. This great, exclamatory, illuminating song, it belonged to anyone who found it in their mouths. There was no wrong way to say it, or write it, the language couldn’t be compelled or herded, it couldn’t be tonsured or pruned, pollarded or plaited, it was as hard as oaths and as subtle as rhyme. It couldn’t be forced or bullied or policed by academics; it wasn’t owned by those with flat accents; nobody had the right to tell them how to use it or what to say. There are no rules and nobody speaks incorrectly, because there is no correctly: no high court of syntax. And while everyone can speak with the language, nobody speaks for the language. Not grammars, not dictionaries. They just run along behind, picking up discarded usages. This English doesn’t belong to examiners or teachers. All of you already own the greatest gift, the highest degree this country can bestow. It’s on the tip of your tongue.

Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that you have to take malaria pills to go to places where the population doesn’t take them, or that you get injections for yellow fever, cholera, typhus and hepatitis? None of the locals are immune to these things. They just suffer them. Drug companies can find prophylactics for rich Western holiday-makers, but not for people who live with disease the other 50 weeks of the year.

the moral is perhaps that intellect and being well-read have no innate value to a contented or useful life. The number of hardbacks on your bedside table is in inverse proportion to the number of arched backs in your bed.

Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills,” laxatives that were 50 percent mercury. I think they were reusable: you swallowed one, suffered the violent scatological consequences, reclaimed the pill, washed it and saved it for the next poor sucker.

Accent is the last great redoubt of prejudice. The race relations industry, that inquisition of fairness and sensitivity, doesn't protect against discrimination by funny voice. You can mock an accent with impunity, and everyone does

Tellingly, the department that deals with relations with the rest of the world doesn’t have the word “foreign” in it: it is the State Department. It looks after the interests of one state alone. It might be called the Bargepole Department.

There was a powerful and effulgent smell of industrial disinfectant. It's a smell that never reassures you about cleanliness; rather, it makes you doubly squeamish of lurking vileness. Soap smells clean, disinfectant smells dirty. Funny that.

In Yorkshire there is only the impetus of decline; the farms, the woolen mills, the dairy rounds wither, unravel and turn sour. The family wears out, stumbles politely, tripping over drink and ennui and a genteel surrender to the momentum of underachievement.

Guns are a trigger for a whole magazine of internal snobberies and prejudices that crackle through white European-American society. There is a salutary sentence for these two groups—the gun lobby and the urban liberal. They are two tribes tied together by guns.

When asked if he thought that the French Revolution had been a good thing, Zhou Enlai famously answered that it was too early to tell, which is trite about the Terror, but it would be true about America. It’s too early to tell. If you take a timeline from the first settlements in the 1600s to the present, and compare it with the foundation of modern Europe from the end of the Roman Empire, at the same point in our history the Vikings are attacking Orkney, and Alfred is the first king of bits of what will one day be England.

the anti-gun urban liberals are really not that much more evolved. They have an equal and opposite fanaticism about guns—that to own one is to be a latent murderer. But worse than that, it’s to be tasteless. There is a raft of assumptions that go with gun ownership.

a gun in a film is so culturally specific to America. It looks odd in world cinema unless it’s ironic. I wonder if there are more balls in English films than guns, more nipples in French films. Guns in America’s story are a constant, a plot device, like coffee cups in European films. Guns are Hollywood.

Thomas Edison was a graduate of Cooper Union. Like Otis, he is principally famous for things he didn’t do. He didn’t invent electricity, or the lightbulb, the phonograph or the movies. These misappropriations didn’t bother him much: he didn’t correct folk. What he was good at, what he really knew, was patents.

The Ninth Amendment, which is not often mentioned, was perfectly foresighted. It says the numeration of the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. So no future law could be made that would deny or trespass on rights already given to Americans.

America is layered with the given graffiti, names of its generous dead. There isn’t a museum or hospital, a theater or municipal amenity, however humble, that can’t be blessed with the remembrance of the comfortably-off and defunct. The money left to Ivy League universities in America isn’t about the needs of learning.

If you want to know what the Georgians were really like, just watch the furniture experts on the Roadshow, those spraunced and pinched plonkers with marbled hair and patinated jowls pulling ancient drawers off old widows’ ball-and-claw feet and getting all arch about their lovely dovetails. That’s the true voice of Georgiana.

give a New York friend a panic attack, turn up unannounced on a Wednesday and suggest going for a drink. It is easier to organize five guys to raise a flag on Iwo Jima than to get mates out for movie and dinner. Surprise parties are such fun, but require e-mail “save the date” warnings. And everyone needs to know how to dress.

Where politer European cities might have had street mimes, New York has always had the Brechtian street theater of pavement psychodrama: the muttering, bellowing, gesticulating and teetering looney tunes for whom the drugs are no longer working, who look like characters from Exodus, prophets of urban collapse and carnal comeuppance.

Ronald Reagan was a man who knew the diplomatic form. He also had a showman’s ear for a tune. So when, at an official dinner, the marine band slipped into ‘Edelweiss’, he stopped mid-anecdote, rose to his feet, placed a reverential hand over his heart and stared into the blank mid-distance out of respect for the Austrian national anthem.

Nobody knows exactly where the first chickens were domesticated – India, China, Thailand, Vietnam – somewhere around 10,000 years ago, which is to say at the birth of farming. The wild bird is a red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus (the French made it their national bird because of the similarity to Gaul, and because they still behave like chickens).

One of the great lessons of 200 years of American boom is that technology is never neutral. Things come with demands, they have needs and they exploit the environments they find themselves in. America invented technopomorphism, the imbuing of functional tools with sapient attributes. There is no such thing as an inanimate object, they are just resting.

a particularly American ability to come up with consistently dreadful names for new things. Just as there is an inspiring national talent to invent stuff and to think forward, so there is an equal and opposite imaginative black hole when it comes to naming the stuff: the conflation and truncation of words, adding extraneous vowels and hyphens to the portmanteau.

American style of talking, typically with the stress on vowels above consonants, as opposed to standard English, which shrinks vowels and beats time on consonants. It is in the consonants that we keep instructions, orders and directions. But emotions are displayed and imparted in vowels. The vowels are color, consonants black and white. The American accent has more access to emotion than English. You’re more likely to sound like a friend than a public information announcement. On the other hand, standard English is more trustworthy, being less emotive. American accents sound more partisan. It is a voice that has grown out of debate, out of long seasons with little company and no more entertainment than the sound of voices.

a German spy landing off the coast of Norfolk, walking into a village and banging on a pub door to ask in perfectly accented English for a glass of hard cider. The publican gave him a drink, made an excuse and went out the back to fetch the local policeman. The only person in Britain who didn’t know you couldn’t get alcohol at nine in the morning would be a German spy.

It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as "the people" or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on.

St. Bride’s is the journalist’s church on Fleet Street. There have been seven churches on this spot. It’s named for the Irish saint Brigit of Kildare, the virginal head of the old, equal-opportunity Celtic Church. She has, over the years, become the patron of babies, blacksmiths, chickens, bastards, children of abusive fathers, and printing presses. It must have been the combination of bastards and ink that brought her to hacks.

Brains were being lured to California by mere money. Mere money and space, and sun, and steak, and Hollywood, and more money and opportunity and optimism and openness. All the Os but without one-upmanship. And there was ownership, and friendship, and a future. All inconsequential fripperies, according to the Old World: beads and mirrors. People who took the dollar in exchange for their brains were unpatriotic in much the same way that tax exiles were.

Alexander Hamilton didn’t want a democracy at all, fearing mob rule, the dictatorship of the majority. Instead, he called for a president and a legislature elected for life—essentially the House of Lords. He demanded strong central government that could veto states. It was all very patrician and paternalistic. He even mentioned getting rid of the states altogether. George Washington loathed the idea of political parties, seeing factions as being the cause for strife that would stop men voting with their consciences or in the best interest of their state.

New York is the worst-dressed rich city in the world. There is an inexplicable lost connection between the countless clothes shops, sophisticated, expensive, modern, classic, amused, serious, postmodern, and vintage, and the stuff, the schmutter that people actually put on in the morning. It’s a city where the rich dress worse than the poor. Generally poor people affect an élan that money can’t buy. Style rises from the bottom. But not in New York. There’s a one-class-fits-all, oversized blahness. They all shop in department stores and boutiques and fashionable chain stores.

Here is a cutting from the Ladies’ Home Journal of Philadelphia: Uncle Sam set apart a royal pleasure ground in North Western Wyoming and called it Yellowstone National Park. To give an idea of what its size—3,312 square miles—really means, let us clear the floor of the park and tenderly place some of the great cities of the world there, close together as children do their blocks. First put in London, then Greater New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Paris, Boston, Berlin, St. Louis, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Washington. The floor of the park should be about half covered, then lift up Rhode Island. Carefully, so as not to spill any of its people, set it down and press in the West Indies. And even then there are 200 square miles left.

For 3,000 years the most sought-after rooms were on the first floor—or the second floor if you’re an American. The piano nobile, the grand first floor, was for animals or the shop. One flight up was the master bedroom and reception rooms, and the further up you went, the lower your status. Scullery maids roosted like swallows in the eaves. But the lift brought us to the penthouse to live with the angels, the glass walls, the silent buffet of the wind, the hiss of climate control. And beneath the great, blinking panorama of the city, wall evaporated into air. No art or bookshelf could compete with the view of omnipotence, the sense of living on Parnassus, a double-glazed Valhalla. And a view suddenly had a value—real estate agents could sell something they didn’t own.

compare that with the statistics for murderous death without bullets. The US comes twenty-fifth, the UK is twenty-seventh. And now the overall bullets and no-bullets untimely death rate. The US is seventeenth, below Slovakia and Poland. The UK is thirty-first. Less murderous than peaceful little Switzerland, though just a tidge more maniacal than New Zealand. So, statistically, you’re more likely to be murdered on the laid-back holiday haven of Barbados than in America, with or without a gun. There are other ways of looking at this list. Eight of the top ten gun-crime countries are from the New World, and so speak Spanish, the language of inarticulate anger. All are notably religious, and all predominantly Christian, though half-and-half Catholic and Protestant. Perhaps more telling is that all of them were colonies.

Taxidermy inhabits a half-life, an underpass between life and death. He is oddly vital, still possessed of an animating force, not as defunct as a corpse yet still nowhere near living. A talisman trapped between escape and dust.

more often than not, an exhibition is merely a misplaced object.

ochre sliver of paper from the Detroit Post. His story goes from

Top hats in Paris and London were paid for with genocide along the Great Lakes of the wilderness.

he too went bonkers, probably due to the mercury used in preparing top hats—hence “as mad as a hatter.

The stands of aspen up here are the biggest living thing on the planet—who’d have thought? Acres of aspen share the same underground artery and vein system, their DNA identical. Branches of this lollygagging übervegetable are all rooted as one.

In the nineteenth century, one in three British soldiers was an Irishman.

America, built on religious contrarianism, has incubated a far wider and more exotic range of votive beliefs than anywhere else on earth, with the possible exception of India. And without wanting to disparage anyone’s fondest faith, America’s big sky and bigger spiritual yearning has led to some truly eye-bulging and belief-suspending premises for salvation. It’s difficult to imagine that the golden plates engraved with the book of Mormon could have been found anywhere but in the New World, or that L. Ron Hubbard would have found a congregation for Scientology. The fervor of religious experience has been a constant throttle and brake on American life, from the witch hunts of seventeenth-century Massachusetts to the New Age pantheistic hedonism and self-help of twenty-first-century Arizona.

The name skyscraper is originally nautical. Skyscraper is the tiny, triangular sail flown from the top of the mast.

Philanthropy was rediscovered in America. There is a particular relationship with charity that is unlike the stealthy, apologetic palming of donations from the Old World,

There is a duty to improve the lot of others. Charity isn’t personal, it’s public. It’s owed not just to God and salvation but to the nation: the idea that America itself deserves its citizens’ charity, not because it is poor but because it could always be richer.