Frankie Boyle Quotes

For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)

Welcome to Glasgow - the city where we punch people who are on fire.

I don't read newspapers anymore — I just lie to myself and cut out the middleman.

Barack Obama will appeal to both black and white voters in America. White voters who'll think he's Tiger Woods.

There are fears that Britain could be facing a double-dip recession, or worse still, a double-dip with misery sprinkles and fuck-where's-my-job-sauce.

It seems amazing that the Navy SEALs managed to get inside the compound and shoot Osama so efficiently. I can only imagine they were told that the mission was to rescue a bearded British hostage and he must be brought out alive.

All told, in the colonial period, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 to 60 per cent, Hickel points out. ‘Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.’ The Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sums it up: ‘We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.

The Lib Dems found it very hard to decide whether they were Labour or Tory supporters, mostly because they're Lib Dem supporters. I mean had most of them agreed with one of the major parties they would probably have applied to join those parties instead of standing at the back of town halls looking disappointed.

Bisexuals are really attracted to senior Lib Dems - as they are both a man and a great big pussy.

The debate is whether the war is legal. It has brought pain, misery and desperation to hundreds of thousands of people. Does that sound legal to you? To me it sounds like the dictionary definition of the legal profession.

I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you're part of a big social scene, it's an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow,wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.

(Oxbridge is a compound term formed from the words obnoxious and privilege).

There is a force that conspires against you. It's called capitalism. It's closing your libraries so you can focus on your conspiracy shit.

I suppose the best advert for abortion is just a silent thirty second shot of Chris Moyles

That said, I don’t really understand the point of the royal princes joining the army. Why send a couple of pampered party boys like Harry or William in to fight? In a war you need a ruthless, merciless killing machine, someone like Andy McNab, or Prince Philip. Prince Philip is the perfect soldier: he likes shooting things and he’s a racist. He’d kill his own daughter-in-law if he thought he could get away with it.

I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsom. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsom in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsom can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.

Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: “For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone.” A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.

A poll when Blair left said that 69 per cent of people reckoned Blair’s legacy would be the Iraq War. I think that ignores his real record of achievement in dismantling the Labour movement. It’s amazing to think that the huge effort he went to creating a massive cash-for-honours scandal will be overshadowed. Blair was said to be saddened that he hasn’t managed to serve for as many years as Thatcher. Instead he will have to content himself with having killed more women and children than Genghis Khan. Ironically, for a man who is so obsessed with legacy, his memory will live on longer than most politicians—as a ghost story that Iraqi mothers use to frighten their children. That said, I do think that Blair stands a good chance of success in his new role of Peace Envoy. There’s a real chance that all those different groups in the Middle East will join together to try and kill him. In six months time he could be putting an end to years of suffering as he is sacrificed on an altar in the centre of Baghdad while everyone celebrates like it’s the end of a Star Wars movie.

Our political culture is now so debased that we regularly hear ‘do gooders’ getting the blame for things. Enviromentalists trying to stop a coal-burning power plant or a new runway that will (let’s just remember) DESTROY THE EARTH are branded as our enemies, these ‘do gooders’. Like doing good is a bad thing. You read all the time in the press that ‘do gooders’ are to blame—a sweepingly derogatory term. Or even worse, the ‘so-called do gooders’. I’ve never once read that the blame was being put fairly and squarely on ‘cunts’, and let’s face it ‘cunts’ must be behind fucking things up far more things than ‘do gooders’. If it’s not ‘cunts’ then I blame those ‘so-called cunts’.

He seems to be viewed as electable by Labour members largely because he looks like someone playing a prime minister in an old Spice Girls’ video.

I’m still struggling to work out whether Boris Johnson represents the interface of the public school system and foetal alcohol syndrome, or what happens when Pixar is infiltrated by the last surviving Nazi war criminal.

They say that the sun never set on the British Empire. I mean it did, but it was hard to see behind the huge pile of dead Indians.

The argument of Brexit is in some ways a sublimated, and quite correct, recognition that Britain’s relationship with the EU is actually about trade, and doesn’t offer it opportunities for exploitation. Because of the Empire, we developed an elite class addicted to enormous returns on investment, only possible through constant growth. As this becomes impossible, Brexit happens so profits can be delivered through cannibalising previously protected resources, including people.

One of the privileges of whiteness is being able to see racists as entirely laughable (indeed, it’s hard to think of anything more laughable than people who suffer from inbreeding moaning about diversity), because for us racism is always abstract.

Left-wing liberals (like me, to be honest) are often blind to their own ideology in the same way that they perceive middle-class people speaking English as not having an accent.

I think this mindset comes in part from a misconception that the Empire represented some kind of moral journey: that it begins in slavery and conquest and ends in reconciliation and Commonwealth. Slavery was abolished against a background of slave rebellions and increasing industrialisation. As so often happens, a moral course was found to be possible only once the business got difficult. Much in the way that Hollywood sex cases have found themselves on trial now that cinema has been replaced by YouTube videos of people unboxing blenders. The only true reconciliation the Empire cared about was with the slave owners, who were fully compensated.

Non-representation is just the cultural equivalent of not being able to meet someone’s gaze.

This year scientists reported a record 18 degrees in the Arctic. Which is particularly shocking to people from Glasgow because we’ve sunbathed in colder temperatures than that.

Mark Fisher, the cultural theorist whose 2017 suicide seems increasingly prescient, coined the term ‘capitalist realism’ to describe the way that we could imagine the end of the world more easily than we could imagine the end of capitalism. I think that has gone now, and that people can, increasingly, imagine a future shaped by something other than capitalism.

The much-ballyhooed Internet of Things (what is a smart bin? In my day that was a dog) will see a surge in demand for rare metals, forcing up their price. Combine that with the invention of the brain-computer interface and there will be times when the spare capacity of human consciousness will be a cheaper option for processing and storage. For a nutritious bowl of soup we’ll be plugged in, with a thousand others, running algorithms to more precisely push a new wonder mop to lonely housewives idly googling through a Valium comedown.

Well, this whole section actually hasn’t turned out to be as upbeat as I’d hoped. Let’s move on.

What we often think of as the self-belief instilled by an elite education is really a kind of class exceptionalism, a belief that privilege is earned through talent and hard work, against all of the available evidence. If you doubt this, simply ask the most left-wing Oxbridge graduate you can find what role they think their background played in their success.

One of the problems with left-wing discourse in Britain is that it seeks to moralise its opponents without ever considering what they really think.

In South Wales racist attacks went up 77 per cent after the referendum vote. I’m not certain whether to be appalled at their racism or admire that they managed to keep such a tsunami of hatred inside until they thought it was allowed.

Perhaps a modern concept of sovereignty might involve owning the property in your capital city, or your own railway system. At the moment Britain is in a strange position where we seem to be sanguine about foreigners owning our infrastructure, but we just don’t want them picking our fruit.

MI5 have denied claims that they’ve withheld intelligence from the Home Secretary. If anyone is guilty of that, it’s God.

Many Conservative politicians are little more than a collection of personality defects developed in an attempt to lure their father out from behind the Daily Telegraph during the six days a year they weren’t using the top bunk at school as the forced sodomy equivalent of a life raft during a shark attack

In previous generations the Conservatives hoped that young people would become more conservative as they got mortgages, or advanced up the career ladder, or something else that none of them will ever do again.

Self-employed may mean no pension, sick or holiday pay but you are Your. Own. Boss! Have to get down to Tesco for when they put on the yellow stickers? Who do you need permission from? That’s right… YOU! You’re the BOSS!

Perhaps the gig economy can help out with social care, so that anyone with a bike can underbid to spend the day squirting soup through a pensioner’s letterbox; and how silly that police armed response teams still take out lethal suspects, when, once cornered, the shot could be sold to an American safari tourist.

Of course, reactionary ‘anti-woke’ types are operating in ignorance at best, and often in bad faith. Their basic position is ‘some people are so marginalised that they have to build a language to describe their oppression, but the real victim is me, who has to learn a new word every nine months’.

The British left online seems to see trending on Twitter as an end in itself. Really, you can only be politically active online in the same way you can be sexually active online, and the far right sees all its online activities as staging posts to recruitment.

Since being born on a sunbed, this furious boiled potato has nurtured Britain’s sense of racial grievance with the patience and care you only see in someone who truly believes that they can monetise it.

Obviously, there’s more hatred on the hard right, but they do seem to have mastered something the left seems to find so hard – directing it outwards.

The far right in Britain are using social media to recruit while the left use it to berate people for liking problematic music videos. I think a problem for the left is their essentialism: they see people as either good or bad, and the role of activism focuses on energising the good ones.

One thing that’s useful to remember when trying to understand British politics is that for even the politically engaged English person it seems to require an act of will to remember that Scotland, Wales, and particularly Northern Ireland, exist. For those countries, it can be a little like being locked in the basement of someone who doesn’t fancy you anymore. In England, for Conservatives and Labour alike, an instinctive rejection of independent nationalism is part of the imperial hangover. This is so pronounced that broad elements of Labour will often fret over how to re-engage with the sort of nationalism that doesn’t like immigrants, while maintaining that the Scottish ones that want a bit more investment in public services are an evil too great to even acknowledge.

When your nihilists are reduced to altruism, it’s probably a bad sign.

What really stands out now is how, on the whole, the authors seemed to feel freer to be imaginative about the future than our contemporaries tend to be when they make predictions.

Toby Young has always embodied contradictions, even if simply by being interested in eugenics while looking like an unviable foetus.

The whole crisis does raise some interesting questions though: if we all agree that we can’t have the weakest people in society dying as a healthcare system, then why do we tolerate it as an economic system

The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

A more mundane threat is the sociopathy of giant Silicon Valley corporations. What can we learn from their rise? Possibly that Hitler might have just about made it if only he’d fitted out the Reichstag with a ping-pong table and some hammocks.

The Union was about a lot of things. One that’s rarely mentioned is the need for imperial manpower: England needed more bodies to serve in its armies. Although it wasn’t immediately obvious how they could increase their population by aligning with a country which was, at that point in history, burning anyone with a womb and a cat.

A lot of her friends were materialists who spoke like idealists: they seemed to view politics like it was a quest for truth, whereas to me art was the search for truth, and politics a search for power.

The attractive thing about Independence to me was that England seemed politically irredeemable, partly because everybody over the age of about fifty-five sort of thought that they fought in the Second World War.

I don’t think a parent always needs to be a great example – they can also act as a sort of hideous warning.

I’d never really liked the police: people have complex problems, and maybe the best person to solve them isn’t a guy with two GCSEs and a stick.

I didn’t ask about the state of the body, imagining that the autopsy had been a bit like a meat raffle.

Some days it feels like the whole world is against you, but it’s worth remembering that actually nobody gives a shit about you.

His whole demeanour was that of a tentatively reformed madman – like some old soldier who’d pieced his life back together, but one beeped horn in a supermarket car park and he was back in ’Nam.

Liberals think that most people are in the middle and agree with them. Most people can’t be in the middle, it’s statistically impossible.

Civility is made out to be this really great thing by all the people who benefit. Of course they want everyone to stick to the rules of civility, because those rules stop people from asking them why they have all the fucking stuff.

There never was a Scottish national identity. It was always Highlanders and Lowlanders, clans. National identity only came into existence after it became part of Britain. A lot of it was invented by Sir Walter Scott, this kind of theme-park identity we have now. That kilt everybody wears at weddings – it’s an eighteenth-century thing; that wedding look is based on the formal dress of a Highland regiment of the British Army.

Scotland hadn’t got a lot right over the years, but there is a good case for putting a knife in your sock when you go to a wedding.

Maybe you saw other countries differently if your experience of them involved watching your mate’s legs boomerang around a poppy field, and it made your Tripadvisor reviews so skewed as to be useless.

I sometimes thought that maybe my generation were subconsciously preparing to flee to the hills – even reality TV might have come into being to condition us to the coming dystopia: thrown together with a bunch of strangers; arguing over rations; one of you going missing every week

We stood awkwardly, crushed in a corridor of smiles fuelled by bad cocaine and low expectations; everyone still two drinks away from belligerence and disaster.

my arse cheeks were fusing with the cushions and I was about to become some kind of DFS centaur.

The funny thing is, the closer it gets, the more it looks like a piano." Frankie Boyle, Mock the Week, "Unlikely Last Words

He had metallic grey-white hair and that air that a lot of Scottish men in their sixties have: a kind of smugness from having outlived everyone they know. He looked like the star of a five-part docudrama about a game-show host accused of necrophilia

Donnie was in the boisterous, domineering mood that he often got into on spirits – the sort of form he was in the time we’d gone to the local comedy club and he’d bullied an improv troupe into doing a musical number about honour killings.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar. The tasteful lighting somehow accentuated my horrific appearance: I looked like a hostage video with an Instagram filter.

A drag act? So fuck? We had a priest at school – full time.’ I heard my voice rise and crack with indignation. ‘An actual paedophile wizard!

It’s amazing that the people of Gotham remain steadfastly philanthropic – still turning up to Wayne Foundation balls where the previous year they were gassed by a psychotic clown. Just because the last time you went out your wife was kidnapped by a human crocodile and your son got turned into clay, doesn’t mean that the library couldn’t use a refurbishment …

Glasgow did have the occasional statue of a scientist or whatever, but it was largely mass murderers. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the plinth said, hero of the Indian Rebellion of 1858.This was Britain, and if you killed enough foreigners, they let you ride a metal horse into the future.

I’ve injected you both with sodium pentothal. Old school. What they used to call truth serum.’ Amy’s head lifted slowly and her voice cracked with indignation. ‘Great, I’ve got a fucking hipster torturer.

She was in the year above me and manning a stall about the right to choice in Northern Ireland. It was a cause I totally agreed with: I’d been to Northern Ireland a bunch, and you always met someone who should have been aborted.

Glasgow was often rated as one of the happiest cities in the world, possibly because the people who researched these things didn’t understand sarcasm.

People trying to be cool in Glasgow don’t have loads of reference points to work with, so they often have to cobble together a personality from movie characters and food allergies

She wore a sharp black blazer, tight even on her thin shoulders, and had immaculate collar-length curly hair. Yet, somehow, this all hinted at a profound internal dishevelment, like her friends had forced her to dress up for a night out because she’d been depressed.

I can only stay optimistic by staying offline. People are fine in the abstract, but it’s hard when you actually have to hear what they think.

Oh, aye. I worry about everything. Sometimes I worry that our whole reality is the memory palace of a serial killer, and one day he’ll walk into the pub where I’m having lunch, read his aunt’s phone number from the underside of a beermat, and the universe will disappear, having fulfilled its purpose.

His fag-scraped voice sounded like an earthquake survivor shouting up through rubble. My drugs combo had taken hold and I literally throbbed with goodwill towards the demented old roaster.

I tried to make some small talk with people. I don’t love small talk, but I accept it has its place. It’s very hard to start a conversation with big talk: ‘Nice to meet you, Martin, my uncle has cancer.

I don’t know if people will even remember the Referendum with what’s coming down the pipeline. It’ll be a tricky tiebreaker in a pub quiz that takes place in the sex bunker of a pitiless regional petrol sultan.

She mentioned speaking truth to power, which I always think is a weird phrase because class relationships are essentially sadistic, and there’s no point explaining your pain to people who are just going to feel slightly aroused.

I was always attracted to women like this. Very emphatic, clever women. My therapist thought that this might be because my problems maintaining attention meant that I had to outsource intellectual stimulation, something I’d meant to read up on but hadn’t.

You’d never get a Scottish version of The Matrix, because anyone up here who was offered two pills would just gub both of them.

You had trouble answering the phone? You neurodivergent cunt.’ Donnie had been sent on compulsory equalities training after some work catastrophe, where he had been compelled to learn a raft of terms he now used as abuse.

I should at least have taken pleasure in telling him that I was ending the family line. That I was taking millennia of refinements to his DNA, and blasting them into the barren soil of a barista’s arsehole.

I got another round in and talked Jane through my thoughts on how we’re the first people in history to be ruled by incompetent fascists, and how we’re going to end up going to the death camps on a replacement bus service,

I said, ‘God bless you,’ to mask the regular horror I have when people sneeze; not because of germs, but because I always feel I’ve just seen their cumface.

A woman can share an anecdote about the embarrassment of a customs officer finding her vibrator as a dinner party anecdote, whereas a man letting slip that he spent a holiday fucking a fleshlight can only ever be the grimmest of red flags.

He brought out a book of upbeat platitudes in the wake of the financial crash that was billed as ‘the literary equivalent of a hug’, but was actually the literary equivalent of trying to fuck someone when they were depressed.

I’d dated a few women who’d been on the pill, without really understanding what it did; I think I thought weight gain and depression were just side effects of going out with me.

I’d worked with so many gay guys in bars, and they were so patient when it came to explaining their horniness in detail, that I thought I’d come to understand some of the aesthetic of what they looked for in guys. It was imperfection, and a kind of unaffected masculinity, I suppose. A broken nose was a lot more attractive than you’d think, basically. It seemed a healthy aesthetic for me – if you’re looking for realness, you’re looking for intimacy.

It’s been an incredible period in our nation’s history, hasn’t it? Personally, if I had a time machine and could do it all again … I’d go back to when I was sixteen, and kill myself.

Can a computer program be conscious?’ Sophie laughed. ‘Can a submarine swim? That’s how Noam Chomsky answers that one. Whether we call it consciousness or not, it’ll effectively be the same thing.

Rom-coms are innately radical. The central point is that it's always about a second relationship. It's about someone getting out of something that doesn't work, and into something that does. The rom-com says no matter how inescapable your current situation seems, you can escape, just not on your own. And this is also the message of radical socialism.

I'm an optimist for the future of the human race because soon mankind will have liberated itself from it's wheel of suffering by killing anything we could possibly be reincarnated into