Mark Albion Quotes

Some people are straightforward. What you see is indeed what you get. Their words have no subtext and their hearts are open. Such individuals possess a naïveté which is both striking and humbling, and which inspires trust in others because these people are themselves trusting. They see life essentially through childlike eyes and, because of that, the more cynical members of the human race often consider them foolish and unsophisticated. Those more experienced in the ways of the world view them as easy marks, such stuff as the con-man’s wet dreams are made on. Straightforward people are very much in the minority, and in today’s world where idealism has become unfashionable and the concept of self-sacrifice unfathomable, they are in all likelihood an endangered species. For the rest of us, lying and deception is a necessary social skill. One we practice every day. Those – like myself – suckled at the breast of Perfidious Albion especially see the public expression of vulnerability as anathema. We harbour an abhorrence for emotional weakness; and we Brits are by no means the only ones. On a dog-eat-dog planet if you are to thrive, you have to be in control of yourself. Or at least appear to be.

A white skin is the greatest blessing that has been enjoyed on American soil.

You say reckless. I say fearless.

steel for centuries, good steel, and they were able to vary the carbon content without ever knowing what carbon was, or even why they needed limestone and charcoal to make iron. They just got on with it. Once atomic theory came along, metallurgy became a proper subject, and that’s when the Bessemer process was discovered, and all that stuff. And no, I haven’t the foggiest idea what the Bessemer process is.’ ‘I do,’ said Helen. ‘My Dad worked

The failure of what we called Reconstruction hurt him mighty bad, an', to my mind, hed more ter du with takin' him off than the fever. That's why he hed that line put on his tombstone. What is it? Let me git out my glasses, child, and I'll read it for ye: - 'He followed the counsel of the Wise, And became a Fool thereby.' What does it mean? I'm not jest sure that I rightly know, son; but it was one of his notions that he'd been fooled, along with the rest of us, by tryin' to work up to the marks of men that only half-knew what sort of a job they were layin' out. He was a good man, according to my notion, and an earnest one; but--somehow it seemed as if his ideas wa'n't calkilated for this meridian.

This new dialect of England’s ruling class differed markedly from the speech ways of American colonists, to whom it seemed contrived and pretentious.