Phillip Adams Quotes & Sayings

The events of September 11 were carried out by people armed not with weapons of mass destruction, but with blades you can buy at a newsagent — Phillip Adams

Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people — Phillip Adams

Today, words. Tomorrow, sticks and stones. And the day after that? — Phillip Adams

Fame often comes to those who are thinking about something else, whereas celebrity comes to those who think about nothing else. Celebrity is, if you like, a forgery of fame: it has the form but lacks the content. — Phillip Adams

Advertising men and politicians are dangerous if they are separated. Together they are diabolical. — Phillip Adams

The Internet provides a delivery system for pathological states of mind. — Phillip Adams

When I was five, a tree was my best friend. An old peppercorn on Grandpa's little farm. I'd haul myself into its calloused arms and hide from the world in its foliage. Apart from the pleasure of looking down on unsuspecting adults, I could be Robin Hood in a one-tree Sherwood Forest or Johnny Weissmuller in his jungle. I fell out of my friend once while Tarzan-ing. Gashed a large chunk from a leg. Almost 70 years later, there's still a scar. — Phillip Adams

Trees are very good friends. Firm friends. My five year olds tree could be relied upon to be there next day, uncritical and protective. And think of trees contribution to our lives. They provide boats, buildings, paper, furniture and, for clog-wearers, footwear. As well as contributing toothpicks and chopsticks they give little birdies somewhere comfy to sit. Best of all, they help produce breathable air and lock up that naughty carbon. Why is why I am talking to the Greens about giving trees the vote. — Phillip Adams

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den. — Phillip Adams

Let the massacres remind us to turn down our political volume and venom. — Phillip Adams

Later, in a different home, I befriended a eucalypt, using a resilient bough as a trampoline. Learning nothing from having plummeted from the peppercorn, I'd bounce happily in my haven in the heavens. I loved that tree - and fully understand why Heysen, Roberts, McCubbin and the rest devoted so much time and effort to painting arboreal portraits. — Phillip Adams

The old dead trees are the most fascinating - the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they'll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees. — Phillip Adams

Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives. — Phillip Adams

I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.
However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.
For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future. — Phillip Adams

To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance. — Phillip Adams

While sticks and stones break bones, words can never hurt? Manifestly untrue. Politics everywhere are holistic, interconnected, and the rhetoric of right or left can produce toxic atmospheres in which lunacy thrives. — Phillip Adams

Unless you are willing to try, fail miserable, and try again, success won't happen. — Phillip Adams

It's a privilege to present 'Late Night Live'. No radio program, anywhere on Earth, casts a wider net. — Phillip Adams

Unless you're willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success won't happen. — Phillip Adams

The most intense hatreds are not between political parties but within them. — Phillip Adams

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries. — Phillip Adams