The Mandarins Quotes & Sayings

The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It deter- mines what people will talk and think about-an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins. — Theodore White

Love is what freed me from the cell of my selfishness. — Seth Adam Smith

At a time when public finances are under huge strain, we surely do not need to pay celebrities to wax lyrical to mandarins. Unless American comedians can make the Home Office fit for purpose, the taxpayer won't be laughing. — Chris Huhne

I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I'm useless with a sword in real life. — John Bradley-West

Nothing perhaps affects man's character more than the company he keeps — J.C. Ryle

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality. — Elizabeth Hardwick

How then did we come to the "standard model"? And how has it supplanted other theories, like the steady state model? It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data. — Steven Weinberg

Don't complain about autumn. Walk with grief like a good friend. Listen to what he says. Sometimes the cold and dark of a cave give the opening we most want. — Jalaluddin Rumi

My biggest failure is 'Metal Gear.' It's my biggest failure and my biggest success. — Hideo Kojima

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends. — Ernest Bramah

I never failed at anything in fiction. — Susan Isaacs

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive. — Simone De Beauvoir

The politicians looked after the mandarins. The mandarins looked after the central bankers and the regulators. (The governor of the Central Bank was paid more in 2008 than the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as was the chief executive of the Financial Regulator.) The Central Bankers looked after the bankers. The bankers looked after IBEC. And IBEC looked after the government. The circle of oligarchs was watertight. — Shane Ross

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines. — Simone De Beauvoir

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate. — Pablo Picasso

He only shows mankind how beautiful everything is which man's hand has not yet spoiled or broken. — Friedrich Max Muller

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace negligee stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin. — Angela Carter

It's okay to talk about it. Death is so normal, I don't know why everyone gets so hung up about it. We all have to deal with it. Most people that you talk to have lost someone, but nobody talks about it. — Rachel Ward