William Donaldson

“We have to keep asserting that people committ crimes not because they come from so-called deprived backgrounds, but because they're wicked. The statistics showing that only .00137% of all crimes of senseless violence are carried out by stockbrokers from Sunningdale prove only that folk are stockbrokers because they have a sense of right and wrong - not vice versa.”

“I expect you (William Whitelaw) were as impressed as I was to read of the recent electrocution in Florida of a character called John Spenkelink in the electric chair. It seems that a full six minutes passed before Spenkelink was dead, during which time he hopped about like a prawn on a hot plate.”

“A recent study shows that one hundred per cent of youngsters on hard drugs had at some time in their lives listened to so-called pop music”

“This afternoon I was sitting quietly with some twenty roughs when I noticed a sudden hush come over the room. I glanced nervously round and observed that forty pairs of eyes were on me...I was reading a book. They had never seen someone read a book before. They were like natives watching a white man shave.”

“Later the place was as deserted as Malcolm Muggeridge's Christmas party of fellow intellectuals.”

“...a large and ridiculous gunner told me that I looked like an out-of-work chorus boy. He was very startled when I told him that was exactly what I was, but that I found it easier to get work as a naval officer, a job requiring considerably less talent.”

“Carlton, Sydney (1949-), painter and decorator. Those who argue that bestiality should be treated with understanding had a setback in 1998 when Carlton, a married man from Bradford, was sentenced to a year in prison for having intercourse with a Staffordshire bull terrier, named Badger. His defence was that Badger had made the first move. 'I can't help it if the dog took a liking to me,' he told the court. This was not accepted.”

“Bottom dogs have to be persuaded of the desirability of inequality.”

“Born 4th January 1935. Left school at 16 with one 'O' level in geography ( so I know my way round the world), but continued my education at the University of Real Life, than which, you will agree, there is none better.”

“I read recently that 60% of all drugs on the black-market had been put there by the police. No sooner are drugs seized, it seems, than they are recycled onto the streets by the arresting officers! I know our Leader, Mrs Thatcher, is in favour of private enterprise, but this is the free market gone mad!...Yours for the Market Economy Within Reasonable Limits!”

“To sit a fine Christian gentleman down in close proximity to an unsavoury crowd of prostitutes was bad enough. Even worse was to allow him to be humiliated intellectually by the afore-mentioned rabble. (When you must have know perfectly well that it is not given to mere policemen, as it is to street-walkers, to think coherently on their feet).”

“King- Hamilton, Judge Alan ( b 1900 )'...I think he erred on the side of severity when he gave Janie Jones, the notorious madame, seven years after the jury had acquitted her'. 'Well, these things are relative of course. It all depends on what you've been acquitted of. Miss Jones was innocent of a very serious offence.”

“Even Mahatma Gandhi - hardly a comfortable character - always wore a bowler hat with his loin cloth when practising as a barrister in London.”

“For my sins I recently went on a fact-finding tour of the North East...They're no longer whineing and snivelling about social justice and the right to work. They've given up completely.”

“...mere tabloid journalists, obliged to choose between the word of a Tory MP and that of a common prostitue, have been far too stupid to see that you can put your mortgage on the latter being true.”

“Only a shallow mind would be puzzled by the fact that Original Sin appears to be distributed so much more noticeably among the deprived...than among merchant bankers living in Surrey's green belt.”

“Questions, Hypothetical: Needn't be answered. No one knows why.Schools, Public: They teach you to stand on your own two feet. 'No doors on the lavatories. That sorts the men from the boys'.Snobbery, Inverted: The worst kind. No need to explain why.”

“I wish to protest most strongly about everything.”

“Power is the best shield that the disordered personality can conceive against being revealed as the laughing stock he secretly suspects himself to be.”

“At Winchester we were discouraged from standing too close, from making, or seeking, personal disclosure. The other day I met a fellow Wykhamist - someone I'd known for forty years - and after the preliminaries, I said: 'Are you happy?'He took a pace back and squinted with surprise: 'Are you pulling my wire?' he said. 'That's none of your business'.At Winchester we were none of us each others business. We cracked on.”