Bernard Levin Quotes (1928-2004)

“As I say, we have all seen photographs of the stone figures, the moai; the pictures show single statues and groups of three or four, but I discovered that there are hundreds: the island [Easter Island] is strewn with them.”

“South African Nationalism is riddled with anti-semitism, but Jews are entirely free to practise their religion and study their sacred books; in the Soviet Union anti-semitism is directed and encouraged by the state, and Jews can be, and are, imprisoned for teaching Hebrew scripture.”

“The explosion of peaceful, mass revolt which has ended Soviet rule from Berlin to Bucharest — and will shortly end it also from Lvov to Vladivostok — was set off not by the eloquence of charismatic leaders, not by hatred of the oppressors, not by hope of gain, but by that tiny yet searing flame which is in us all, and which no Niagara of oppression, hunger or torture can ever extinguish.”

“I am a child of the city. I was born in one, but that alone is not enough to make a man want, even need, to live and die in one, not even the city of his birth is London, as mine is. Millions are born in cities and flee them, London included; others go on living in them and become more and more unhappy. I think I can understand what moves those who cannot endure city life, but that is largely because the things they cannot abide are the very things that made cities so attractive to me in the first place.”

“The Nazis burned the works of Jews and other authors of whom they ideologically disapproved, but even more dreadful, it seems to me, was the action of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, at the start of the insane destruction of their country (including, in the end, the physical destruction of something like one-seventh of the entire population); in the sack of Phnom Penh which marked the beginning of their holocaust they burned every example of the printed word they could lay their hands on, from ancient Buddhist scriptures to hospital record-cards.”

“Almost all of us want to be richer than we are, even if we are very rich indeed. To be sure, there are exceptions; saints, ascetics, those who travel light and will not add even the weight of a wallet, a few whose material ambitions are fully satisfied and who therefore truly want nothing further. But the rest of us want more than we have, and the specially thoughtful sometimes wonder whether there could ever come a time when we didn't. The crucial question, though, leaving out of consideration the exempted categories, is: what are we willing to do to increase our wealth?”

“And none so poor to do it reverence. What happened? Surely something did, for that portrait of Kennedy can hardly be recognised from the version we have today. He is now widely thought of, when he is thought of at all, as either an earlier model of President Carter, all goodwill and muddle, or a belligerent adventurer likely to follow the Bay of Pigs fiasco with an unprovoked nuclear strike on Moscow. Was it all show and froth, good looks and rhetoric? I do not believe it. In the first place, Kennedy was not a liberal in the Carter mode (let alone the Dukakis version); it would almost be closer to the reality to say that he was a liberal in the sense of the Manchester school.”

“For everybody other than the fellow travellers who simply lied about it, the obvious truth about the Soviet Union was, and is, that its system was, and is, incapable of feeding its people, housing its people, healing its people, transporting its people (except, alas, to prisons and concentration camps), keeping its people informed, teaching its people, even entertaining its people, and above all incapable of trusting its people. It could not, and today still cannot, keep its people clothed, warm, clean, hopeful, industrious, healthy, comfortable, honest or sober. Moreover, the system of lying as a way of life meant that however merciless the rulers, the massive pillars of the system were hollow, and thus could not stand for ever.”

“Rivers have been personalized (Old Father Thames), fantasized (Anna Livia Plurabelle), sung to (Ol' Man River), regarded as sacred (Ganges, Alph) invented to symbolize the inevitability of death (Styx), remembered because they marked turning points in human history (Rubicon). If it were not for the winding Maiandros we would not meander; without the Rhine literature and music would be the poorer by the loss of countless legends; Christ was baptized in the Jordan. And when river and city meet, the human race puts down roots of civilization; it is my consciousness of that truth that makes it impossible for me to get used to the idea of invisible rivers, those streams that have been covered over as cities spread, but continue to flow silently and unseen beneath the streets.”

“Kennedy's posthumous reputation has undergone an extraordinary series of metamorphoses. As could have been predicted, the first revaluation of his character and achievement was almost as depressing as the conspiracy theories; his histoire amoureuse was being touted around before the first blade of grass had grown on his grave, and soon every whore in America was announcing that he had enjoyed her favours.”

“When the Labour Herald printed a foully anti-semitic cartoon Mr Kenneth Livingstone, boss of the GLC, not only defended its publication, but said that the only thing he regretted about it was that it did not go far enough.”

“Fox could speak for four hours at a stretch without repeating himself, and in prose so magnificent that it makes the blood race simply to read it—what it must have sounded like beggars the imagination. What is more, Fox could do that after staying up all night gaming and drinking.”

“But we can go back further still, for the thing did not start with Princess Anne, either; before her there was Princess Margaret. She, too, was attacked for going on holiday, and indeed for putting on weight, but the main charges, which seem almost incredible today, concerned her choice of men friends - and after, not before, her divorce.”

“Then we go back to the Duke of Edinburgh; I recall an amazingly ridiculous campaign against him because, on a visit to India, he was invited to go tiger-shooting (such an invitation is a great honour there) and after a few days of the newspapers back home yelling and screaming and jumping up and down, he had to pretend that he had a whitlow on his trigger-finger and so couldn't shoot anything, not even a tabloid journalist.”

“A critic has a duty to ignore anything happening off stage, and to make no allowances for any shortcomings that may result... All the same, I am at any rate partly human, and it would be absurd, as well as impossible, for me to persuade myself that I do not know that Terence Rattigan has for the last couple of years been staring into the eyes of the old gentleman with the scythe... So I am doubly delighted to say that Cause Célèbre (Her Majesty's) betrays no sign of failing powers; on the contrary it could almost herald a new direction for Sir Terence, and a most interesting one, too.”

“Courageous, self-willed and frantically energetic, Levin holds strong views which he enunciates with unambiguous force.”

“He can no more say it short than A.J.P. Taylor can say it long. In the long sentences of Proust you can still hear the aphoristic tradition that started with Pascal. In the long sentences of Levin you can hear a tradition being forgotten.”

“As a child he had been brought up in the grim backstreets of 1930s Somers Town (between St Pancras and Euston stations) by his mother and her parents — Jewish refugees from Lithuania. His father had walked out on them when Bernard was three. That early betrayal, I always felt, explained a lot about why he stayed a bachelor. It was as if he used his intellect to dazzle because he found it difficult to communicate, or commit, on an emotional level.”