Quotes by Phillip Adams

“The Internet provides a delivery system for pathological states of mind.”

“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”

“Advertising men and politicians are dangerous if they are separated. Together they are diabolical.”

“Success is easy. Any mug can be successful and make a fist of it. Its how you deal with it afterwards that is the test of character. Ive watched a lot of people lose everything. Now Keating in a sense has lost everything. If you add up all the things hes lost, its pretty significant. But there is still an absolutely remarkable, unbroken, interesting, involved bloke who is not crushed by what hes been through at all. Hes still defiant, hes still funny, hes still full of ideas.”

“But Watson would have told us, had the [full version] gone ahead, that this was a dominating woman who drove him I suppose, dare one suggests, in much the same way that Janette [Howard] might drive John. But that [Keating] felt unsupported finally. This is murky territory. The only one who is entitled to comment, apart from the players, is Don.”

“I wanted to take the shot. I usually make my shots from that spot, so when I got the ball I knew it was going up. I live for situations like that. Im not going to let us down, not going to let us lose. I love my team. We have a mission, to win the state, and we wont stop until we do it.”

“Weve been motivated this year. Everybody on our team expects to be good. Everybody expects to win every time we play. It wont be that hard to calm down and let everything work. Well play until the final second.”

“Youve only to walk amongst them, to trail your fingers over their spines, to be enriched by a wonderful osmosis”

“Unless youre willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success wont happen”

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.

I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term Holocaust had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.

Ive 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 Im 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 didnt exist, doesnt 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.