On Success/Happiness/Optimism: Apropos Of Nothing/Something/Everything

"I don't give a toss if people say I haven't fulfilled my promise. I think my values are right but I don't want to impose them on other people. I've been lucky enough to be born in a democratic country where I can say what I like, with parents who were decent, intelligent people, where I'm reasonably well off, and where I've met a lot of interesting people and been to some interesting places. How much luckier can you get?
"Life is a matter of passing the time enjoyably. There may be other things in life, but I've been too busy passing my time enjoyably to think very deeply about them." 

Peter Cook.

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

Bob Dylan. 

"I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."

Elvis.

"Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent."

Noam Chomsky.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, 
A medley of extemporanea; 
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; 
And I am Marie of Romania."

Dorothy Parker.

"Fuck' em."

Mick Jones.

"Oh, what's the bloody point?"

Kenneth Williams. 

"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."*

Antonio Gramsci. 

* There's some debate as to whether Gramsci ever said this, and it's nicked off someone else whatever, so don't write in Marxist pedants.

 

Morrissey: The Queen Is Morally Dead

On Thursday Johnny Marr took to Twitter and tweeted; "David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don't. I forbid you to like it."
Good for him.
Like The Clash's Mick Jones it was always clear who was really the left-wing conscience of the band.
Morrissey has just written a long open letter pledging his agreement.
"I would like to, if I may, offer support to Johnny Marr who has spoken out to the media this week against David Cameron. To those who have expressed concern over Johnny's words in view of the fact that David Cameron has pledged immense allegiance to the music of the Smiths, I would like to try to explain why I think Johnny is right not to be flattered."
"It is true that music is a universal language – the ONLY universal language, and belongs to all, one way or another. However, with fitting grimness I must report that David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure."
That's right - as Cameron and his millionaire chums unleash a war against the working class and on the most vulnerable in society, hacking away at the welfare state with gay abandon, Morrissey gets miffed that Dave kills stags.
As riots return to London and set Europe on fire in righteous anger against the injustices of neo-liberalism, Morrissey says he's angry about hunting fucking stags.
Morrissey really is the most spectacular moral fuckwit.
This year we've had to endure his criticisms of China.
Not for turning a communist state into the world's biggest sweatshop, but because of the "horrific... Chinese cat and dog trade."
In August he wrote a letter to The Times about the British army.
On Afghanistan? Iraq?
No - it was drawing attention to "[the] horrific process utilised to supply real bearskins" for Guardsmens' hats.
What a colossal, monumental buffoon.
We should do the world a favour and eat him.