Top 250 Westminster Abbey Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Cats are ideal for politicians. I had two when I arrived at Westminster, Sooty and Sweep, who had come with a flat I had bought six years earlier in Fulham from someone who was about to go abroad. There was a better offer ahead of me but she took mine because I would take the cats.

Working on 'Downton Abbey' is amazing, but there's an ensemble cast of between 18 and 21 actors. With 'Love Life,' there are two couples and a few other key characters. As a smaller unit, you've got to take more responsibility - at the same time, you can have more ownership of the direction it's going in.

Abbey Road was actually one of the first studios I ever got the chance to go to. A friend of mine won a competition and got the chance to spend a day recording there - that's when I was around 15 - and I was the only one who could engineer out of all of us.

You have no idea what's going to happen [in Downton Abbey] until you get the script. We roughly knew a couple of the key points that were going to happen, but when I got the last episode, I turned to the last page to check that I was still alive.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

Thankfully, due to the United Kingdom and the commitment of the Westminster government we are able to ensure that money brought in, whether it be from the City of London or from North Sea oil, can be pooled and directed to wherever it is needed most. That is what being in the United Kingdom is all about.

If I hadn't got into comedy, I wouldn't have met Abbey, my wife, and I wouldn't have my two girls, and the whole thing unravels. That's the thing about being basically - whisper it quietly - happy, is that you don't really want to change anything, because once you start changing stuff, then what you've got all disappears.

I remember wearing overcoats, hiding in the bushes outside of Abbey Road Studios, waiting for the traffic to clear. As it did, we would drop our overcoats and run out on to the cross walk and strike our poses.

For the last episode [of Downton Abbey], you'll need some handkerchiefs. I needed handkerchiefs reading it. It wasn't because it necessarily moved me while reading it, but it was the experience of reading it when I realized it was the last time I was ever going to be reading one of those scripts. That was quite terminal.

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

I did a great deal of research to write 'The Irish Duke.' Since all the people in this Lords of the Realm series are real historical characters, everything had to be authentic. I researched Woburn Abbey, where my heroine lived, and everything about Barons Court in Ireland, which was the ancestral home of Abercorn.

It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy.

At 10 A.M. on the Friday after the election in 2010, David Cameron's team met in his room at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza Hotel. Cameron was clear that, unable to form a majority government, they had to begin talks with the Lib Dems about forming a coalition. But in a rare example of strategic discord, George Osborne disagreed.

For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

I do not own a car, and my main form of travel to Westminster and in my constituency is by bicycle. I also take my bike on trains to meetings in other parts of the country, which enables me to see other cities and the other parts of the country.

We've got a younger fan base - and their parents. One day when we were at Abbey Road, an entire family was outside waiting for us - like, a nine-year-old, a 16-year-old, and their mother. They can agree on liking us for whatever reason. It's kind of strange.

I love the Beatles, but I don't listen to them at all regularly. Most of my friends are bigger Beatles fans than I am. I respect them, and I love them - 'Abbey Road' is probably one of my favorite albums, but I don't think I've ever listened to the 'White Album' the whole way through.

Before I went on stage at Kyle Hutton's Real Life Real Music Festival, I heard one of his songwriting students, Abbey Hirvela, sing; she was in the poet's saddle and riding that horse like she owned it. She was good! I probably ruined her by showing her how to make an E chord without the 3rd though.

I love Downton Abbey. It's just great. My mother giving birth to me was just like Lady Sybil giving birth, except that there wasn't such a tragic ending.

I would love to be in 'Downton Abbey.' That's the thing I thing many people would have a good laugh with me saying anything like that. I feel like that's the next phase of my career. To reprove to everyone that I can do things besides the crazy characters.

English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.

I myself downloaded and watched 'The Wire,' 'Breaking Bad,' 'Downton Abbey,' 'Mad Men' and 'The Walking Dead' on my iPad while walking on a treadmill. I never turned a TV on once. I never inserted a DVD.

And so in my warnings, I was pointing to a number of incidents around the communion that could undermine our growing sense of communion - of becoming a global communion. So that's why I pointed to New Westminster in Canada, to incidents in the United States, and Sydney itself.

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.

In Westminster, I make sure I maximise my ability to represent my constituents. I can do that in a variety of ways: by asking written questions or questions in the House of Commons, through the scrutiny of bills and by sitting on the environmental audit select committee every week, as well as other committees.

I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.

Working within newspapers, so many of them are so used to the status quo, they're so invested in lobby journalism, and assuming that all politics happens in Westminster... but doing social affairs, I spend a lot of time out of London speaking to people who have been hit by cuts, or disabled, or who have been made unemployed.

I don't tend to watch TV. I'm like a Netflix junkie. I watch a lot of documentaries and movies on Netflix. I like 'Downton Abbey.'

I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.

I know that everyone wants to know about 'Downton Abbey,' but the truth is that it was only a few days out of my life. Still, you play a distinctive part on a hit series, and everyone suddenly knows who you are. Isn't it crazy how this business works?

Sunday night is curry night. I always order a spinach paneer and a chicken tikka. There's usually something good on TV like 'Mr Selfridge' or 'Downton Abbey,' so I'll watch them before I have to think about blowdrying my hair and all the other boring stuff us girls have to do!

The young man who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it.

You're a mad scientist,' said Maggie, in what may well have been intended as a reassuring tone. 'We don't expect you to be nice. We just go to bed every night hoping you won't mutate us before we wake up.' Dr. Abbey blinked at her. 'That's...almost sweet. In a disturbing sort of a way.

For years, I longed to hear Armstrong describe what it was like to contemplate Earth from 238,900 miles away. Former Space Center director George Abbey once told me that many NASA astronauts felt that looking at Earth was akin to a religious experience.

Sometimes I like to watch TV, though I never get to watch any of the shows in real time. I'm a fan of 'Downton Abbey,' 'Boardwalk Empire,' and 'Boss.' There's a British series called 'Luther,' but in England, they think a series means four episodes. And I like 'Mad Men.' Otherwise, it's always good to unwind with a book.

I've built an 8-track studio in my house that's virtually identical to what they used at Abbey Road, and I also own the 16-track set-up that Led Zeppelin used to record 'Houses of the Holy.' I'm interested in producing, but I'm mostly recording my own stuff.

'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.

We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God's commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. . . . This leads to frightful results. . . . The British State considers it the duty of an Englishman to kill people who are not English whenever a collection of elderly gentlemen in Westminster tells him to do so. . . . Church and State are placable enemies of both intelligence and virtue.

We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine.

I find that the old Roman baths of this quarter, were found covered by an old burying ground, belonging to the Abbey; through which, in all probability, the water drains in its passage; so that as we drink the decoction of the living bodies at the Pump-room, we swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath - I vow to God, the very idea turns my stomach!

I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.

You have a job but you don't always have job security, you have your own home but you worry about mortgage rates going up, you can just about manage but you worry about the cost of living and the quality of the local school because there is no other choice for you.rankly, not everybody in Westminster understands what it's like to live like this and some need to be told that it isn't a game.

My goal is to get power out of Westminster and into the hands of the people it affects. That means sharing power with those who have none and using national and local government to help people to help themselves and one another.

When Dad heard 'The One and Only,' he said: 'That's a smash.' Dad played the demo through the speakers at Abbey Road, where we were recording. I was a huge Nik Kershaw fan and was desperate to meet him, but everyone else hated the song.

From Lady Carlisle's trip to Moscow in 1663 to Veronica Atkinson's tour of duty during the 1989 Romanian revolution, it is clear that very little has changed. Four hundred years of innovation, liberation, and improvement clearly bypassed the Foreign Office while making its rounds through Westminster.

I hate the word educational! I mean, 'Downton Abbey' is educational in that you come away from it knowing so much more about that period than when the show started, but you don't come away thinking it was educational.

After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession... and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love.

I grew up in New Jersey in the '80s. That means one thing: Big hair. ... I had big hair, my boyfriends had big hair, we all had big hair. Our prom looked like the poodle division of the Westminster dog show.

'Downton Abbey' didn't have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn't just as an entertainment.

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

I go to see my kids in school plays, ... I watched Lorna in a concert at the Westminster College of Music the other day and it was amazing. I felt very proud and surprised. I don't know why I was surprised, because I've known her for 17 years, but I've never seen her do anything like that in front of an audience. It's brave, it's uplifting.

If animals had a Pope," Major Thompson said to me, "their Vatican would be in London. And if by some dire submarine cataclysm that noble vessel, Great Britain, were to be shipwrecked and start to founder, believe me, there would surely be somebody in Westminster to cry from the top of the Tower: "Dogs first!

The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

The Reformed tradition at the beginning of the twenty-first century is different as a consequence of this - and different in nontrivial ways. Some may scoff at this, saying that such "developments" don't represent Reformed thought. But by what standard? Perhaps by the Westminster Confession. But this is only one Reformed confession, and it was only ever a subordinate standard.

The first time I went to Abbey Road and put those headphones on, I discovered I had two voices. I no longer had to shout in the studio, but I can't knock the Cavern or the other clubs because they gave me my strong voice.

We will never vote for the renewal of Trident; that's a decision which will fall to be made in the next Westminster parliament. We will never vote for that.

[Maggie Smith] brings new meaning to the phrase "doesn't suffer fools." She has just the most amazing, dry timing of anyone ever, I think. I think everyone's always known about it, but with her resurgence on Downton Abbey, a whole new generation has been introduced to it, which is just great.

For years we've had all the big-hitting HBO box-set dramas, all these brilliant, witty, clever shows, and in return the only thing we've had to offer is big period dramas like 'Downton Abbey'.

The truth is I am not a very hands-on political wife; I don't get involved in day-to-day Downing Street life. They don't need me interfering, but in the evening, we will talk about each other's day. I try to stay out of the Westminster village. There are times when I will be surprised and curious about what's been announced.