Murdoch Quotes

Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at. ~ Iris Murdoch

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way. ~ Iris Murdoch

She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again. ~ Iris Murdoch

As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind. ~ Iris Murdoch

Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of. ~ Iris Murdoch

Half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter. ~ Iris Murdoch

Here's the thing about me: I have a job to do and I do it. ~ James Murdoch

She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature. ~ Iris Murdoch

I felt that it's best just to be as transparent as possible. ~ Rupert Murdoch

The chief requirement of the good life', said Michael, 'is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has ... One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles. ~ Iris Murdoch

If you find me, take me home. ~ Emily Murdoch

I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I gonna say? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch could have more? ~ Tom Hanks

Whatever influence you have, it's only for a small amount of time. When Sir Frank (Packer) sold the Daily and Sunday Telegraph to Rupert Murdoch in 1972, I lost my position as women's editor. Suddenly the phones stopped ringing. All the people who said they were my friends, I didn't hear from them. I was only in my 20's, and that was a sobering lesson to learn: how fleeting everything is, and how easily it can be taken away from you. So you never take yourself too seriously, you never think you're too important. ~ Ita Buttrose

My biggest objection to Fox News, I say, is not the scaremongering, it's the way it's reshaped the Republican party. It will misrepresent social and economic issues, and promote the more extreme elements of the party, politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, in a way that is hugely detrimental to American politics. (For the record, Rupert Murdoch disagrees, and last year claimed that Fox News "absolutely saved" the Republican party.) "Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing," says Stewart. "I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don't get turd lung disease. ~ Anonymous

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. ~ Iris Murdoch

Religion is having an intense attitude and no time off... religion is about those awful deep things. ~ Iris Murdoch

I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them. ~ Iris Murdoch

Girls don't want men to be quiet and gentle, I'm told. If you're not panting with impatient lust they think you're not interested. ~ Iris Murdoch

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. ~ Iris Murdoch

I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams. ~ Iris Murdoch

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there. ~ Iris Murdoch

My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it. ~ Rupert Murdoch

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. ~ Iris Murdoch

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is. ~ Iris Murdoch

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. ~ Iris Murdoch

Twenty-five years old this day. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul,' for all His goodness. Man is immortal till his work is done. Use me in Thy service alone, blessed Saviour. ~ Alexander Murdoch Mackay

[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay. ~ John Desmond Bernal

Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary. ~ Rupert Murdoch

I don't tell him I couldn't have gorged if I'd tried, my stomach stuffed full of butterflies and grown-up worries. ~ Emily Murdoch

He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire. ~ Iris Murdoch

When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Every artist is an unhappy lover. ~ Iris Murdoch

This is when I forgave my parents. This big secret that was not ready to reveal itself was the reason my parents had sent us here. This colossal secret was the reason my parents had been absent from their children, had never talked too much, but clearly had plenty to give.
This is when I forgave my parents. On the remainder of our silent journey to the island, my soul was anything but mute. This is when I mourned the death of Murdoch and Elizabeth Benedict for the first time. ~ Tabitha Freeman

And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations. ~ Iris Murdoch

A lot of people are very happy to read their newspaper either on their iPad or - startlingly and faster and faster the figures go up - on their telephone, on their smart phone. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world. ~ Iris Murdoch

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine. ~ Iris Murdoch

You see, nobody cares about me except you. You don't know what that's like. You've always had people who cared. You've always had people. I've never had anybody. No wonder I feel frustrated. ~ Iris Murdoch

People begin to resent the rich only when they conclude that the system is rigged. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Why do you need to drive a Ferrari to get stuck in a traffic jam anyway? How do people afford these cars? ~ James Murdoch

For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. ~ Iris Murdoch

Happiness is free, Mama says, as sure as the blinkin' stars, the withered arms the trees throw down for our fires, the waterproofin' on our skin, and the tongues of wind curlin' the walnut leaves before slidin' down our ears. ~ Emily Murdoch

His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him. ~ Iris Murdoch

There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage. ~ Iris Murdoch

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other. ~ Iris Murdoch

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. ~ Iris Murdoch

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph. ~ Iris Murdoch

We're not a manufacturer, or an airline, but we do use energy. Printing and publishing newspapers, producing films, broadcasting television signals, operating 24-hour newsrooms. It all adds carbon to the atmosphere. ~ Rupert Murdoch

A jacketless Murdoch resumes his quiz, brushing off the assault as 'an overexcited autograph-hunter wanting to have his shaving foam signed. ~ Andy Zaltzman

Can we change the world? No, but hell, we can all try. ~ Rupert Murdoch

My belief is that if you grapple with the big changes until you really get them and if you develop an internal compass to steer your marketing and communications, you will be working in a discipline that is more exciting, more intellectually rich, more delightfully complex and ultimately more rewarding than it has ever been. ~ James Murdoch

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. ~ Iris Murdoch

Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time? ~ Thomas C. Foster

A book is a living, breathing thing. It spends the first chapters of its life curled up in the mind, symbiotic with its creator as it grows fat and round. And then the book is born. ~ Emily Murdoch

He looked so sad. I never saw him look sad before, he was always so superior, everywhere the king. You once called him a god from elsewhere who had lost his way. ~ Iris Murdoch

Thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you. ~ Iris Murdoch

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart ... ~ Iris Murdoch

I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself. ~ Iris Murdoch

So, in a curious lurid calm which could not last and yet, it seemed, could not end, the days went by. ~ Iris Murdoch

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. ~ Iris Murdoch

I focus on the endless treetops scrapin' the sunset into gooey colors, the birds trillin' and fussin' at our departure. I close my eyes for a second, breathin' in deep to make serious memories, the kind that sick forever. ~ Emily Murdoch

As for what other people think of me, I could worry about that every day, but choose not to. ~ Wendi Deng Murdoch

The unspoken words trembled in the air. ~ Iris Murdoch

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this. ~ Iris Murdoch

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen. ~ Iris Murdoch

It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day. ~ Iris Murdoch

I'm not a bad driver. And I never will be because I took lessons when I was quite a boy. I never had to pass a test because there wasn't such a thing when I first started driving a motor car. So I didn't have to pass one. ~ Richard Murdoch

To be a complete victim may be another source of power. ~ Iris Murdoch

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch

Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. ~ Iris Murdoch

We all have to expand our capabilities to encompass the changing world, its growing diversity and, indeed, its complexity. ~ Lachlan Murdoch

Her OBGYN, Dr Caroline Murdoch, popped in and asked if she could speak to Bree alone. Bree nodded and Tina left them. "I wanted to talk to you about why you fainted." Something in her voice made Bree's body go rigid with expectation. "I…thought maybe it was the shock of… everything," Bree whispered. Oh God. Oh God. She didn't know what she was bracing herself for. "I know you and Alessandro were trying to conceive again. I want to tell you that you were successful. You're going to have a baby, Bree," she said. Bree squeezed Gianni tighter and buried her face in his neck as the tears filled her eyes and streamed from her face. Oh God…Now? She was torn between joy and utter terror. They had done it, but how would Alessandro react when he found out, considering the condition he was in now. They had created another life. Another target for Arturo. ~ E. Jamie

We started Fox when everyone said it couldn't be done. ~ Rupert Murdoch

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that. ~ Ruth Rendell

We're just living on our emotions and eating each other. ~ Iris Murdoch

Be the best you can be for yourself! ~ Susan Marie Murdoch

We make attachments to what's familiar. We find the beauty, even in the lack. That's human. We make the best of what we're given. ~ Emily Murdoch

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch. ~ Iris Murdoch

I take my hand back, like a leaf letting go. It hurts too much to hang on. So why does it hurt so much to let go? ~ Emily Murdoch

Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words. ~ Iris Murdoch

Elections are when you have to make a choice. Perfection not often attainable! ~ Rupert Murdoch

Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself? ~ Iris Murdoch

I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody . . . And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody. ~ Iris Murdoch

I try to keep in touch with the details ... I also look at the product daily. That doesn't mean you interfere, but it's important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what's happening. ~ Rupert Murdoch

SHIT, OR GET OFF THE POT ~ Rupert Murdoch

He was extremely angry with Bellamy who had, when Clement needed him, refused to be with him. ~ Iris Murdoch

youth is a marvelous garment ~ Iris Murdoch

Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that. ~ Iris Murdoch

White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. ~ Iris Murdoch

Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art. A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths. ~ Iris Murdoch

Well, you won't abandon me, will you."

"Don't be silly, Ludens, you are buckled to my heart. ~ Iris Murdoch

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. ~ Iris Murdoch

The future belongs to brands that do more than pay lip-service to real dialogue and recognise that their customers want them to believe in something. ~ James Murdoch

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. ~ Iris Murdoch

It's much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it. ~ Iris Murdoch

There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so - crucial. ~ Iris Murdoch

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong? ~ Iris Murdoch

And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one's only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one's partners head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow! ~ Iris Murdoch