Anthony Daniels quotes:

I quite like post-apocalyptic films, things like 'Mad Max' for instance, because they are so full on and there is something quite cleansing about the post-apocalyptic because you can see where we all think we're heading.

We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.

Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.

It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.

Everybody uses mime and gesture in real life, though we don't realize it. It's very useful as a performance technique, though it can be boring to watch on its own.

Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it.

It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.

I have a greater appreciation for kitchen appliances, having played one.

The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.

Over the years, I've loved being on stage with an orchestra, waving my hands around.

Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking.

You know, a lot of people are loath to go to an orchestral concert because they are intimidated by the thought.

The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence

If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space.

If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is "pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television," then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths young men principally, of course to our way of life.

We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.

Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.

In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.

Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.

It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow.

Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.

If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.

Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.

When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels.

[There] is no class so dangerous as the idle educated.

Cruelty is like hope: it springs eternal.

The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.

Modernity is the most transient of qualities.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy.

Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.

All I ever wanted to do was act.

On a film set everyone is very cool. Well, blase really.

I don't do that many appearances at conventions. I like to keep them special for me. And for the fans, I hope.

Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.

The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.

Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one's own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.

For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.

The real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: "How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?

In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.

In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.

For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.

Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.

We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.