Noel Annan, Baron Annan Quotes

The diminished respect for authority brought about by the spread of egalitarianism, the multiplicity of choice and styles of life which greater affluence has made possible, the belief in the value of modernity, and the expansion of curiosity and interest, these seem to me to be the main forces which have disintegrated the old cultural pattern.

Mr Grade is a brilliant television mogul, but on this occasion he has used the language of an insolent jackanapes. He cannot possibly "respect and support" ITC's authority. If he did he would at once apologise and promise not to commission a further series [of The Word]. The ITC was set up by Parliament to safeguard the public against gross breaches of taste, and he is lucky to escape from the infliction of a swingeing fine.
Does Mr Grade expect us to believe the media-speak twaddle about "independent research"? Or does he think we are all so ignorant as to believe that all moral judgments are "subjective" and by implication worthless?
Clearly his mind needs stretching by a few elementary textbooks on ethics which will enable him to realise that Channel 4 should not celebrate moronic presenters of programmes for sniggering schoolchildren.

The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which had held good before the war must now, by definition, be wrong—if indeed they were not responsible for causing the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the pre-suppositions of that comfortable pre-war England were manifestly false. Searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, the ’twenties came to see it through the eyes either of Mrs. Webb or of Mrs. Woolf.

It was right 25 years ago to expand higher education. It was wrong to think it could all be Rolls-Royce education. It was wrong to insist on parity of esteem between university and university and between universities and polytechnics.

Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society.

It is true that in the most hallowed and ancient of our institutions of higher education, still whispering the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, it can be asserted that the best that has been thought and said must inevitably and inescapably be handcuffed to the study of the Anglo-Saxon. Still there has been a change.

Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. For the most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories.

Professor Scruton should — from time to time — try to take the advice Keats gave to his brother. "The only way of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party."

Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary.

Nostalgia, however, is the mother of loyalty.

The faith of the ’twenties lay not in political machinery but in education and in psycho-analysis: not in votes for women, but in freedom for women. This was the romanticism of a generation affecting to despise the romantic! What is more romantic than to see the eventual triumph of reason, the conquest by the social sciences of misery and evil, the revolution in morals as the panacea to cure the world?