Quotes from A.A. Gill

At the end of the eighteenth century, science was one of the few areas in old Europe where illegitimacy could not overshadow accomplishment.

The purpose of an army must surely be to put itself out of business.

There was a powerful and effulgent smell of industrial disinfectant. It's a smell that never reassures you about cleanliness; rather, it makes you doubly squeamish of lurking vileness. Soap smells clean, disinfectant smells dirty. Funny that.

The only type of humor that is excused lower classness is satire, and satire is the chamber music of comedy - a joke that many people profess to enjoy, but few actually get.

Niagara Falls Power Company chose to go with AC current to feed the industry of Buffalo, which became briefly known as the electric city of the future.

Old guns rarely die, they just hang on walls.

The New World failures may have been greater, the disasters more excessive, the consequences more brutal, but there's a bounce in every fall, a spit on the palm's new start for every setback.

In Yorkshire there is only the impetus of decline; the farms, the woolen mills, the dairy rounds wither, unravel and turn sour. The family wears out, stumbles politely, tripping over drink and ennui and a genteel surrender to the momentum of underachievement.

Derringer, who invented the gun that killed Lincoln, made as much money in lawsuits as he did selling guns.

History is always personal—never more so than for those who find theirs is written by the enemy. It strips the defeated and the displaced of their dignity. It is a posthumous insult.

nothing transformed the politics, the economy and the table of Europe like the potato. The tuber from Peru.

The Ninth Amendment, which is not often mentioned, was perfectly foresighted. It says the numeration of the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. So no future law could be made that would deny or trespass on rights already given to Americans.

Catholicism was trying to avoid hell, but Protestantism was trying to achieve heaven.

New York is like a divorcée looking for a richer second country.

It is a miserable irony that the potato came from America and sent these people back to America as desperate economic refugees.

give a New York friend a panic attack, turn up unannounced on a Wednesday and suggest going for a drink. It is easier to organize five guys to raise a flag on Iwo Jima than to get mates out for movie and dinner. Surprise parties are such fun, but require e-mail "save the date" warnings. And everyone needs to know how to dress.

a particularly American ability to come up with consistently dreadful names for new things. Just as there is an inspiring national talent to invent stuff and to think forward, so there is an equal and opposite imaginative black hole when it comes to naming the stuff: the conflation and truncation of words, adding extraneous vowels and hyphens to the portmanteau.

Thomas Edison was a graduate of Cooper Union. Like Otis, he is principally famous for things he didn't do. He didn't invent electricity, or the lightbulb, the phonograph or the movies. These misappropriations didn't bother him much: he didn't correct folk. What he was good at, what he really knew, was patents.

Where politer European cities might have had street mimes, New York has always had the Brechtian street theater of pavement psychodrama: the muttering, bellowing, gesticulating and teetering looney tunes for whom the drugs are no longer working, who look like characters from Exodus, prophets of urban collapse and carnal comeuppance.

St. Bride's is the journalist's church on Fleet Street. There have been seven churches on this spot. It's named for the Irish saint Brigit of Kildare, the virginal head of the old, equal-opportunity Celtic Church. She has, over the years, become the patron of babies, blacksmiths, chickens, bastards, children of abusive fathers, and printing presses. It must have been the combination of bastards and ink that brought her to hacks.

proportionately, being a journalist in a war is more dangerous than being in the Special Forces, and more important.

There is only a sparse handful of exceedingly rich countries that could begin to afford to maintain the bulimically wasteful expense of an American democracy.

Lawyers are the new three-button, white-collar, cuff-shooting cowboys. They fulfill all the cowboy criteria. Workingmen with arcane skills. They can be both good and bad, sheriffs and gunslingers.

One of the great lessons of 200 years of American boom is that technology is never neutral. Things come with demands, they have needs and they exploit the environments they find themselves in. America invented technopomorphism, the imbuing of functional tools with sapient attributes. There is no such thing as an inanimate object, they are just resting.