James Delingpole
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All Your Favourite Quotations Are A Lie (Pt 1)

All Your Favourite Quotations Are A Lie (Pt 1)

'Only the dead have seen the end of war.' Plato.

I first became aware of this marvellous quotation - so wise, pithy and dark - on one of my frequent trips to the Imperial War Museum. It’s one of a series, inscribed on the wall beside the ramp leading down to the World War I/trench section. Another of my favourites is attributed to Thucydides: ‘There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.’

The Plato quote is so good it has been used many times since, inter alia by Gen Douglas MacArthur in a speech at West Point in 1962, as an aphorism apparently oft-cited by grunts in the ‘Nam, and by Ridley Scott in Black Hawk Down. But the quote is fake. Or at least its attribution is.

In fact it derives not from the Classical Age but from the early 20th century. It was invented by the Madrid-born philosopher, poet and later Harvard professor George Santayana. He clearly had a gift for this sort of thing for he also coined another of those phrases which you’ve always thought was devised by someone much more famous: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Usually, this is attributed, in various forms, either to Edmund Burke or Winston Churchill. But the former didn’t say it and the latter - as I suspect he quite often did - just plagiarised it.

Fake quotes - whether genuine quotes that have been misattributed or fabrications which have been lent authenticity by putting them in the mouths of someone famous - have been a bugbear of mine for some time. I can probably date this moment to the time someone called me out on my favourite George Orwell quote: ‘In times of universal deceit truth-telling becomes a revolutionary act.’

Annoyingly, I had used it a good half dozen times in articles and in internet chats before I learned that Orwell had never actually said it. I felt cheated and also foolish: surely as an English literature graduate I ought to have known such a thing, in the way that film buffs know that Humphrey Bogart never said “Play it again, Sam.”

But these are easy mistakes to make now that fake quotes are everywhere. Probably, this has always been the case but they have definitely proliferated with the advent of the internet, the shortening of attention spans (which make us more susceptible to gnomic verities that appear to sum everything up and obviate the need for further thought) and the corresponding appetite for meme-friendly aphorisms.

Many of these fake quotes, I’ve noticed, are printed over photographs or images of the alleged author. It’s a cheap trick but an effective one. No one ever is going to be fooled by a joke quote like: ‘Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Abraham Lincoln, 1865.’ But shove it on top of a picture of the 16th president with those familiar features - the wart, the chin beard, the lined skin and sunken eyes - and just for a fraction of a second, the subsconscious is taken in.

Databases like BrainyQuote - ‘Originally published in 2001, BrainyQuote is one of the oldest and most established quotation sites on the web’ - really don’t help. A professional ‘quote investigator’ interviewed a few years ago by Vice - https://www.vice.com/en/article/jp34g8/all-your-favorite-famous-quotations-are-fake - explained the problem: ‘One reason that things get misquoted is that when people go online and they type in some phrase from a quotation, often near the top of Google or Bing will be one of these major databases, like BrainyQuote. And it turns out that they're filled with misinformation, but people don't know to distrust the citations provided by these websites. So they simply repeat them.’

If I’d written this piece a few years ago, I would likely have chalked up fake quotes as yet another of those irksome things that are simply a product of our accelerated, glib, attention-deficit culture. Now that I’m wiser to the Great Deception, though, I understand that it goes much deeper than that. Famous quotations - culturally embedded by quizzes, bestselling compendiums, newspaper articles, websites and memes celebrating those famous quotations - are yet another means of social control.

Take that fake Plato quotation from the beginning. What does it tell us - or purport to tell us - about the nature of the world? Why, it reinforces the notion that war is a natural state of affairs for mankind. The Thucydides one in the same Imperial War Museum corridor does much the same. “You think endless peace is something we’re ever going to achieve? Nah, mate. Listen to these Classical authors. They knew their stuff, as the Classical authors always did. And what they’re telling us - so it must be true - is that endless war is part of human nature.”

Now I’ve been unable to be ascertain whether the Thucydides quote is as fake as the Plato one. But I do know of another quote, quite similar in meaning, which was faked up recently and attributed to Thucydides in order - I suspect - to perform the same cultural brainwashing trick. It was exposed by Exeter University classics professor Neville Morley in an essay titled Thucydiocy 2017 (https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/12/20/thucydiocy-2017/). Morley saw it being used as a tagline for the 2017 movie Wonder Woman. “Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.”

Morley complains, rightly I think, that this is part of an ‘ongoing discourse of the naturalisation of war,’ which he suggests goes at least as far back as Napoleon, or possibly even to Hobbes. The message, as he puts it, is: “Don’t be fooled, people, and don’t stop funding the military - peace is a temporary lull at best.”

Are Morley and I making a mountain out of a molehill, here? Well I can certainly see why, if you were of a Normie persuasion, you would think that way: “C’mon guys, it’s just a movie. It’s what movies do. They make shit up!”

Sure they do. And that, as those of us who are down the rabbit hole know, is precisely the problem. Hollywood is and always has been primarily a means of social control, of promoting an agenda. Yes, it’s theoretically possible that in this instance the screenwriters responsible - Patty Jenkins and Allan Heinberg - just alighted on their quote from some Big Bumper Book of Military Quotations. [Or, as some have suggested, they ripped it off from Call of Duty 2. Which, if they did opens a whole other can of worms: the video game industry being used in much the same way Hollywood is]. But I think it would be naive to discount the alternative possibility that this is another case of cynical and deliberate messaging. It would certainly fit in with Hollywood’s M.O., especially with regard to movie blockbusters, which is where generally it’s brainwashing is most blatant.

And it’s significant, I think, that the fake Thucydides quote isn’t used merely as a tagline. They’ve actually gone to the trouble of embedding it in the script. Here is the relevant dialogue:

General Ludendorff: “Enjoying the party?”
Wonder Woman: “I confess I’m not sure what we’re celebrating tonight.”
General Ludendorf: “A German victory, of course.”
Wonder Woman: “Victory? When I hear peace is so close?”
General Ludendorff: “Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.”
Wonder Woman: “Thucydides”
General Ludendorff: “You know your Ancient Greeks. They understood that War is a God. A God that requires human sacrifice.”

I’m reminded here, somewhat, of the introductory talk that Mark Crispin Miller used to give his students when he was still allowed by New York University to conduct his course on Propaganda. I paraphrase - you really should listen to this podcast interview for the full account https://usawatchdog.com/cv19-a-propaganda-masterpiece-mark-crispin-miller/ - but essentially Miller warned them: ‘Be prepared to be very upset. You may be shocked to discover how many of the ideas you imagined to be your own are in fact the result of propaganda.’

Well it would definitely have come as a shock to the younger me, I know that. When you’ve had what you consider to be a superb education, steeped in Classical literature, you tend to kid yourself that you are just too damn clever, too well-read, to fall for the kind of cheap confidence tricks that fool the unwashed masses.

Which, when you think about it, is what makes the faking of those Classical quotes so damned cunning. They deviously exploit one of one of the cultural assumptions most deeply embedded in both the ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ classes alike: this idea that if one of the Ancient Greeks or Romans said it then it must be true because there’s almost nothing about the world that they didn’t know. Another thing they exploit is that the ‘educated’ are rarely as clever as we pretend to be. For example, presented with a vaguely plausible quote with a fancy Classical name attached, passing few of us are going to go: “Hang on a second. Did he really say that? Let me check…” Instead, we’ll go “Ah. The great Thucydides. He was the Greek general who wrote Anabasis. The sea! The sea!” - and congratulate ourselves on just what marvellously well-informed people we are.

But we’re not. Really we’re not. And that is how the Enemy wins.

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James and Dick’s CHRISTMAS Special 2025

Featuring Dick. And James. And Unregistered Chicken. And possibly some other special guests.

Not included in ticket price but available so you don’t starve/die of thirst: nice pizzas out of wood-fired ovens; street food.

VIP Tickets - £120 including bell-ringing lesson, walk with James, front row seats, church tour

Location is: My neck of the woods. Northants. Nearest stations, Banbury/Long Buckby. Junction 11 of M40.

Friday, 28th November 2025. Starts at 5pm

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/?section=events#events

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I Wish I Weren't a Christian

No, not really, obviously. I’m just venting my frustration on how incredibly hard it is sometimes.

For example, if you read your scripture regularly you will notice that time and again Jesus enjoins us to forgive our enemies. This is emphasised in Matthew where He tells us that there’s only one prayer we really need and that’s the Lord’s Prayer.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus leaves us in no doubt that for followers of the way forgiveness is not an optional extra.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.

There’s an implicit contract here. If you want to be worthy of God’s forgiveness then you must do likewise.

I say the Lord’s Prayer every day, from the moment I wake till the moment I’m about to go to sleep - and lots of times in between.

The first parts are easy. What’s not to like about hallowing the Lord’s name and celebrating his eternal kingdom and being assured of all that daily bread He provides?

But the forgiving trespasses part can be a bit of a stumbling block because it seems so onerous - and unfair.

Surely if someone wrongs you, especially when unprovoked, the proper and proportionate response ought to be to smite them sevenfold? At the very least.

How can it not be right to retaliate when you’ve got right on your side?

How can it especially not be right when you happen to have been blessed by God with a mind that can produce the kind of next-level invective, weapons-grade cattiness and implacable, Daisy-cutter bomb logic that utterly obliterates anyone foolish enough to cross you?

Not only would the revenge be just - but fun too!

I’ve tried these arguments, over the years, on my morning walk with the dog, which is one of the occasions where I go through the Psalms and commune with God. But I can never quite get my point past the goalkeeper.

I’ll say stuff like: “C’mon, God. Give me a break. I’m not St Francis of Assisi. Can’t you just give me a bit of leeway, just this once, to satisfy my baser urges? I’ll be good afterwards, promise.”

Or: “But taking out wrong ‘uns in an amusing way is my brand. It’s how I make my living. You surely don’t want me to starve, do you?”

Resisting the temptation to deploy my powers is tough. It’s like being blessed with a huge penis only to discover “No sorry. The Lord has decided that your path is to become a monk. So I’m afraid that magnificent appendage is for peeing, only.

Why, God? Why?

The problem is that the Bible doesn’t really offer many get-out clauses. It’s not just the Lord’s Prayer that enjoins forgiveness. There’s that possibly even more annoying bit where Jesus tells us - say what? Really?? - that we should ‘Turn the other cheek.’

And then there are all the Psalms - which Jesus quoted more than almost any other book, so they must be on point - urging us to be patient and to let God take care of all the smiting.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/Archive/show.php?slug=2025-08-13-psalm-37-pooyan-mehrshahi

For example, there’s Psalm 37:

Leave off from wrath; and let go displeasure. Fret not thyself else thou shalt be moved to do evil.

Time and again you find the psalmist - usually David - asking, in so many words, “How much longer am I going to put up with this injustice? It’s so unfair!”

And God’s reply is always: “Fret not. I’ve got this!”

In Psalm 73, another of my favourites, the psalmist gets so frustrated he wonders why there’s any point being good when behaving badly seems so much more profitable.

Yea, and I had almost said even as they. [ie the Ungodly] But lo, then I should have condemned the generation of thy children.

But then he goes into the sanctuary of God and learns the fate of the ungodly.

Namely how thou dost set them in the slippery places and castest them down and destroyest them.

O how suddenly do they consume, perish and come to a fearful end.

Yea, even like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/Archive/show.php?slug=2025-12-09-james-is-joined-by-preacher-stephen-white-to-unpack-the-beauty-and-depth-of-psalm-73

The language and imagery of the Psalms is so magnificent that I could spend all day reciting them. But if you’re reciting them merely for the great poetry then you’re surely guilty of the kind of vainglorious burbling Jesus warned us against in Matthew 6. You need to imbibe the meaning also - and accept that if Jesus took this stuff seriously then you probably should too.

Not, by the way, that I am remotely wasting any time fantasising about my enemies consuming, perishing and coming to a fearful end. On the contrary, I feel sorry for them because choosing the wrong path, away from God, is punishment in itself.

I prefer to take my example from one of the extraordinary monks featured in Archimandrite Tikhon’s Everyday Saints. [Unfortunately I can’t look up his name because I gave my copy to ortho bro Dick].

This monk was sent to the Gulag by the Soviets - but not before being cruelly tortured by a sadistic NKVD man who broke all his fingers. Many years later, the monk was reunited with his torturer, now so thoroughly ashamed he became an ardent Christian.

Please don’t think for a moment that I am comparing my feeble attempts at forbearance to that of this saintly monk. I’m sure I will fail to meet the exacting standards of saintliness on many, many occasions in the future, which will be my loss and your gain. After all, I’m sure my articles are SO much more fun when I’m putting the boot in rather than when I’m turning that other cheek.

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James and Dick's Christmas Special - Don't Miss Out!

I was about to start writing Part Two of my piece Most Journalists Don’t Realise They Are Working For Satan, when a thought occurred: “Hang on, James. Shouldn’t you be plugging your show?”

It’s this Saturday, on the off chance you are interested. I quite understand if you’re not: you’re probably busy, this miserable weather doesn’t make you feel like venturing away from home, and anyway, it’ll just be me and Dick on a stage talking rubbish as usual.

You’re right. Dick and I sitting on a stage talking rubbish is indeed what you’re going to get this Saturday evening. As usual we won’t be at all prepared. Well, Dick might but I won’t because I’m lazyI like to keep it real.

The only thing I will have to do in advance is wrap Dick’s present which I got him from Russia. He’s going to really love it because it is about as Dick a present as you could possibly imagine and I want to watch his little eyes light up as he tears off the wrapping.

But to be fair, I do have roughly in my mind some of the few things I want to talk about. One of them is ‘Who Really Runs The World?’, which obviously for us batshit-crazy tinfoil hat loons is one of those ongoing conversations which keeps changing the more we learn. Another is ‘Was Churchill more evil than Hitler?’ We’ve talked about this stuff before but my take on these issues in 2025 is going to be subtly different from the ones you heard in 2024 or 2023, let alone in say 2019 when I was about 90 per cent Normie. (I’m allowing myself 10 per cent off because I did at least know back then that climate change was bollocks).

Will we play the “Yes/No” game? I doubt it because the answer always “No” these days. But you never know. Perhaps Dick might surprise me. Or perhaps he might introduce a wild card game he has invented for the occasion.

There will be no Christmas decorations. Sorry but it’s too early.

Nor, likely, will I wear my Christmas jumper. Too hot.

But we will do the Lords Prayer at the beginning - inter alia, to ward off any demons and because it makes everyone feel amazingly uplifted - and Jerusalem at the end.

Also, you get to see Unregistered Chickens, who just get better and better. Or so I’m told by one of the band members. Dick and Andy the lead singer keep making bitchy remarks about the fact that even when they’re playing at my events I never come to see them. Or only for a few minutes. I try to explain, honestly, that this isn’t because I’m too grand or because I think they’re crap but because before you do a show the very last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the audience because it drains all the energy you need for the show.

Still I think the thing you’ll enjoy most about the event is hanging out with like minded folk. You’ll be able to put faces to the names of some of the fellow Awake people you know from online. And you’ll be able to talk about all the things - Michelle Obama’s big swinging lunchpack; hybrid creatures bioengineered in the same Antartica DUMB where they breed the children for adrenochrome, were the Thunderbirds puppets actually devised as a result of remote viewing technology which enabled Gerry Anderson to see into the future from the 1960s and watch Konstantin Kisin and the other one presenting Triggerpod? etc - that you will probably avoid bringing up with family round the Christmas dinner table.

It’ll be fun. You’ll really, really enjoy it.

It will be no skin off my nose if you don’t. But I just think if you don’t come you’ll be missing out.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/Events/james-and-dick-s-christmas-special-2025

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All They Want Is Your Soul

One of my unlikely podcast guests this week is Nick Griffin.

I say ‘unlikely’ because I’m always slightly wary of people who have been involved in mainstream politics - even if, like Griffin, it was only at the margins.

https://locals.com/jamesdelingpole/feed?post=7481845

Griffin - or Nick, as I suppose I should call him, now he’s my new mate - used to be the leader of the notorious British National Party (BNP). Like the party from which it splintered, the National Front, the BNP was and is one of those outfits which the mainstream media likes to brand as ‘fascist’ and ‘far right’ and ‘basically a bunch of Nazis.’

This would be why, in my days as an MSM journalist, Nick never crossed my radar. He wasn’t the sort of character of whom you could say to your editor “How about we hear what that Nick Griffin has to say for himself?” It would be tantamount to career suicide because, imagine, what if you quite liked him or he said something people agreed with? Far better not to take the risk - and to ignore him - as all self-respecting media folk did.

Anyway, now that very belatedly I’ve had chat with him I’ve discovered that, yes, I do quite like him. And also that he says lots of things I agree with. Many of the people who’ve listened to the podcast share my pleasant surprise. Here’s a typical comment:

“I was brought up believing the BBC hype - NickG is equivalent to Satan […] Please do bring Nick back on. Even some of my ‘awake-ish’ friends still recoil in horror at the mention of his name. This exposure can right this wrong.”

My main reservation about inviting Nick onto the Delingpod wasn’t that he’d be too controversial but that he might be a bit too conventional in his outlook, a bit Normie.

But on this, too, I was pleasantly surprised. As an example of how interesting his conversation is - and perhaps as an incentive to encourage those of you who aren’t already paid subscribers to sign up for an early listen before the podcast goes out free - I want to share with you one of his best anecdotes.

It was prompted when I asked him about whether any attempts had ever been made by shadowy forces to buy him off.

Yes, Nick said. Attempts had been made on a couple of occasions, one of them when he was a member of the National Front.

Representatives of an ultra-orthodox Jew in New York called Rabbi Schiller offered the National Front a large sum of money, on one somewhat surprising condition, which I shall reveal in a moment.

In Italy, meanwhile, on another occasion, some of Nick’s ‘far-right’ fellow travellers were made a similarly generous offer by a wealthy Jewish outfit. Again, the money was dependent on the fulfilment of one surprising term.

Then, Griffin went on, there was the example of his friend in Northern Ireland, a social marketing genius who was offered a blank cheque by Jewish interests, but only on one condition.

Here’s the interesting part. Perhaps you thought - as I certainly did - that in all three instances the Jewish donors would have made the same request: talking more about the Holocaust, maybe; toning down the anti-Semitism; avoiding criticism of Israel; something like that.

But no. The things that were requested were all very different - and also quite unexpected.

In the case of the National Front, the request was that they should stop griping about the perils and iniquities of the banking system.

With the Italians, the request was that they cease to sing the praises of Corneliu Codreanu, a Romanian fascist leader - founder of the Iron Guard - assassinated in the 1930s.

And in the case of the Northern Irish marketing guru, it was that he should stop talking about the evils of abortion.

The three very different provisos only had one thing in common: each was very dear to the heart of the people to whom the money offer had been made. To the National Front, banking was the key plank of their economic argument. To the Italians, Codreanu was a beloved romantic hero and role model. To the Northern Irishman, crusading against abortion was a moral imperative.

“They offer you everything you need,” explained Griffin. “But in every case they are only prepared to give it to you on condition that you sacrifice the thing closest to your heart.”

Perhaps experts in the Kabbala, or the Babylonian Mystery Religions, or the occult generally can explain to me what is going on here. But clearly these offers have great ritual significance - and also go some way towards explaining the nature of a world whose temporary god, according to the scriptures, is Satan.

Yes, you will be granted whatever you want. But not until you’ve first sold your soul.

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