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Exlpore more Society quotes

"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."

"The action or inaction of any government does not negate the Personal Responsibility of the citizens."

"The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!"

"The only soap of a dirty society is the clean men, only the clean can wash the grimy!"

"What the new government of Nigeria and other African governments must do, is to start a massive reorientation campaign in the culture of the dignity of labour."

"To Have Thousands Transformed In The Society Is To Lack Unity."
Explore more quotes by John McGahern

"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."

"When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody."

"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."

"We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places."

"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."

"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."

"Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."

"For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970."

"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."
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