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"Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear."
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"Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible."
"Half of the world population is dying from poverty and hunger and still you think you are not rich enough."
"The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away."
"A lot of attention has been given over to the Catholic Churches sexual abuse of children in their care, but this attention seems to have been hijacked by the media and has overshadowed the many thousands of victims that endured physical abuse."
"As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."
"More humane societies are usually smaller, like the Scandinavian countries and Holland, where it is much easier to reach consensus and cooperation."
"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."
"I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!"
"Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time."
"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
"It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance."
"It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity."
"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."
"Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?"
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