top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
Standard
Customized
More
"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful " but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities " but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation's history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Religion doesn't divide the society. The humans reading the wrong books to understand religion, do."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."
Parenting
"In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."
Reflection
"Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure."
Relationship
"Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange."
Reflection
"The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser."
Knowledge
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
Philosophy
"He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself."
Travel
"The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else."
Politics
"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art."
Education
"I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history-Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states."
Awareness
bottom of page