top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by British Authors
"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?Winston thought. "By making him suffer, he said."Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?..."
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity."
"A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer."
"And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it."
"It is a curious thing, but I have been right in everything I have done and said in my life."
"A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy."
"Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich."
"A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection."
"God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything."
"Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther."
"The very idea of true patriotism is lost, and the term has been prostituted to the very worst of purposes. A patriot, sir! Why, patriots spring up like mushrooms!"
"Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored."
"I work with the options I have in front of me and my reasons for choosing a job can vary enormously depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I take a job because it's a group of people I'm dying to work with, and sometimes it can be a desire to shake things up a bit and not to take myself too seriously."
"In high altitude astronomical facilities we routinely discharged large amounts of nitrogen gas into closed spaces. We were never informed by the astronomy management team about the abnormally low oxygen environments that the use of liquid nitrogen creates, how long term exposure to it manifests itself in human health and the resulting abnormal mental behaviors."
"I put a bullet into the back of the crocodile's neck just behind the head, thus killing it. If a crocodile is hit in any other part of its anatomy it disappears into the water and is irrecoverable."
"Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out."
"For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race."
"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?"
"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
"If you do what everyone else does, you will get what everyone else gets."
"Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat."
"Nurture a desire to be free from the clock."
"There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits."
"I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head."
"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak."
"Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions."
"The curtains would open and it would be just her standing in some ludicrous pose, like Aphrodite."
"Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love."
"Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different."
"In 1947 I married Rowena Palmer, and we have two daughters, Alison and Claire, and a son, John."
"The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
"Bader's philosophy was my philosophy. His whole attitude to life was mine."
"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement."
bottom of page