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Quotes by British Authors
"Decisions! And a general, a commander in chief who has not got the quality of decision, then he is no good."
"Not every programme dealing with issues of global significance has to be fronted by last week's winner of Have I Got News For You-but I suppose you might be wrong."
"The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors."
"You know, we're really destroying ourselves because we're really making the motivating force of anything we do selfish."
"I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you."
"The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity."
"I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this."
"In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism."
"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."
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
"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?..."
"I think I've still got a bit of a sado-masochistic streak in me, because if I'm not going to be restricted by corsets and covered in lace, then I still wind up wearing an ape-mask over my face. I do wonder how I get myself in these situations!"
"I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible."
"If you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself."
"I saw George Bush at a benefit concert actually waving at Stevie Wonder. Someone had to tell him 'he can't see you'."
"I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years."
"Friends are God's apology for relations."
"The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door."
"Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame."
"Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination."
"What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
"Nurture a desire to be free from the clock."
"The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
"How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!"
"I am not one and simple, but complex and many."
"Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can."
"Stress is a designer ailment that many of the so-called afflicted suffer from with pride."
"When mental energy is allowed to follow the line of least resistance and to fall into easy channels, it is called weakness."
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