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Quotes by English Authors

"Oh, I have to say Romana; she was much more fun to do but I did enjoy the Princess when she was turning bad."


"Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics."


"If way to the Better there be it exacts a full look at the Worst."

"Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?"

"The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable."

"The imaginary world has always been the most fun place for me to be."


"In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics."


"All the mistakes I've ever made in my life have been when I've been drunk. I haven't made hardly any mistakes sober, ever, ever."

"Gilks sighed. 'You're a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,' he said, 'but you make the samemistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid."

"A leader has to 'appear' consistent. That doesn't mean he has to be consistent."

"Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved."

"I want to look at life - at the commonplaces of existence - as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."


"The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come."

"They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now thanthe Pyramids."

"And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."

"Science is the systematic classification of experience."

"The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna - though not one or the other in particular. He was not definitely Jewish, nor definitely Greek nor Portugese nor Spanish, nor South American. What did seem highly unlikely was that he was an Englishman called Robinson."

"On the whole, I think women wear too much and are to fussy. You can't see the person for all the clutter."

"I'm still pretty sick about what I've lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I'm not the best sleeper."

"It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be."

"Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence."

"Says he, 'I am a handsome man, but I'm a gay deceiver'."

"Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising."

"I'm about to challenge for the Maryland Cup in the next couple of years, as an owner, a trainer, and a rider."

"People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design, there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own."

"That requires as much power as a small radio transmitter--and rather similar skills to operate. For it's the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler's career as a dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb."

"On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb."

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."
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