Academics From England

"It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is confirmed by the spread of Fascism, which is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought. There is nothing more obvious about the post-war situation than that it is novel, springs from causes which have not yet been analysed, and cannot be relieved until this analysis is complete and has been made the basis of a new social formula. Yet persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them."

"There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or frustrate cruelty, and for that purpose we must hear the evidence of all persons affected by their operation and of all persons qualified by experience or learning or speculative gifts to form an interesting opinion on what those operations might be. It is therefore necessary that all classes of men should be given the fullest opportunity to express themselves without constraint, not only out of admiration for an abstraction , but as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist, of whatsoever kind, should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness, and what light may be, and darkness."

"The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature."

"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse."

"Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it."

"Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."

"After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking."

"I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you."

"The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."

"But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin."

"To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end."

"She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized."

"That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors."

"These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved the emptiness of one of man's most reasonable expectations. No more sensible form of government could be imagined than aristocracy. If certain able stocks in the community were able to amass enough wealth to give their descendants beautiful houses to grow up in, the widest opportunities of education, complete economic security, so that they need never be influenced by mercenary considerations, and easy access to any public form of work they chose to undertake — why, then, the community had a race of perfect governors ready made. Only, as the Lauristons showed, the process worked out wholly different in practice. There came to these selected stocks a deadly, ungrateful complacence, which made them count these opportunities as their achievements, and belittle everybody else's achievements unless they were similarly confused with opportunities; and which did worse than this, by abolishing all standards from their minds except what they themselves were and did."

"One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste."

"She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form."

"I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learnt in the rest of the world that you can't now go around and put out your hand and, across seas, exercise power; but the poor Americans had not learned that and they tried to do it. The remoteness of Americans from German attack had made them feel confident. They didn't really believe that anything could reach out and kill them. Americans are quite unconscious now that we look on them as just as much beaten as we are. They're quite unconscious of that. They have always talked of Vietnam as if by getting out they were surrendering the prospect of victory, as if they were being noble by renouncing the possibility of victory. But they couldn't have had a victory. They couldn't possibly have won."

"If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him. I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished."

"It’s extraordinary the really tragic and dreadful things there are in marriage which are funny. I’ve never known anybody to write about this. My husband would insist on going and driving a car, and he’d never been a good driver. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world and he couldn’t drive at all at the end and it was terrible."

"It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it."

"My note to Rebecca West brought a kind of reply and an invitation to lunch. I was pleasantly surprised to find her anything but English in her manner. But for her speech I should have thought her an Oriental, she was so vivacious, eager, charming, direct. Her friendliness, the cosiness of her room, the hot tea, were grateful after a long, cold ride in the drab autumn afternoon. She had not read my writings, she frankly admitted, but she knew enough about me to add her welcome to that of the others and she would be happy to speak at the dinner. She would also arrange an evening to have her friends meet me. I was not to hesitate to call on her for anything I might need. I left my hostess with the comforting feeling that I had found a friend, an oasis in the desert London seemed to me."

"Yugoslavia as a subject had a tendency to swallow its students whole. When Rebecca West set about explaining the country after a brief visit in 1937, she found herself drawn into research on the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, on early Christianity, the Catholic-Orthodox schism, the origins and rise of nationalism, on Fascism and Nazism, on the nature of heroism and the nature of Evil (emphatically with a capital E). She came to believe that in Yugoslavia’s urgent moral questions could be glimpsed — and perhaps grasped! — keys to understanding all mankind, all human history and God, and after four years of writing, she loosed on the world what must surely be the longest travel narrative in the history of literature, the 1,100 densely packed pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And even within that cavernous space, she succeeded only in representing the Serb viewpoint."

"Many books and articles about Yugoslavia have left the impression that the war was inevitable . The most famous of all English - language books on the region was Rebecca West's monumental travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941 and continuously in print since then. West’s openly pro-Serb attitudes and her view that the Muslims were racially inferior had influenced two generations of readers and policy makers."

"No single form or genre was sufficient to contain her energy, and she lived as hard as she wrote. Rebecca West went everywhere, read everything, knew everyone. As Bonnie Kime Scott says in her editor’s introduction, "To read her letters in an informed way is to receive an education in the culture of the twentieth century.""

"Rebecca [West] is an extremely clever young woman whose critical writings in the papers have been startling everyone for the last few years. Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could, and much more savagely."

"It is not an exaggeration if one claims that The Strange Necessity and The Common Reader of Virginia Woolf are the two finest volumes of literary criticism written by women in the English language."

"Stealing is OK as long as it's done well."

"Twenty-eight years ago, I created my first game on an Apple II in my bedroom closet at a time when the interactive entertainment industry was taking its first baby steps. Today the games business has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry and we are just at the tip of the iceberg. I'm thrilled to have been a part of this successful journey and I'm extremely honored by the Academy's Hall of Fame induction."

"If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe."

"Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies."

"The way I really think is more like this "I am a scientist. I think the way to the truth is by investigation. I suspect that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and life after death do not exist because I have been looking in vain for them for 25 years. I have been wrong lots of times before and am not afraid of it"."

"Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes."

"Memetics appears to have a lot of implications that we humans are machines, which people have never liked. Of course we're machines, we're biological machines. But people don't like that. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. People don't like that. My view is that if these things are true it doesn't matter if we like them or not."

"The other key to my failures seemed to be belief. I was told that I didn’t get results because I didn’t believe strongly enough in psi, because I didn’t have an open mind!"

"...there were a few who were in open rebellion against the said Whiggery — a few, say two, Carlyle and Ruskin. The latter, before my days of practical Socialism, was my master towards the ideal aforesaid, and, looking backward, I cannot help saying, by the way, how deadly dull the world would have been twenty years ago but for Ruskin!"

"He used to attend Mr. Gladstone's breakfasts, and at one of them the host pronounced three grand things to be done to the ways of the world by mankind. First, the introduction of more lenient and humane practice with prisoners; second, a general sentiment against war; and third, the abolition of slaves. "Yes," said Ruskin in his mild tones, "but then I don't think prisons ought to be made humane; and I'm not against slavery; and I'm not against war.""

"Long and singular was Ruskin's journey through many landscapes, and his influence in all directions, social and aesthetic, was so remarkable that even those who have least predilection for it may perhaps call it the greatest event in our literary history since Lyrical Ballads and Waverley. At least one exceptionally good observer judged that as Carlyle...had written himself out as a source of social inspiration, it was Ruskin alone among writers of prose, apart from fiction, who relieved us from the reign of Commentators."

"The change which Ruskin's work made in economic thinking has been so far-reaching that today it is difficult for us to realise the perversity and the power of the economic teaching which he fought... Perhaps the greatest contribution which Ruskin made to political economy was this enlargement of its scope. It was not to be confined to exchange: it was not to ignore the real goodness or badness of men's choices: "The essential work of the political economist", he says in Munera Pulveris, "is to determine what are in reality useful or life-giving things and by what degrees and kinds of labour they are attainable and distributable". The political economists of his time would have stoutly denied that it was their business to determine what things are in reality useful, and many economists would still be of the same opinion. By the economist demand must be taken for granted—whatever it was a demand for. Whether the object demanded was good or evil, would do good or harm was not the economists' business. Ruskin refused to accept this abstraction—for an abstraction it surely is, and by his refusal often saw things to which the professionals were blind."

"I should wish never to lose the impression of the kind welcome which I received from him. He is the gentlest and most innocent of mankind, of great genius but inconsecutive; and he has never rubbed his mind against others, so that he is ignorant of very obvious things."

"Ruskin's own artistic life would have been impossible without the paternal sherry and the rich men who drank it."

"There are very few whose Utopias have in any detail come true, or have, like Ruskin's, remained a permanently fruitful ideal. In politics his influence has been entirely for good."

"Fifty years ago Ruskin was widely and, with rare exceptions, approvingly regarded as a major moral and practical inspiration behind the public welfare reforms of wartime and post-war Britain... Social security from the cradle to the grave, public ownership of key industries, state patronage of culture, planned new towns, and policies of full employment were all seen as clearly foreshadowed in Ruskin's writings on social philosophy of the 1860s and 1870s, particularly in Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera."

"I cannot therefore claim much book knowledge. However, I believe I have not lost much because of this enforced restraint. On the contrary, the limited reading may be said to have enabled me thoroughly to digest what I did read. Of these books, the one that brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was Unto This Last. I translated it later into Gujarati, entitling it Sarvodaya (the welfare of all). I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in a equal measure. The teaching of Unto This Last I understood to be:1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2. That a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice."

"The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism — the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation."

"Mr Ruskin is morally Conservative, intellectually Radical."

"The combination of shrewd common sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnestness ; the restlessness, the fervour, the impestuosity, — all these are characteristics of a Scotsman of parts and highly developed in Ruskin."

"Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases. Poets may not be "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"; but Ruskin, like Rousseau, changed the world by a vision which has the intensity and innocence of poetry."

"The point and stab of his challenge still really stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man."

"As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of the bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight as a bullet."