"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue — But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water."
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Chapter 3
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Orlando%3A_A_Biography
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Orlando: A Biography
Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a novel by Virginia Woolf, which she called "a biography", intending it to be the first of a new genre breaking barriers between fiction and non-fiction. It was inspired by the life and behavior of her friend Vita Sackville-West.
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