Authors From Wales

"The Cistercians...are wholly strange to the use of flesh. Yet they keep pigs to the number of many thousands, and sell the bacon—though perhaps not quite all of it. The heads, legs and feet they neither give away, throw away, nor sell. What becomes of them God knows."

"Vadis quo uis, morieris ubi debes."

"Numquam enim audiendi quod aliquis monachus super puerum incubuisset, quin statim post ipsum surrexisset puer."

"The hatred which is the degenerate product of love is the stubbornest."

"Meum est propositum in taberna mori: Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori, Deus sit propitius huic potatori! Poculis accenditur animi lucerna; Cor imbutum nectare volat ad superna: Mihi sapit dulcius vinum in taberna, Quam quod aqua miscuit præsulis pincerna."

"Dura est manus cirurgi, sed sanans."

"Hoc solum deliqui, quod uiuo."

"I wasn't an artist of any sort, but I thought I knew something about how artists' minds worked, and I didn't believe that to change an external situation had much to do with it. It was what they did with whatever was lying about that mattered."

"After I had eaten my evening meal I wandered out on to the beach where the tide was coming in sharply, a tumble of white in the darkness. I walked as far as the cliff beyond the beach, and I sat down there on a tussock of sea-pinks, listening to the surge of the water, watching the stars that the clouds covered and unveiled and the cluster of humble lights half a mile away that was Penmael. I felt lonely. My body was warm, but I was chilled to the soul's marrow. This was the oddest feeling I had ever known: this loneliness. Aloneness was something else. I had sought it eagerly, welcomed it when found, but I had never been lonely in my aloneness. Now I was so lonely that I could stand it no longer."

"In the long run, what do we have but our memories?"

"There are men to whom a marriage is eternal and who are crippled for ever when it ends, largely, I think, because of the passion and completeness of their own contribution to it. They embark their all in one frail craft, and, if that goes, the wreck is total."

"Unsatisfactory indeed the world seemed to Mr Menheniot. He was pushed about in bus queues; he was snapped at by café waitresses. In the Underground unpleasant voices shouted "Hurry along! Hurry along!" and the sight of all these people hurrying along - Why? Where to? - amid clanging gates and roaring wheels, out from and in to holes bored in the earth, left him sick for another way of living. Never, never, he thought, could he be happy in the world about him: the world that the war had knocked sideways and that seemed to his frightened imagination as though it would not be straight again but must topple right over."

"It is courteous to respect a fellow-being's right to privacy by providing him with a room of his own; but it can be torture to make him feel that that room is where he is expected to be, out of one's way."

"She had scuttled to earth like a beetle that knows it is in danger of being trodden on."

"Though blind chance took me to a newspaper office, I was happy there at once; and I have been happy in newspaper offices ever since. It was clear from the first that the way up was through the reporters’ room; and the way to the reporters’ room in those days was by learning shorthand. It was a lucky thing for me that there was another boy in the office who shared my passion for learning shorthand. It is the easiest thing in the world to learn; but when we had learned the principles there came the question of practice. We solved this by coming to the office at eight each morning. Our work began at nine, and for an hour before that time we harangued and declaimed to one another from a volume of Sir Edward Clarke’s speeches, borrowed from the office library."

"[Swithinbank] had dreamed of this show, and here was the dream come true, because he had made it come. What had I ever dreamed of except to be tucked in under a warm blanket of safety? And what had I ever done to make even that true? Nothing."

"To be the only possessor of news that will interest many people is always to be in a powerful position."

"All these things were in the “front room.” We had all that fanatical devotion to the “front room” which is peculiar to the poor. It was a sacred place. A room of our own to work in would have suited me and my brother splendidly. But the whole family, including us, still crowded into the kitchen for all purposes. It was a fine, comfortable kitchen with an open fireplace, a cheerful room to be in if you had nothing to do but read or talk. Not so good, though, if you had any other sort of work to do. The simple fact is, of course, that the use of one room for all purposes, in a house with a beggarly income and no servants, arises from the necessity to save money and labour. Using another room would mean laying fires, and fires would mean money, and so would light. That is what really lies behind all the old jokes about the unused “parlours” of the poor. But the consequence is the creation of the “sacred” feeling where the parlour is concerned. Even in the summer-time, when light and fire were not in question, one kept out of it."

"Once I wandered away from my brothers and sisters and went into a near-by field, and right out in the middle of it I lay down in grass so high that no one could see me. The red sorrel from that angle rose like spires and the dog-daisies trembled against the blue with fantastic loveliness. The silence was so great that I could hear the grasses making a small commotion like the trees of a forest in which I was a beetle. I shut my eyes and tried to forget that I was anyone at all. I tried to imagine that I was a stone lying on the ground; and I remember snatching myself up from what must have been something near to unconsciousness and rushing away frightened."

"On one of those occasions, for a variety of subjects, I had won three pounds worth of books. It was in the happy days when the volumes of the Everyman Library cost but a shilling apiece. Decorously the students walked up and received their books—one, two or three. But, with a lust for quantity, and to the devil with morocco bindings, I had staked out my claim on Everyman. On my first call, I was received with ironic cheers as I bore away a toppling pile of thirty volumes; and when, called later, I added another thirty to the store and walked back to my seat, chin firmly pressed into the topmost volume, there were roars of laughter. It was a business getting home those sixty volumes. I had taken the precaution to provide myself with plenty of string, and what is more I got on to a tram, a rare thing to do in those days."

"I was beginning to see that my whole life had been a flight from the possibility of unearthing the sort of man I really was."

"the self-contained life"

"And there's so much gossip in the [countryside], Mr Menheniot. It makes a person uncomfortable."

"The world is an onion, Mr Menheniot, skin within skin, and anyone who thinks it's nothing but the outside one that lies in the dung can have it if he wants it. A real man of the world knows them all, down to the heart's core of the thing. Not all on the surface, is it, like a nice David-Cox water-colour."

"Maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favor humans over ideology, and those who favor ideology over humans. I prefer humans to ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain."

"I suppose it's no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it's known as cognitive dissonance. It's the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we're kind people and the idea that we've just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior."

"The city of Oide stands directly opposite. The author of the City of Oude Ayeen Akberry, ii. 41, says, that it was in his time the largest city in Hindoostan; he mentions it as a place of peculiar sanctity. Feristhta boasts of its existing two thousand two years before the Christian era."

"In a two-hour monologue before assembled Nazi dignitaries on 15 June 1935 the Leader made it clear that he expected the fraternities to wither away in the Nazi state as remnants of a bygone aristocratic age. In May 1936 Hitler and Hess openly condemned the fraternities and barred Party members from belonging to them."

"Like the Hitler Youth in the schools, the Nazi Students’ League and its members did not fight sly of naming and shaming the teachers they thought were not toeing the Nazi line. In 1937 a Hamburg professor complained that no student meeting had been held in the previous few years ‘in which the professoriate has not been dismissed in contemptuous terms as an ‘ossified’ society that is not fit to educate or lead you people in the universities.’"

"Hitler insisted that political education was a matter for the Party and not for state-run institutions or state-appointed teachers… All the staff had to undergo regular special training, and the students also had to spend time several weeks a year working on a farm or a factory to maintain contacts with the people."

"Yet the Nazi Students’ League was not without competition in the student world at this time. Many students joined the stormtroopers in the spring of 1933, and following Hitler’s instruction in September 1933 that the task of politicizing the student body was to be undertaken by the SA, the brownshirts set up their own centres in the universities and put pressure on students to join. By the end of the year, over half of the students at Heidelberg university, for example, had enrolled as stormtroopers."

"The widespread intimidation of the population provided the essential precondition for a process that was in train all over Germany in the period from February to July 1933… The Nazi takeover of the federated states provided a key component in this process… At the same time as the state governments were being overthrown, local Nazis, backed by squads of armed stormtroopers and SS men, were occupying town halls, terrorizing mayors and councils into resigning, and replacing them with their own nominees."

"Not just women, young people, students, and school pupils, but also many other sectors of German society were catered for by specially designed Nazi organizations by the end of the 1920s. There were groups for civil servants, for the war-wounded, for farmers, and for many other constituencies, each addressing its particular, specifically targeted propaganda effort. There was even a kind of trade union movement, the clumsily names National Socialist Cell Organizations [NSBO]."

"Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights."

"There were even more disturbing reports of children whose membership in the Hitler Youth was disapproved of by their parents threatening to report them to the authorities if they tried to stop them going to meetings. For adolescents, it was only too easy to annoy parents who were former Social Democrats by greeting them at home with ‘Hail, Hitler!’ instead of ‘good morning’. ‘Thus war is taken into every family’, one wife of an old labour movement activist observed. ‘The worst is’, she added apprehensively, ‘that you’ve got to watch yourself in front of your own children.’"

"The overall effect of Hitler Youth membership, some Social Democratic observers complained, was a ‘coarsening’ of the young. The suppression of any discussion or debate, the military discipline, the emphasis on physical prowess and competition, led boys to become violent and aggressive, especially towards young people who for whatever reason had not joined the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth groups travelling by train amused themselves by insulting and threatening guards who failed to say ‘Hail, Hitler!’ every time they asked a passenger for his ticket."

"At every level, formal learning was given decreased emphasis… By 1939 employers were complaining that school graduates’ standards of knowledge of language and arithmetic were poor and that ‘the level of school knowledge of the examinees had been sinking for some time.’ Yet this did not cause any concern to the regime. As Hans Schemm, the leader of the Nazi Teachers’ League up to 1935, declared: ‘The goal of our education is the formation of character’, and he complained that too much knowledge had been crammed into children, to the detriment of character-building."

"The Hitler Youth proved a thoroughly disruptive influence on formal education. ‘School’, one Social Democratic report already noted in 1934, ‘is constantly disrupted by Hitler Youth events.’ Teachers had to allow pupils time off for them almost every week… Despite the military-style discipline in the schools, there were numerous reports of indiscipline and disorder, violent incidents between pupils, and insubordination towards teachers. ‘One can’t speak of the teacher having authority any more,’ noted one Social Democratic agent in 1937. ‘The snotty-nosed little brats of the Hitler Youth decide what goes on at school, they’re in charge.’"

"The National Socialist German Students’League… gained a reputation for provocative actions, and campaigned on issues such as the reduction of overcrowding in lectures (by imposing a limit on the number of Jewish students), the dismissal of pacifist professors, the creation of new chairs in the subjects like Racial Studies and Military Science, and the harnessing of the universities to the national interest, away from the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself."

"Among those who were sent to receive political indoctrination in June 1919 was a 30-year-old corporal who had been in the Bavarian army since the beginning of the war and had stayed in it through all the vicissitudes of Social Democracy, anarchy and Communism, taking part in demonstrations, wearing a red armband along with the rest of his comrades, and disappearing from the scene with most of them when they had been ordered to defend Munich against the invading forces in the proceeding weeks. His name was Adolf Hitler."

"Even though total membership of the Nazi Students’ League did not even reach 10 per cent of national fraternity membership, the Nazis had completely taken over student representation in Germany. Impress by such numbers, Hitler appointed Schirach to the leadership of the Hitler Youth on 3 October 1931."

"For all their deficiencies, the Hitler Youth movement and the increasingly Nazified school system were driving a wedge between parents who still retained some loyalty to the beliefs and standards they had grown up in themselves, and their children who were being indoctrinated at every stage of their lives. As one such agent ruefully observed: ‘It is extremely difficult for parents who are opponents of the Nazis to exercise an influence on their children. Either they ask the child not to talk at school about what is said at home. Then the children get the feeling, aha, the parents have to hide what they think. The teacher permits himself to say everything out loud. So he’s bound to be right. - Or the parents express their opinion without giving the child a warning. Then it’s not long before they are arrested or at the very least called up before the teacher, who shouts at them and threatens to report them. - ‘Send your father to the school!’ That is the normal answer to suspicious doubts and questions on the part of the child. If the father is quiet after such a visit, then he gives the child the impression that he has been convinced by what the teacher has told him, and the effect is far worse than if nothing had ever been said.’"

"Early in 1934 the Interior Ministry made military training organized by the brownshirts compulsory for male students. Soon they were spending long hours training with the SA. This has a serious effect on their studies. University authorities began to note a drastic fall in academic standards as students spent days or even weeks away from their studies, or appeared at lectures in a state of exhaustion after training all night."

"At the heart of death’s history lie not only the emotion of grief and the breaking of bonds between each other and our place in this world but also the hope of answering the queries and resolving the injustices of a lifetime."

"He became in a certain sense a democrat, but not, like Place and Cobbett, a Radical. He put himself at the head of the economic as distinct from the political action of the working-class. He devoted himself in the latter half of his life to starting the co-operative and extending the Trade Union movement."

"The Scottish factory, when he took it over, was as bad as other factories of the time. In fifteen years he had made it a model of humane and intelligent provision for mind and body, with moderate hours, good pay, healthy conditions both in the factory and the village, and good education, including the first infant school in the island. The outcome was a high morale among the hands. It was, he imagined, his great discovery that "the character of man is formed for him, and not by him," or, as we should now say, that "environment makes character.""

"I have always looked upon Owen as my first teacher in the philosophy of human nature and my first guide through the labyrinth of social science. He influenced my character more than I then knew, and now that I have read his life and most of his great works, I am fully convinced that he was the greatest of social reformers and the real founder of Modern Socialism."

"I would class Owen in a triad as one of the three men who have in this generation given an impulse to the moral world, Clarkson and Dr. Bell are the other two."

"The modern history of Europe is littered with the projects of the politics of Rationalism. The most sublime of these is, perhaps, that of Robert Owen for 'a world convention to emancipate the human race from ignorance, poverty, division, sin and misery' – so sublime that even a Rationalist (but without much justification) might think it eccentric. But not less characteristic are the diligent search of the present generation for an innocuous power which may safely be made so great as to be able to control all other powers in the human world, and the common disposition to believe that political machinery can take the place of moral and political education."

"Never was there such a combination as in Robert Owen of business ability with moral simplicity and earnestness, and visionary insight, occasionally running to the absurd. Brought up in a Welsh village in the days of Wesley, his destiny lay in wider realms of thought and space, but his mind and character never lost the mark of an upbringing among poor people and among people aspiring earnestly towards an ideal outlook on everyday things."