All Quotes

"The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities."

"Perhaps the word for the feeling I mean is serenity, a high acceptance, a recognition that Heracleitus's doctrine of eternal flow is a great truth, and while we may not, in ourselves, find the moment when the one element changes into the other, that moment will come and the consciousness of its inevitability may give us courage in adversity, and balance in good fortune."

"Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit."

"Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant."

"I knew that he prayed a great deal, of course for help in the examinations. But subsequent clinical experience has convinced me that God is not particularly interested in examinations, just as he won't be dragged into the Stock Market, or being a backer in show business."

"When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle."

"The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement."

"Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew."

"Naked anger may sometimes be seen in priests of the Church of Rome, but the Church of England prefers the icy smile, the false bonhomie, the sword concealed in the palm-branch."

"The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live."

"A Library goes on as far as thought can reach."

"But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom's Cabin? What carried off Little Nell?...They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue."

"The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness."

"Can you tell me the time of the last complete show?" "You have the wrong number." "Eh? Isn't this the Odeon?" I decide to give a Burtonian answer. "No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night."

"The really great eccentrics are all inimitable; they are not possessed by a single oddity; they are, in their deepest selves, unlike the generality of mankind."

"Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection."

"Try some Symbolic Logic on your little Couch Potato when you go home, and see what happens."

"Those of you who have visited Oxford know what a busy, crowded, noisy place it now is and you might perhaps not guess that it was a university town if it were not that, now and then, the traffic is halted while the Vice-Chancellor, preceded by his two mace-bearers, crosses the street. It must be one of the few places left in the world where self-assertion, covetousness, and the whole world of the combustion engine must come to a halt because somebody distinguished for his intelligence is going about his business."

"He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English "class system" which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher."

"He sets a thief to guard his purse Who trusts a dial with his hours Or bids a sand-glass bleed away his nights, His days, his loves, his pleasures and his powers. The burthen of his years Is Time's soft footfall, Time's soft Falling Through his joys and tears."

"They live and laugh who know the better part — Count length of pleasure not by dial or glass But by the heart; What are our fears When Time's slow footfall, fall, fall Falling Turns lovers' hours to years?"

"Love, though sweet, must know its proper station And never seek to rival education."

"The brigand's life is a very fine life For men of generous mind; We rob the rich to help the poor And succour oppressed mankind. The rich, dear souls, are close around And it's easy work to skelp 'em; But the poor — damn their eyes — can never be found When we're in the mood to help them."

"We are Brigand Philosophers Our hearts are high and cheery, For we know our robbery rests upon A sound economic theory!"

"I literally never meet anybody who ever talks about God as something other than a kind of big man. I think God is a wondrous spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, but only interested in men as part of a giant creation which is pulsing with life. People say, when a relative dies: "Oh, how could God have taken her away so young and with so much before her?" God doesn't give a bugger about how young she is. He probably isn't noticing particularly. That's just the way a lot of things happen. A lot gets spilled, you know, in nature. When you look at what's going on out there now, those trees are dropping seeds by literally the hundreds of thousands and millions, and one or two of them may take on. I think that that is the way that God functions. He doesn't care nearly as much about individuals and individual fates as we would like to suppose. But by trying to ally ourselves with the totality of things, we may get into Tao as they say in the East and be part of it, really take part in it, and not just regard ourselves as a kind of miraculous creation and the rest just sort of stage scenery against which we perform."

"Famous author (and former newspaperman) Robertson Davies recently gave a reading from his latest novel to a packed library theatre in Calgary. After the reading, he took questions from the audience. One young man asked, "Professor Davies, how can a practicing journalist find time to write fiction?" "Oh dear," Davies replied, "that question shows a great deal of innocence about journalism.""

"Scientific and humanist revolutionary leaders, on the other hand, cannot believe in the myth of the ignorance of the people."

"The task of revolutionary leaders is to pose as problems not only this myth, but all the other myths used by the oppressor elites to oppress."

"In a dynamic, rather than static, view of revolution, there is no absolute 'before' or 'after,' with the taking of power as the dividing line."

"The road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust."

"The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given—something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt."

"It is accomplished by the oppressors depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo."

"As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power."

"The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders."

"People are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world (which is a human world), and create it with their transforming labor. The fulfillment of humankind as human beings lies, then, in the fulfillment of the world. If for a person to be in the world of work is to be totally dependent, insecure, and permanently threatened—if their work does not belong to them—the person cannot be fulfilled. Work that is not free ceases to be a fulfilling pursuit and becomes an effective means of dehumanization."

"For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in a revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking 'revolutionary consciousness' or 'class consciousness,' it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep people from thinking."

"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success."

"Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems."

"For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority."

"The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in school, where students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think."

"The participants begin to realize that if their analysis of the situation goes any deeper they will either have to divest themselves of their myths, or reaffirm them. Divesting themselves of and renouncing their myths represents, at that moment, an act of self-violence. On the other hand, to reaffirm those myths is to reveal themselves."

"The culture of the dominant class hinders the affirmation of men as beings of decision."

"I interpret the revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action which is prolonged in 'cultural revolution' once power is taken. In both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientização—by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects—is necessary."

"Finally, cultural revolution develops the practice of permanent dialogue between leaders and people and consolidates the participation of the people in power."

"The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures."

"The object of a dialogical-libertarian action is not to 'dislodge' the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to 'bind' them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality."

"If you are an intellectual, your best course is to relax and enjoy it."

"Modern disillusion is unlikely to last forever, and nothing rings so hollow as the angst of yesterday."

"The world does so well without me, that I am moved to wish that I could do equally well without the world."

"When I was born good fairies clustered round my cradle, showering me with wit, beauty, grace, freedom from dandruff, natural piety and other great gifts, but the Wicked Fairy Carabosse (who had not been invited to the party) crept to my side and screamed "Let him be cursed with Inability To Do Little Jobs Around The House", and so it has always been."