All Quotes

"Now, without directly altering the existing condition of things, it is possible to work upon the human mind and character, and give them a direction no more correspondent with that condition; and this it is precisely which he who is wise will endeavour to do. Only in this way is it possible to reproduce the new system in reality, just as it has been conceived in idea; and in every other method (setting aside the evils which arise from disturbing the natural order of human development) it is changed, modified, disfigured by the remaining influence of preceding systems, in the actual state of circumstances as well as in the minds of men. But if this obstacle be removed,—if the new condition of things which is resolved upon can succeed in working out its full influence, unimpeded by what was previously existing and by the circumstances of the present on which this has acted,—then must nothing further be allowed to stand in the way of the contemplated reform."

"In order to bring about the transition from the condition of the present to another newly resolved on, every reform should be allowed to proceed as much as possible from men’s minds and thoughts."

"The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to elevate this power is the only way to counteract this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of that power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when fetters are unloosed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth—however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances—is this true of all the bonds which oppress and enthral him. Let us undo them one by one, as the feeling of freedom awakens in men’s hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step. There may still be great difficulties in being able to recognize the symptoms of this awakening. But these do not lie in the theory so much as in its execution, which, it is evident, never admits of special rules, but in this case, as in every other, is the work of genius alone."

"The legislator should keep two things constantly before his eyes:—1. The pure theory developed to its minutest details; 2. The particular condition of actual things which he designs to reform."

"Owing to the vigorous and elastic strength of man’s original power, necessity does not often require anything save the removal of oppressive bonds. From all these reasons (to which a more detailed analysis of the subject might add many more) it will be seen, that there is no other principle than this so perfectly accordant with the reverence we owe to the individuality of spontaneous beings, and with the solicitude for freedom which that reverence inspires. Finally, the only infallible means of securing power and authority to laws, is to see that they originate in this principle alone."

"To the yoke of necessity every one willingly bows the head. Still, wherever an actually complicated aspect of things presents itself, it is more difficult to discover exactly what is necessary; but by the very acknowledgment of the principle, the problem invariably becomes simpler and the solution easier."

"Joseph Coulthard, The Sphere and Duties of Government (London: John Chapman 1854)"

"“What happened to her books?” “They went up in smoke. Confiscated by the Red Guards, who promptly burnt them in public, right in front of her apartment building.”"

"We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read."

"Four-Eyes’s parents probably wanted their son to be a writer. They must have thought it would be good for him to read books, even if he had to do so in secret."

"Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me."

"I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly."

"It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children."

"Inside, piles of books shown in the light of our torch: a company of great Western writers welcomed us with open arms. On top was our old friend Balzac, with five or six novels, then came Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and some English writers, too: Dickens, Kipling, Emily Brontë… We were beside ourselves. My head reeled, as if I’d had too much to drink. I took the novels out of the suitcase one by one, opened them, studied the portraits of the authors, and pass them on to Luo. Brushing them with the tips of my fingers made me feel as if my pale hands were in touch with human lives. “It reminds me of a scene in a film,” said Luo. “You know, when a stolen suitcase turns out to be stuffed with money…” “So, are you weeping tears of joy?” I said. “No. All I feel is loathing.” “Me too. Loathing for everyone who kept these books from us.”"

"I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo’s favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland."

"I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same."

"Every nook and cranny of the land came under the all-seeing eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had cast its gigantic, fine-meshed net over the whole of China."

"She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price."

"There are so many interesting Brazilian writers I’d like to get my hands on. The ' Best Young Brazilian Novelists a few years back identified twenty writers aged under forty, and there’s a lot there still waiting for the to welcome them in. For that collection, I translated short work by two of those writers, and , both of whom deserve full English-language books; there’s another on that list, , who’s bound to be discovered by the English-speaking world before long. And there are a lot of Brazilian writers I have already translated but of whom I’d like to do a lot more — I’ve done one extraordinary short novel by and would love to do a second, I’d like to do more , too, and so many others…"

"Once you’ve agreed what makes a in the first place (which isn’t as easy as one might think…), I think the basic measures of quality for children’s fiction are the same as for adult fiction. How well ted, how well imagined, the commitment to a voice and the skill in realizing it, the aliveness of the s, the vividness of the world, the originality and wit and surprise and charm and everything else that demanding readers look for in great writing. Books for younger children tend to be heavily illustrated, in a way that most adult books aren’t (more’s the pity…), a fact that of course brings with it a whole other set of ways in which a book can succeed or fail. (The illustrations and their relationship to the text aren’t, of course, minor factors incidental to the substance of the book, they are among the hardest things to get perfectly right.)"

"has a , and deserves it. But while she doesn’t need any recognition from me, I’ve just given the team behind her book a prize: the £2,000 . Why? Well, I thought was stunning. But my Russian is terrible, so I only read it in 2016, when it was published in English, through the work of translator Bela Shayevich and editor Jacques Testard. Nobody is likely ever to give the literature Nobel to a translator or editor – so my prize has gone to them. One of our shortlisted books, ', was the first work of modern published in the UK. In 2017, working with the and with support from the , I established the TA first translation prize, using my €25,000 (£22,000) winnings from another award, the . Its aim was to highlight the work of translators new to the profession, and of the editors who work with them. Literary translation is a difficult profession to break into. Plenty of people want to do it, but in the insular , there’s regrettably little work to go around, and it’s easier for publishers to entrust their books to already-known translators who are seen as less of a risk."

"Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm. When Athens had decayed and Alexandria sprawled, the new giant-city, across the Egyptian sands; when the Greek world was filling with libraries and emptying of poets, growing in erudition as its genius expired, then first appeared, as pompous as Herod and as worm-eaten, that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more, which replaces depth by muddiness, beauty by echoes, passion by necrophily."

"In The Waste Land Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior."

"My dream is of a British statesman who could say to his countrymen: "You are sick of war, weary of entanglements. There are some who would have you renounce both. I offer you instead a heavier load of foreign responsibilities, a risk of new war. Because that is the only road to lasting peace. Since the War, British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble. Be bold at last, and give a lead to Europe, by offering to form with France and whatever other European states will join, a League within the League, of nations pledged to submit all disputes to the League, but pledged also to fight without hesitation in defence of any member of the group who is attacked. If Germany will join, so much the better; though Germany as she is never will. If America, better still; for the present America is a broken reed. All the more honor for us to accept a responsibility if she refuses."The way will not be easy. We shall often regret the day we pledged ourselves to bear taxation in peace and face death in war for interests and frontiers not our own. But no interest is more really our own than the reign of law between nations."That is little likely to happen. Only an Abraham Lincoln takes risks of that sort with a nation. But this is not because the ordinary politician is wiser; it is because the ordinary politician does not realize the latent force of idealism, all the stronger with the decay of the religions which gave it other outlets, ready in the world of to-day for any leader with the courage to use it; and so easily abused accordingly by the rulers of Moscow and Berlin."

"Considering what was to come, the much-abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens."

"On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey, A voice still whispers in me, far away – A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly There rises from the dead that shadowy hell, The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand, The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land, A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle. Then fades the phantom, and once more I know Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now, Our battlefields reconquered by the plough, And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago."

"Paris may pass in gas and flame and blood — We shall sit safe behind our sundering flood. Berlin may build a Holier Inquisition — It will but mean an extra-late edition. Hitler be hailed through all a wrecked Ukraine — We shall just read, and turn to golf again. For God, the day our guardian seas He took, Gave us the broad breast of a Beaverbrook; Round us, though fails the Channel — never fear! — Still lie the stainless depths of Rothermere."

"Many honest folk feel it hard to deny the Sudetens self-determination, if they want to belong to the Reich. But then, can we deny it to the Czech areas among the Sudetens? Then what about Sudeten pockets in the Czech areas? Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things. You cannot have self-determination by villages. You may split Czechoslovakia now. In a few years it will be one again. Only it will be German. That is all.What would our own answer be, supposing we were expected on racial grounds to hand over to Berlin our coastal counties from Essex to Northumberland? We should reply that any nation must defend itself against a step which would make it impossible to defend itself.You cannot by any juggling with frontiers abolish racial minorities in Europe. And you cannot totally ignore geography. It follows that where you cannot move mountains you must move men. If the Sudetens are irrevocably set on being in the Reich let them go to the Reich instead of expecting the Reich to come to them. The Germans are the later comers in Bohemia. There are precedents for such an exodus. Good Aryans may disdain to copy Moses, but within these fifteen years just such an exchange of minorities has cured, as nothing else could have cured, the secular hate of Greek and Turk. If a small, poor and barren state like Greece could absorb between one and two million refugees it is absurd to pretend that a great country like Germany, which Hitler has set flowing with milk and honey, could not do as much and more. And if the Czechs can give a home to the persecuted refugees of the Axis, so much the better.This seems to me justice. The alternative is to admit the Trojan Horse into Prague. That may be the sort of fool's wisdom called "expediency"; it is the line of least resistance; but at least let us not cant about its honesty.Undoubtedly Hitler will object. He has other aims. It is not oppression he minds; the loudest yelps about persecution come from the persecutor of the Jews. Czechoslovakia lies on the flank of the German drive to the Black Sea. Therefore, Hitler will not hear reason.A question that vitally affects all Europe should be discussed by Europe. If Hitler foams at the mere mention of the League, let it be a European conference. Only let it give full weight to those smaller Powers which have often a more disinterested sense of decency than their great neighbours. If Hitler refuses he puts himself at once in the wrong. The verdict of such a conference may not convince him; but if he cannot reason, he can count."

"Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed."

"A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese."

"Criticism is not a science whose elements can be mass-taught to adolescents — it is a difficult art, at which even adults are seldom a notable success. With the young the result is often that they either just regurgitate the judgements they have been taught, or else, if they have a natural and healthy rebelliousness, the opposite of what they have been taught. Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature except one’s own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence."

"It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'."

"It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen."

"And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them."

"A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father — if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out."

"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."

"Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are."

"The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt."

"Although beneath this grave-mound thy white bones now are lying, Surely, my huntress Lycas, the wild things dread thee still. The memory of thy worth tall Pêlion keeps undying, And the looming peak of Ossa, and Cithæron’s lonely hill."

"I throw my apple towards you. If you will love me, take it And give me in repayment your own maidenhead: If your will is what I would not, yet keep it still; and make it A lesson of how swiftly all loveliness is fled."

"Beside the grey sea-shingle, here at the cross-roads' meeting, I, Hermes, stand and wait, where the windswept orchard grows. I give, to wanderers weary, rest from the road and greeting: Cool and unpolluted from my spring the water flows."

"I came one-half hour early. My watch [had] gone on a rampage. Lucas [is] a gray-haired man of about 60, [with] finely chiseled features, markedly piercing blue eyes — a look of intelligence and elegance about him — but the elegance is all in his face, not in his clothes. We talked about Bloomsbury. So much of what Lucas said was in quotations — English, French, and German — that I cannot remember or reproduce it. One emphasis he made was that Bloomsbury was a jungle — that the society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind. He kept insisting that Dickinson and Forster were not really in Bloomsbury. They were softhearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that. Lucas stayed out of this “jungle.” Also, they tormented each other with endless love affairs. Strachey was openly homosexual — a surprising thing in view of his later relationship with Carrington. Lucas went to Cambridge in 1913 [and] after one year went to war. Returned in 1919. Strachey and the rest were coming into their fame. The notoriety of Eminent Victorians was partly a chance of time and place—the frantic 20s were to assist him no end."

"Dots Johnson - "Lefty" Jones"

"this country might have been a pio neer land once. but. there ain't no mo indians blowing custer's mind with a different image of america."

"O, Columbia, the gem of the ocean, The home of the brave and the free, The shrine of each patriot's devotion, A world offers homage to thee."

"Three cheers for the red, white, and blue."

"Aux États-Unis la nature, comme la société, n'est pas toujours belle, mais elle est toujours grande."

"We reaffirm today our enduring commitment to the UN and to multilateralism. You can count on the Philippines as a champion for advancing gender equality as a driving force for peace, justice and sustainable development."

"The atmosphere of ignorance and superstition surrounding the blackjack table that day had convinced me that even good players didn’t understand the mathematics underlying the game. I returned home intending to find a way to win."

"Just Push the Button!"