Literary Critics

"To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious."

"There has always been an element of the magical in the style of M. Ernest Renan—an art of saying things in a way to make them beautiful."

"A famous student of history has bequeathed to us a definition of nationality which is worth attention: I refer to Ernest Renan, of whom George Meredith once said to me, while the great French critic was still living, that there was more in his head than in any other head in Europe. Renan tells us that "Man is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his language, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation.""

"No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud ... of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaiis, laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become."

"Thus, the Semitic race is recognizable almost solely through negative characteristics: it has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in sum an absence of complexity, of nuance, an exclusive sentiment of unity."

"Nature, on the other hand, plays a very small role in the Semitic religions: the desert is monotheistic; sublime in its immense uniformity, it primarily revealed to man the idea of 'infinite.'"

"The true Semitic society is that of the tent and of the tribe."

"The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism."

"A Muslim who knows French will never be a dangerous Muslim."

"To write well is to think well; there is no art of style distinct from the culture of the mind. The good writer is a complete mind, gifted with judgment, passion, imagination, and at the same time well trained. The inner qualities of rectitude, of brilliant geniality, are not given; instruction, wealth of information, fulness of knowledge, are acquired. Thus good training of the mind is the only school of good style. Wanting that, you have merely rhetoric and bad taste."

"Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation"

"You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect."

"I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life."

"La nature a fait une race d'ouvriers ; c'est la race chinoise, d'une dextérité de main merveilleuse sans presque aucun sentiment d'honneur; gouvernez-la avec justice , en prélevant d'elle pour le bienfait d'un tel gouvernement un ample douaire au profit de la race conquérante, elle sera satisfaite ; une race de travailleurs de la terre, c'est le nègre ; soyez pour lui bon et humain, et tout sera dans l'ordre; -- une race de maîtres et de soldats, c'est la race européenne ."

"Regere imperio populos, voilà notre vocation."

"La régénération des races inférieures ou abâtardies par les races supérieures est dans l'ordre providentiel de l'humanité. L'homme du peuple est presque toujours chez nous un noble déclassé ; sa lourde main est bien mieux faite pour manier l'épée que l'outil servile. Plutôt que de travailler, il choisit de se battre, c'est- à-dire qu'il revient à son premier état. ."

"We aspire not to equality but to domination. Countries inhabited by foreign races must become again countries of serfs, farm laborers, and factory workers. The goal is not to suppress inequities, but, rather, to amplify them and to make of them a matter of course."

"La colonisation en grand est une nécessité politique tout à fait de premier ordre. Une nation qui ne colonise pas est irrévocablement vouée au socialisme, à la guerre du riche et du pauvre. La conquête d'un pays de race inférieure par une race supérieure, qui s'y établit pour le gouverner, n'a rien de choquant."

"Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?"

"Jesus, in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government. That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse."

"To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed."

"Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him."

"In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact."

"Thus the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics. It has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in everything there is a complete absence of complexity, subtlety or feeling, except for unity. It has no variety in its monotheism."

"He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign."

"As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost."

"All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women."

"There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped."

"Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe."

"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

"Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community."

"Older children always sit down to paint or write after they have seen a picture or read a story that appeals to them, and attempt to create. So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things. To avoid the ordeal of emotion that leads to the conception is the impulse of death. Sterility is the deadly sin. Today so many of our activities are sterile. Our upper classes are impotent by reason of their soft living. Our lower classes have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours: they can only bear dead things."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."