British author quotes Quotes

“The world is too little aware of the waste of life, limb and land which anti-personnel landmines are causing among some of the poorest people on earth.”

“If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”

“That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.”

“Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.”

“The change is radical it gives us new natures, it makes us love what we hated and hate what we loved, it sets us in a new road; it makes our habits different, it makes our thoughts different, it makes us different in private, and different in public.”

“The worst evils of life are those which do not exist except in our imagination.”

“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

“Had I faltered we would have neither the success nor the international reputation we have. Yet when a woman is strong she is strident. If a man is strong, he's a good guy.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.”

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.”

“Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.”

“He only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to extend it to others. He who cares to have slaves must chain himself to them. He who builds walls to create exclusion for others builds walls across his own freedom. He who distrusts freedom in others loses his moral right to it.”

“Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.”

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.”

“Biography lends to death a new terror.”

“Learn to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.”

“I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?”

“It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.”

“...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory”

“It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.”

“Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature.”

“Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.”

“Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.”

“Both the President and Mr Gorbachev have said that they want to see a world without nuclear weapons. I cannot see a world without nuclear weapons. Let me be practical about it. The knowledge is there to make them. So do not go too hard for that pie in the sky because, while everyone would like to see it, I do not believe it is going to come about.”

“We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.”

“Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons”

“when you came you cried and everybody smiled with joy; when you go smile and let the world cry for you.”

“I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.”

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

“If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”

“Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.”

“The enemy is still proud and powerful. He is hard to get at. He still possesses enormous armies, vast resources, and invaluable strategic territories...No one can tell what new complications and perils might arise in four or five more years of war. And it is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must reside.”

“If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.”

“...and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay parties.”

“To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.”

“Alas! it is a fearful thingTo feel another's guilt!”

“For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.”

“True love is just like regular love, but with more truth.”

“I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood.”

“I may not always be offered work, but I'll always have my family.”

“Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizenmay assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties.”

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

“The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.”