Quotes by British Authors - Page 526

I am not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash.
Agatha Christie
sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Jon Ronson
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.
Benjamin Zander
At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
Jon Ronson
A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.
Graham Greene
Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.
Bertrand Russell
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
H.G.Wells
What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.
John Christopher
Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.
Penelope Keith
He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
Graham Greene
Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.
Jon Ronson
t tMonsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
Andrew Sullivan
Clockers" asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)
Nick Hornby
There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation -- the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living.
Mark E. Smith
It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.
James Clavell
A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.
George Eliot
We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.
J.B. Priestley
How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.
Matt Ridley
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.
Graham Greene
The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
Jon Ronson
In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.
Aleister Crowley
Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
Ian Fleming
But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.
Agatha Christie
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.
John Ruskin
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Thomas Hardy
Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.
Douglas Adams
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
John Berger
It was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
Douglas Adams
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
Graham Greene
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
Alan W. Watts
Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.
Charles Dickens
People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.
Douglas Adams
In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past
Alan Moore
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.
Richard Adams
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
Douglas Adams
A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.
Douglas Adams
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.
Douglas Adams
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
Douglas Adams
According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.
J.K. Rowling
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
Charles Dickens
My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ever since her being turned into a Churchill, she has out-Churchill'd them all in high and mighty claims.
Jane Austen
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
Ian McEwan
You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.
Alan Brown
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
Joan Smith
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity
Aldous Huxley
Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.
Christopher Hill
Some of the epidemic may overwhelm society as a physical expression of energy hysteria.
Lynne McTaggart
In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.
George Orwell
I may be permitted, like the doctors, to cure a greater evil by a less, for I shall not fall seriously in love with the young widow, I think, nor she with me - that's certain - but if I find a little pleasure in her society I may surely be allowed to seek it; and if the star of her divinity be bright enough to dim the lustre of Eliza's, so much the better, but I scarcely can think it
Anne Brontë
You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.
Idries Shah
Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.
David Mitchell
Her black is beautiful, his society is ugly.
Habeeb Akande
Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no business there.All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible.
W.H. Auden
The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?
John Lennon
I'll just quote myself for now; actually, I'll quote what a good friend of mine, David Jenkins responded to a post I made when I was feeling 'pissy.'"Deep thoughts (come) from a deep well. Society is useful because when we see ourselves reflected through others we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves." ~ David Jenkins, 2013
David Jenkins
Nothing is ‘wrong’ with me, Dan. What’s wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
Martin Hopkins
The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,but more importantly, trodden upon.
Martin Hopkins
Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...
Martin Hopkins
An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.
C.L.R. James