Quotes by British Authors - Page 528

I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.
Douglas Adams
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.
Idries Shah
You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.
Hanif Kureishi
Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.
Idries Shah
Maria was married on Saturday. In all important preparations of mind she was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The bride was elegantly dressed and the two bridesmaids were duly inferior. Her mother stood with salts, expecting to be agitated, and her aunt tried to cry. Marriage is indeed a maneuvering business.
Jane Austen
The illusion of beauty - the rule of comparisons.
Lesley Pearse
The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one's selfhood or erase it?
Salman Rushdie
If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.
Virginia Woolf
We are not like you. We do not glory in having power over our own kind." Haghuf turned to walk away. Then as an afterthought added over his shoulder, "Or imagining that we do.
Jaq D. Hawkins
They were the Saturday Club, a secret society of which only the four of them were aware and which none other could join.
Ben Elton
It's all about vanity, isn't it? I think it says something about people if they can't do it
Gwendoline Riley
Then none was for a party;Then all were for the state;Then the great man helped the poor,And the poor man loved the great;Then lands were fairly proportioned;Then spoils were fairly sold;The Romans were like brothersIn the brave days of old.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.
David Mitchell
Disease is a manifestation of human thought because it is ideas, worldviews, and beliefs that create the conditions in which a society can be riddled with disease, strife, and poverty, or can continue in health and harmony.
F. David Peat
But if the individual is to sacrifice a measure of personal liberty within the social contract, then individual rights must be guaranteed by law. Thus, it has been said that, in law, rights are the fence an individual erects around himself for protection against his neighbors.How absurd such a posture must seem from a worldview in which the individual emerges out of the society, rather than the other way around.
F. David Peat
If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.
Isaiah Berlin
From the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.
Idries Shah
☺☺ When a man gets you 99, he starts to think, he may only have another 10 years of sexy lovemaking left... Still Smiling At 99. ☺☺
Michael Levy
☺☺ When a man gets to 99, he starts to think, he may only have another 10 years of sexy lovemaking left... Still Smiling At 99. ☺☺
Michael Levy
Be sure that if you are unhappily celebrated for either beauty, wit, intellect, or all three together, half society wishes you dead already, and the other half tries to make you as wretched as possible while you are alive.
Marie Corelli
...unquestioning automatonsblindly marching to the beat -an eerie crunching soundhoards of shuffling feet...(from silent moments)
Muse
I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We are poor indeed if we are only sane.
D.W. Winnicott
Chromatacia…society…ruled by a colortocracy…social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.
Jasper Fforde
...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.
Matt Ridley
So the organisation of society on the basis of functions, instead of on the basis of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest is not service but gain. It means, in the third place, that the obligation for the maintenance of the service shall rest upon the professional organisations of those who perform it, and that, subject to the supervision and criticism of the consumer, those organisations shall exercise so much voice in the government of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is discharged.
R.H. Tawney
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaCommunity: Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.
Idries Shah
Social ascendency, innocently disguised as high fashion, good taste or prestigious expenditure, was the same the world over.
John Keay
With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.
William Golding
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPatience: A support for the disappointed.
Idries Shah
Causes: As important a fact as any individual cause on earth is the vital incapacity of the human individual to distinguish between genuine cause and one which is foisted upon him by pressure, environment, propaganda, conditioning.If people had the sense they pretend to have, they would seek this fundamental distinction perceptible.Hardly anyone makes this effort. This is partly because it is an invisible but powerful part of their culture to teach that conditioned emotionality and ‘causes’ whose necessity, urgency or rightness is only conditioned into them, are necessarily, right.
Idries Shah
Our culture treats people with depression is as if there is something wrong with them; a biological imbalance best treated with medication. But if it’s impossible to understand biology outside the context of environment, and there is a frightening increase in male suicide and depression, perhaps we need to take a closer look at the other variable - our environment.
Mike Snelle
We live in a society where interacting with government agents is apotentially hazardous activity
Steven Magee
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.
Thomas Hardy
It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society.
Sally Crawford
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaAdherent:Someone who will believe anything except what he should.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaSupporter: Someone who will say anything.
Idries Shah
As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of the machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare, which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch....The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.
George Orwell
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaBribetSubstitute for law, which is a substitute for justice.
Idries Shah
When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart.
Kazuo Ishiguro
How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?
Virginia Woolf
Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.
Kenan Malik
Be a dog, but don't be a younger brother.Proverb.
Idries Shah
Unfortunately, you are far more likely to be harmed or die prematurely as a direct result of modern society than you are from any form of terrorism.
Steven Magee
As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.
Kenan Malik
Well, let's argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn't it so, Mr Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily.
Jean Rhys
It is not uncommon for textbooks on language to have sections on the relationship 'between' language and society, as if these were two independent entities which just happen to come into contact occasionally. My view is that there is not an external relationship 'between' language and society, but an internal and dialectical relationship.
Norman Fairclough
Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, “the average person,” but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is to move forward.
Jerome K. Jerome
But in truth, neither the lonely meditations of the hermit nor the turmulos raptures of the reveller, are capable of satisfying man’s heart. From the one we gather unquiet speculation, from the other satiety. The mind flags beneath the weight of thought, and droops in thee heartless intercourse of those whose sole aim is amusement. There is no fruition in their vacant kindness, and sharp rocs lur beneath the smiling ripples of these shallow waters.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
Angela Carter
To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.
Auberon Herbert
I found most of my friends quite content to be used as tax-material, even though the sums of money taken from them were employed against their own beliefs and interests. They had lived so long under the system of using others, and then in their turn being used by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and looked on this subjecting and using of each other as a part of the necessary and even Providential order of things. The great machine had taken possession of their souls.
Auberon Herbert
In some respects, a society in which the members reach a universal level in which they are anonymous drones by choice is even more frightening than one in which they are forced to be so against their will. When human beings relinquish their individuality and identity of their own volition, they are also relinquishing their claim to being human.
J. Paul Getty
I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.
Terry Pratchett
Make me a shadow on the wall.
Kate Griffin
Corporate terrorism is psychological warfare. Corporate terrorists try to manipulate us and change our behavior by creating fear, uncertainty, and division in society.
Steven Magee
They will notdisappoint you, and you will look upon them morecharitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure
W Somerset Maugham
I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that...
David Mitchell
You should be able to strip a man naked and throw him out with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of a year he should own a business and have money in the bank.
Rick Rescorla
Modern society - everyone thinks getting cancer is a normal aspect of life.
Steven Magee