Quotes by British Authors - Page 529

As with all new inventions, there are upsides and downsides. The commercial drone is no exception. But until robust safeguards have been introduced to protect personal privacy from prying eyes in the skies, the true benefits to society of unmanned aerial vehicles will remain unrealised.
Alex Morritt
Selfishness is not a virtue. Altruism is not a moral weakness. Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.
Darryl Cunningham
Trust cannot, in the real world, be just a matter of personal choice.
David Amerland
We’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard.
Russell Brand
The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives.
Terence Kealey
Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order - and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.
Alain de Botton
People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.
E.M. Forster
A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.
Roger Scruton
Avoid the mindless chaos that pervades vast swathes of society.
Steven Redhead
But when society is the name for such hollow gentlemen and ladies...and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost ourselves in that same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way out.
Charles Dickens
It’s very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I’m rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I’ve beenshockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I’ve been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard—the quiet, dusky cupboard where there’s an odour of stale spices—as much as I can. Butwhen I’ve to come out and into a strong light—then, my dear, I’m a horror!
Henry James
They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
Henry James
Inheritance and culture obscure people’s higher capacities.
Idries Shah
The modern Establishment relies on a mantra of 'There Is No Alternative': potential opposition is guarded against by enforcing disbelief in the idea that there is any other viable way of running society.
Owen Jones
What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?
Chris Cleave
Lily was listening; Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were all listening. But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking; Mr. Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lacking. All of them bending themselves to listen thought, "Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed," for each thought, "The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.
Virginia Woolf
A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she shouldh ave known how to deal with it. It was immesley to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said - what did one say? - Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But, no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immesnse self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.
Virginia Woolf
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.
Virginia Woolf
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.
John Fowles
Every one belongs to every one else.
Aldous Huxley
In the room of holding out an example for imitation, [the nobility] give only a warning to the lower classes of the people, who are taught to despise the boasted pre-eminence of birth, when attached to the meanest actions and most unwarrantable pursuits; and from hence proceeds all the licentiousness and spirit of equality that causes general disturbance.
Eliza Parsons
Mr Judge, Jury & Executioner of Micah Xavier Johnson‬ needs to go to jail as soon as possible – he is a danger to civilized society.
Steven Magee
The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms.
Olivia Laing
A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.
David Pearce
They ought not to have let things come to this," he said, but he was never very clear even to himself who or why "They" were nor what "This" was. Some person or persons unknown was to blame. He hated these unknowns in general. But he was unable to focus his hatred into hating some responsible person or persons in particular. If only he could find who it was had neglected to do something, or had done something wrong or messed about with things, they would catch it. He'd get even with them somehow.
H.G.Wells
The correct action as we all know is to back off from EMF/RF exposures as a global society.
Steven Magee
In an ideal world, no one would need a therapy. In this world, many people did but didn’t get it for a variety of reasons. Liam believed some of them turned to the world of doms and subs.
Jane Davitt
Decades of corporate government deregulation and reduced funding of important government departments has the country well along the path to a lawless society.
Steven Magee
When it comes to dress, we are supposedly free to wear whatever we want - but if this is the case, why do we wear such similar clothes? Why are we choosing to wear shoes that are almost perfectly designed to make walking as difficult as possible?
Caroline Criado-Pérez
We live in the irradiated lazy indoor cancer society.
Steven Magee
It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion—as distinct from a transient fit of appetite—that makes more towering promises than any other emotion. No doubt all our desires makes promises, but not so impressively. To be in love involves the almost irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. Hence all seems to be at stake. If we miss this chance we shall have lived in vain. At the very thought of such a doom we sink into fathomless depths of self-pity.Unfortunately these promises are found often to be quite untrue. Every experienced adult knows this to be so as regards all erotic passions (except the one he himself is feeling at the moment). We discount the world-without-end pretensions of our friends’ amours easily enough. We know that such things sometimes last—and sometimes don’t. And when they do last, this is not because they promised at the outset to do so. When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.If we establish a “right to (sexual) happiness” which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it.
C.S. Lewis
A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity, but this does not happen to those qualities of personality —women don’t really care two cents about our looks—by which we hold women. Thus in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.
C.S. Lewis
I was finished with assuming the best intentions of those who abandoned me, done trying to assuage my loneliness in barren places.
Saleem Haddad
But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is a class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.
Owen Jones
See, the world is narrowing. We each live in a bubble of attitude. Everything tailored for us. No happenstance, only what I already am and know. At a certain point I find my shape is less here.' A palm flat on his chest. 'More out there.' Laying the palm on his keyboard.
Matthew Blakstad
Almost every day I am reminded of Saadi's reflection that there is no senseless tyranny like that of subordinates.
Idries Shah
A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely
Christopher J. Nolan
In a world of chemically induced sanity, a little lunacy confers immense advantages.
Iain Pears
People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence cases to have any point of meaning
Aldous Huxley
Son, in life you do not fight battles because you expect to win......you fight them merely because they need to be fought.-Snagglepuss
Mark Russell
I try not to speak to critics. It only encourages them.-Snagglepuss
Mark Russell
The world is on fire, young man. As writers, it is only proper that we do what we can to warn people.But in telling the truth to the world, don't lie to yourself. Write whatever you want. Tell the truth. Just don't imagine that you are changing anything.Like I said, people just want to have a good time. -Snagglepuss
Mark Russell
...American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.
Jhumpa Lahiri
A million years ago - some hairy bastard daubed a horse on the wall of his cave, he saw it, he drew it - well done! Flash forward: 'Hello, welcome to my vlog. Today I bought a plum
Patrick Marber
This society doesn't work without booze – our parties aren't good enough, our conversations aren't sufficiently interesting, nor is our self-confidence high enough to sustain our interactions without alcohol. It's everywhere, lubricating everything.
David Mitchell
Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world—the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities.As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave
R.D. Laing
In less than a decade, social media is one of those things that has become part of the fabric of society. It is also something about which everyone has an opinion. At some point in a dinner party, someone tends to malign social media for being full of updates about lunch or photos of pets. Life is full of froth. It is the mundane that makes us human. The seemingly inconsequential tidbits we share help us forge social bonds and bring us closer together.
Alfred Hermida
the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...
Robert Galbraith
We live in a society where those in the know use radiation resistance health techniques.
Steven Magee
Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong with them. Everyone is extremely hard to live with. 
Alain de Botton
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Modern society is a biological disaster masquerading as progress.
Steven Magee
A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.
Michel Faber
Some critics of trans people have told us that we shouldn’t feel this pain of being denied the legitimacy of our own selves; gender is, of course, just a social construct. I wonder if these people also tell widows not to bother grieving their husbands, because marriage is also just another social construct.
C. N. Lester
Trying to take away someone’s language is usually the first step in trying to change them.
C. N. Lester
It is an Age where any sort of debauchery is tolerated, as long as it brings fame with it.
Ian Pears
As an individual I stand out.As a member of society, you don't.
Anthony T.Hincks
The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.
D.H. Lawrence
I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies....
Thomas Hardy
Don't be a slave to society!
Anthony T.Hincks