Quotes by British Authors - Page 605

I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?
Terry Pratchett
I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.
Alan Bennett
It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in a people. They grow used to the unthinkable,and sometimes they may look back and even wonder when things changed. Theywill not find a day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learnto ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.
Charles Morgan
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.
Michael Oakeshott
For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.
D.H. Lawrence
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
Douglas Adams
Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.
Frank Harris
For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old, crafty, secret murderer. How horrible! And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death.
Robert S. Hichens
We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
Virginia Woolf
Just a bullet a bag and a dream that's all I had now look at what I got
Saira Viola
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Bill Bryson
I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people.
Terry Pratchett
How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?
William Wilberforce
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
Christopher Hitchens
The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.
John Bowlby
Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character
Robert Browning
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.
Lionel Shriver
We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s become, of being different.
David Icke
Though we longed not to be lonely, we also feared the pain it would take us to be brought out of our lonely states. And after that fear, could we be guaranteed that we would never be returned to a state of loneliness again? We could not.
Edward Carey
I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.
John Wyndham
Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?
Julian Barnes
If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.
Oliver Sacks
There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. (...) However bad life may seem (...) While there’s life, there is hope.
Stephen Hawking
We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
William Golding
[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
Karen Armstrong
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
Arthur C. Clarke
If there is one sound the follows the march of humanity, it is the scream.
David Gemmell
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.
C.S. Lewis
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
J.K. Rowling
We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
Angela Carter
Those who understand the true nature of humanity are always loners
Dean Cavanagh
We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.
Jane Goodall
But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.
Aldous Huxley
And just when you’d think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.
Terry Pratchett
Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.
Terry Pratchett
Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring.
Terry Pratchett
You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.
Paul Gallico
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
C.S. Lewis
The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, were being ashamed of what they were, lying about it, trying to be somebody else. Honesty was Fats' currency, his weapon and defense. It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them. Other people, Fats had discovered, were mired in embarrasment and pretense, terrified that their truths might leak out, but Fats was attracted by rawness, by everything that was ugly but honest, by the dirty things about which the likes of his father felt humiliated and disgusted. Fats thought a lot about messiahs and pariahs; about men labeled mad or criminal; noble misfits shunned by the sleepy masses.
J.K. Rowling
Trees're always a relief, after people.
David Mitchell
Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.What precipitates acts? B
David Mitchell
Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
D.H. Lawrence
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,and when we escape like squirrels turning in thecages of our personalityand get into the forests again,we shall shiver with cold and frightbut things will happen to usso that we don't know ourselves.Cool, unlying life will rush in,and passion will make our bodies taut with power,we shall stamp our feet with new powerand old things will fall down,we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up likeburnt paper.
D.H. Lawrence
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become.
Brooke Foss Westcott
Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.
Mark Lawrence
She felt so human that he could barely carry on a conversation.
l.a weatherly
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis
The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
Terry Pratchett
The Doctor: Amazing. Nancy: What is? The Doctor: 1941. Right now, not very far from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing. Until one tiny, damp little island says "No. No, not here." A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing, the lot of you. I don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me.
Steven Moffat
I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "what jolly fun"!
Walter Alexander Raleigh
A dog has one aim in life... to bestow his heart.
J.R. Ackerley
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
Terry Pratchett
Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.
Terry Pratchett
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope
We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.
Rudyard Kipling
Deep is the chasm between the centuries, but by bridging it a man may return home.
David C. Douglas
But maybe all it needs is a moment to change the course of history.
Sally Gardner
Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victim hood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changes on both sides." Baron Baghdassarian
Elif Shafak