"Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man."
"At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer."
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Source: Leonard Woolf (1939). “Barbarians Within and Without”
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"The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentists drill."
"Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable."
"There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class."
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"Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face"."