"Man is a hating rather than a loving animal."
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Quote collection
Rebecca West quotes (page 8 of 11)
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought."
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"There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists."
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"All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm."
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"Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world."
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"For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition."
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"one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all."
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"the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain."
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"it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult."
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"Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her."
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"The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved."
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"A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness."
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"Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned."
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"After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking."
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"When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!"
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"To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself."
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"Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it."
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"Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is a cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone along with the rest of revealed religion, it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument."
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"There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one."
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"If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution."
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