I would like to see a state of society in which every man and woman preferred the old Scottish Sunday to the modern French one. We should then find solid and eternal foundations of character and self-command.
—Ramsay MacDonald (British Head of State)
The advantage of taking an instant dislike to somebody is that it saves time.
—Spike Milligan (Irish Humorist)
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
—Anna Freud (Austrian-British Psychoanalyst)
Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
—Anthony Burgess (English Novelist, Critic)
If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out.
—Jean Kerr (Irish-American Writer)
What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
—Bharati Mukherjee (Indian-American Novelist)
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
—Evelyn Waugh (British Novelist, Satirist)
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
—Kate Chopin (American Novelist, Short-Story Writer)
My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.
—Dashiell Hammett (American Crime Writer)
Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.
—Joseph Schumpeter (Austrian-American Economist)
All beings desire happiness; therefore to all extend your benevolence.
—Mahavamsa (Sri Lankan Narrative History)
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
—Max Beerbohm (British Humorist)
Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable.
—William McIlvanney (Scottish Novelist, Poet)
The very essence of leadership is [that] you have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.
—Theodore Hesburgh (American Catholic Educator)
Anyone who moved through those years [of the Second World War] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
—William Golding (English Novelist)