"Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth."

Lawrence, D. H. on Decadence
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"You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies."

Lawrence, D. H. on Democracy
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"The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else."

Lawrence, D. H. on Democracy
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"Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."

Lawrence, D. H. on Design
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"But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more."

Lawrence, D. H. on Effort
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"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

Lawrence, D. H. on Endurance
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"The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent."

Lawrence, D. H. on Equality
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"Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar."

Lawrence, D. H. on Ethics
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"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."

Lawrence, D. H. on Evil
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"We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong."

Lawrence, D. H. on Exile
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"The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure."

Lawrence, D. H. on Flowers
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"Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was."

Lawrence, D. H. on Freedom
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"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority."

Lawrence, D. H. on Generations
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"America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact."

Lawrence, D. H. on America
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"America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it."

Lawrence, D. H. on America
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"God is only a great imaginative experience."

Lawrence, D. H. on God
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"I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?"

Lawrence, D. H. on God
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"Never trust the teller, trust the tale."

Lawrence, D. H. on Gossip
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"The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man."

Lawrence, D. H. on Horses
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"The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up."

Lawrence, D. H. on Humankind
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"That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction."

Lawrence, D. H. on Insects
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"Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him."

Lawrence, D. H. on Institutions
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"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."

Lawrence, D. H. on Intelligence and Intellectuals
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"The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept."

Lawrence, D. H. on Intuition
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"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter."

Lawrence, D. H. on Letters
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