Quotes by Waugh, Evelyn

"Other nations use force; we Britons alone use Might."

Waugh, Evelyn on empire
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"We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them."

Waugh, Evelyn on friends and friendship
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"The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish."

Waugh, Evelyn on heaven
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"If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles."

Waugh, Evelyn on journalism and journalists
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"Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything."

Waugh, Evelyn on manners
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"News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead."

Waugh, Evelyn on news
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"It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste."

Waugh, Evelyn on paradise
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"An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along."

Waugh, Evelyn on art
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"Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak."

Waugh, Evelyn on autobiography
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"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying."

Waugh, Evelyn on prison
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"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."

Waugh, Evelyn on punctuality
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"In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse."

Waugh, Evelyn on quotations
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"Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God."

Waugh, Evelyn on saints
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"That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down."

Waugh, Evelyn on school
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"If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be."

Waugh, Evelyn on science
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"All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day."

Waugh, Evelyn on sex
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"Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography."

Waugh, Evelyn on biography
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"If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

Waugh, Evelyn on censorship
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"One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die."

Waugh, Evelyn on words
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"What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen."

Waugh, Evelyn on youth
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"His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death."

Waugh, Evelyn on courtesy
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"Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression."

Waugh, Evelyn on crime and criminals
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