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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Cyril Connolly

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Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
People
Places
Civilization
Blot
Number
Prisons
Numbers
Maintained
Small
Altogether
Literature
Bombs
Need
Terrorism
Needs
Prison

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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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We create the world in which we live if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
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Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
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