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It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Empires
Propaganda
Considered
Degree
Degrees
Probable
Rule
Duration
May
Rulers
Believe
Empire

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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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