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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
Rule
Duration
May
Rulers
Empire
Believe
Empires
Propaganda
Considered
Degree
Degrees
Probable
More quotes by Doris Lessing
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Doris Lessing
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
Doris Lessing
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
Doris Lessing
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing
Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
Doris Lessing
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
