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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
May
Rulers
Believe
Empire
Empires
Propaganda
Considered
Degree
Degrees
Probable
Rule
Duration
More quotes by Doris Lessing
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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
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.
Doris Lessing
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Doris Lessing
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
Doris Lessing
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Doris Lessing
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
Doris Lessing
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
Doris Lessing
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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
I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
