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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
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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
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More quotes by Doris Lessing
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
Doris Lessing
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.
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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
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
Doris Lessing
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing
Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
Doris Lessing
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
Doris Lessing
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.
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 I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to 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
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
The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
Doris Lessing
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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
