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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

E. M. Forster

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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Willing
Outcomes
Tucked
Liberty
Libertarian
Amidst
Freedom
Admit
Foresee
Fear
Nervous
Nuisance
Away
Praise
Safely
Cannot
Whose
Dangers
Past
Danger
Censorship
Enough
Present
Outcome

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Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
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She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
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Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.
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At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
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Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
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All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
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It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
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Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
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If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
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Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
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Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
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Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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