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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
Enough
Present
Outcome
Willing
Outcomes
Tucked
Liberty
Libertarian
Amidst
Freedom
Admit
Foresee
Fear
Nervous
Nuisance
Away
Praise
Safely
Cannot
Whose
Dangers
Past
Danger
Censorship

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Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
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How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
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I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
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It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
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Man can learn everything if he will but try.
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
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I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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