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Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

John Buchan

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John Buchan
Age: 64 †
Born: 1875
Born: August 26
Died: 1940
Died: February 11
Barrister
Biographer
Former Governor General Of Canada
Journalist
Military Personnel
Novelist
Poet
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Perth
Scotland
John Buchan
1st Baron Tweedsmuir
Lord Tweedsmuir
Modern
Modernism
Keep
Folk
Life
Conspiracy
Folks
Silent
Civilization
Pretences
Quiet
Pretence
Comfortable
Compact

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London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
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Wise men never grow up indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
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History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.
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Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.
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In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
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Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.
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I would have been content with any job however thankless, in any quarter however remote, if I had a chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and the solitary place glad.
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It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.
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You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.
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He who would valiant be against all disaster let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.
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I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.
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The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.
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Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self.
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I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.
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Without humility there can be no humanity.
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The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.
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Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.
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Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.
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It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home.
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The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political, were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact, and therefore did not look for new foundations.
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