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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.

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
Wall
Thread
Bring
Solid
Tell
Division
Saturn
Earth
Glass
Barbarism
Back
Push
Sheet
Think
Glasses
Separates
Thinking
Touch
Sheets
Life
Civilization
Reign

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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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Wise men never grow up indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
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Without humility there can be no humanity.
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You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.
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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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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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The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.
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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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I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.
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Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
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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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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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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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[W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.
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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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We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
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Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.
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But some love not the method of your first Romance they count it, throw't away as dust If I should meet with such, what should I say Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay
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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 charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.
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