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Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.

P. D. James

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P. D. James
Age: 94 †
Born: 1920
Born: August 3
Died: 2014
Died: November 27
Member Of The House Of Lords
Novelist
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Phyllis Dorothy James
Phyllis Dorothy James
Baroness James of Holland Park
Phyllis James
Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James
People
Generous
Individuals
Safety
Virtue
Future
Individual
Money
Governments
Government
Generosity

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If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
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In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
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It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
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Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.
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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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