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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
Money
Governments
Government
Generosity
People
Generous
Individuals
Safety
Virtue
Future
Individual

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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
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All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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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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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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