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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

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
Development
Surveillance
Indulgence
Regime
Regimes
Perpetual
Hardly
Total
Conducive
Healthy
Combines

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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
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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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If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
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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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[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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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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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
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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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A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
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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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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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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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