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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.

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
Death
Hedgerows
Nature
Meanest
Used
English
Great
City
Men
Streets
Cities
Violence
Lives
Companionable

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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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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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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
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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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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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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 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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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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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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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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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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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
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