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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.

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
Humbug
Required
Politician
Listen
Talk
Actually
Hope
Believe
Condone

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Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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[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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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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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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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
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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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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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