Quote

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

P. D. James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Remember
Cease
Soon
Dying
Nation
Worth
Dead
Nations

More quotes by P. D. James

Image
gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P. D. James
Image
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
P. D. James
Image
But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of? That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.
P. D. James
Image
We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
P. D. James
Image
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
P. D. James
Image
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
P. D. James
Image
First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P. D. James
Image
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
Image
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
P. D. James
Image
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?
P. D. James
Image
Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
Image
Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
P. D. James