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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

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
Creativity
Fear
Doesn
Coercion
Flourish
Despotism
Atmosphere

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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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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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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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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
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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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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.
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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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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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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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