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Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

Rebecca West

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Rebecca West
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: December 21
Died: 1983
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Suffragette
Writer
London
England
Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Destruction
Stinks
Powerful
Stink
Hypocrite
Agent
Hypocrisy
Agents
Likely
Rate
Nostrils

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If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
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I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
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... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
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It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
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[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
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There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
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No great thing happens suddenly.
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The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
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For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
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A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
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