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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
Powerful
Stink
Hypocrite
Agent
Hypocrisy
Agents
Likely
Rate
Nostrils
Destruction
Stinks

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Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
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Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.
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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?
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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
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But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
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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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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
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Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.
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