Quote

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

Rebecca West

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Drop
Sleep
Nations
Pears
Many
Sleepy
Men
Treason
Like
Veins
Rebellion
Soft

More quotes by Rebecca West

Image
It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
Rebecca West
Image
Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Rebecca West
Image
I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.
Rebecca West
Image
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Rebecca West
Image
Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.
Rebecca West
Image
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
Rebecca West
Image
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
Image
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.'
Rebecca West
Image
If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.
Rebecca West
Image
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.
Rebecca West
Image
... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
Rebecca West
Image
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Rebecca West
Image
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
Image
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.
Rebecca West
Image
A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
Rebecca West
Image
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West
Image
it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
Rebecca West
Image
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
Image
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
Rebecca West
Image
It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
Rebecca West