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... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.

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
Never
Instantly
Unnecessary
Followed
Period
Killing
Periods
Necessary
History
Killings

More quotes by Rebecca West

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I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.
Rebecca West
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Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
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I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
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The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
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Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.
Rebecca West
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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?
Rebecca West
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He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West
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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
Rebecca West
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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Rebecca West
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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
Rebecca West
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The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
Rebecca West
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Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.
Rebecca West
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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
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Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West