Quote

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.

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
Principle
Expenditures
Survival
Enabled
Species
Prevents
Principles
Aristocracy
Full
Stimulus
Energy
Avoiding
World
Unnecessary
Stimuli
Survive
Expenditure

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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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He is every other inch a gentleman.
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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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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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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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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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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.
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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.
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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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A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
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The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup.
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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
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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.
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I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
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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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To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
Rebecca West