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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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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
Show
Betterment
Shows
Gathering
Human
Gas
Humans
Tendency
Unfortunately
Tendencies
Laughing
Either
Gatherings

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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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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.
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Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
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After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.
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The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
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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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To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
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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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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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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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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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.
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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
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She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
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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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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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