Quote

There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.

Rose Macaulay

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Rose Macaulay
Age: 77 †
Born: 1881
Born: April 1
Died: 1958
Died: October 30
Author
Novelist
Writer
Rugby
Warwickshire
Emilie Rose Macaulay
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay
Always
Freedom
Increasing
Would
History
Younger
Time
Ends
Suppose
Thinking
Firsts
Begins
People
First
Rate
Thing
Generation
Much
Generations
Really
Sure

More quotes by Rose Macaulay

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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
Rose Macaulay
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The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees there are no obstructing walls.
Rose Macaulay
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If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.
Rose Macaulay
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The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
Rose Macaulay
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Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.
Rose Macaulay
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Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.
Rose Macaulay
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The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
Rose Macaulay
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As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
Rose Macaulay
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Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.
Rose Macaulay
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A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.
Rose Macaulay
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Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.
Rose Macaulay
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To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.
Rose Macaulay
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The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.
Rose Macaulay
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To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Rose Macaulay
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Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
Rose Macaulay
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We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.
Rose Macaulay
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Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.
Rose Macaulay
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Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.
Rose Macaulay
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It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
Rose Macaulay
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Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that born invaders. They cannot stay at home.
Rose Macaulay