36 quotes found
“That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thr...”
“The world, I tell you, is bored -- bored now to the explosive pitch. It's bored by all this incessant war preparation. It is bored by aimless violence, now here, now there. It is tired of hatred po...”
“Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political ...”
“Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldnt one be free? Really free? Guarding ones freedom, wasnt freedom at all. Why cou...”
“They ought not to have let things come to this," he said, but he was never very clear even to himself who or why "They" were nor what "This" was. Some person or persons unknown was to blame. He hat...”
“Common sense and every material reality insisted upon the unification of human life throughout the planet and the socialisation of its elementary needs, and pitted against that was the fact that ev...”
“The essential question was always "Who are these fellows who give us orders? By what warrant? And how do we benefit and how does the world benefit? But they are doing no good to anyone, no real goo...”
“It was his first definite encounter with the wary-eyed, platitudinous, evasive Labour leaders, and he realised at once the formidable barrier ofinert leadership they constituted, between the discon...”
“He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one lit...”
“We have nothing to destroy," said Rud. "All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to d...”
“Public men in America are too public. Too accessible. This sitting on the stoop and being 'just folk' was all very well for local politics and the simple farmer days of a hundred years ago, but it'...”
“You English," said Steenhold."You Americans," said Rud."When you aren't as fresh as paint," he said, "you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I'm amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sor...”
“These politicians impressed him as being the most shortsighted and sceptical men he had ever met. They lived in a little world that was bounded on the one side by "office" and on the other by the c...”
“Things were rather larger, more obvious and rougher on the American side, but the issues were essentially the same. The general public voted and demonstrated, but its voting seemed to lead to nothi...”
“They despite and hate the government more and more, but they don't know how to set about changing it. The country is dying for some sort of lead, and so far all it is getting is a crowd of fresh pr...”
“It doesn't take ten years of study, you don't need to go to the University, to find out that this is a damned good world gone wrong. Gone wrong, because it is being monkeyed with by people too gree...”
“The whole world," he said, "is going Radical again. Fundamentally. In religion. In politics. In law. The Common Man has been trying to get his Radicalism said and done plainly and clearly for a hun...”
“We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense.”
“But nowadays -- Our weakness for the last few years has been the ineffectiveness of the Opposition. This Labour Party has never had the quality of a fighting Opposition. It has just sucked the life...”
“Look at the way people have swung through Communism, Toryism, Liberalism -- in vast blocks. In my father's boyhood you were either a Liberal or a Conservative in England, and there you stuck, and i...”