Storm Jameson Quotations

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

invaders always destroy libraries.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas -- on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor -- unless he means something else, quite different -- is a rogue ...

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses ...