J.B. Priestley Quotes (35 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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An Inspector Calls

J.B. Priestley

J.B. Priestley: 35 quotes0 likes

Famous J.B. Priestley Quotes

“I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.”

J.B. Priestley

“Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”

J.B. Priestley

“We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”

J.B. Priestley An Inspector Calls

Source: An Inspector Calls

“Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”

J.B. Priestley

"The Disillusioned", in The Balconinny, and Other Essays ([1929] 1969) p. 30.

“I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.”

J.B. Priestley I Have Been Here Before

I Have Been Here Before, Act III.

“Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators.”

J.B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley, "The War - And After", in Horizon magazine (January 1940), reprinted in War Decade : An Anthology of the 1940s (1989) by Andrew Sinclair

J.B. Priestley Quotes about life

“I suppose -- in the last resort -- you trust life -- or you don't. Well -- I don't. There's something malicious... corrupt... cruel... at the heart of it. We don't belong. We're a mistake.”

J.B. Priestley I Have Been Here Before

I Have Been Here Before, Act II.

“But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us -- the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.”

J.B. Priestley Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 60.

“Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.”

J.B. Priestley Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 59-60.

“We know only too well that there are times when everything goes wrong, but, in our haste to make the worst of life, we are apt to forget that there are also times when everything goes right.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Faraway (1932), Ch. 5. 5

“Cathedral cities, market towns, ports forgotten by the sea, spas long out of fashion, all these can decay beautifully, and often their charm increases as the life ebbs out of them. Industrial towns, like steam-engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away.”

J.B. Priestley

Bk 2, Ch. 6. ii
The Good Companions (1929)

“In our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.
On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 8, p. 183

J.B. Priestley Quotes about time

“Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness – when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be.”

J.B. Priestley

International Herald Tribune, January 3, 1978.

“We tend quite rightly to associate an age with its newest and most original ideas, and there is no harm in this as long as we remember that only a few men, at that time, may have actually held those ideas, and that many decades, often amounting to centuries, may pass before those ideas have seeped down to wider and commoner levels of belief, thought, and feeling.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 6, p. 140

J.B. Priestley

J.B. Priestley Quotes

“I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.”

J.B. Priestley

Saturn Over the Water (1961) ch. 2.

“We cannot go forward and build up this new world order, and this is our war aim, unless we begin to think differently…one must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. Property is the old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things in that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property; instead of thinking of a country as the home of a living society with the community itself as the first test.”

J.B. Priestley

BBC Radio Broadcast, July 21, 1940. Reprinted in Priestley, Postscripts, William Heinemann Limited, 1940, and All England Listened: The Wartime Broadcasts of J.B. Priestley, Chilmark Press, 1968.

“Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.”

J.B. Priestley

International Herald Tribune, January 3, 1978.

“In plain words; now that Britain has told the world she has the H-Bomb, she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject, in all circumstances, nuclear warfare. This is not pacifism. There is no suggestion here of abandoning the immediate defence of this island... No, what should be abandoned is the idea of deterrence-by-threat-of-retaliation. There is no real security in it, no decency in it, no faith, hope, nor charity in it.”

J.B. Priestley

"Britain and the Nuclear Bombs", The New Statesman, 2 November 1957. This article led to the creation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

“Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something suspiciously bovine about them.”

J.B. Priestley

"The Dark Hours", in Too Many People, and Other Reflections http://books.google.com/books?id=WXRMy9eD_GkC&q=&quot;Those+no+sooner+have+I+touched+the+pillow+people+are+past+my+comprehension+There+is+something+suspiciously+bovine+about+them&quot;&pg=PA80#v=onepage (1928).

“In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: The English (1973).

“I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.”

J.B. Priestley book English Journey

English Journey, 1934. Reprinted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton Writing Englishness: An Introductory Sourcebook,Routledge, 2003 (p. 26).

“Our great-grand-children, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.”

J.B. Priestley

"Postscript to the News", broadcast on BBC radio, June 5, 1940; published in The Listener, June 13, 1940.

“It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.”

J.B. Priestley

The New Statesman, July 20, 1962, p. 7.

“Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning.”

J.B. Priestley

"A Coincidence," http://books.google.com/books?id=vmpHAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Although+we+talk+so+much+about+coincidence+we+do+not+really+believe+in+it+in+our+heart+of+hearts+we+think+better+of+the+universe+we+are+secretly+convinced+that+it+is+not+such+a+slipshod+haphazard+affair+that+everything+in+it+has+meaning%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage Going Up Stories and Sketches (1950)

“Because most children are highly imaginative, it is supposed by some that to reach maturity we ought to leave imagination behind, like the habit of smearing our faces with jam or chocolate. But an adult in whom imagination has withered is mentally lame and lopsided, in danger of turning into a zombie or a murderer. It is the creative imagination that has given our ruthless bloodthirsty species its occasional gleams of nobility, its hope of rising above the muck it spreads.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 12, p. 305

“A man must be either conscientiously scientific in his approach or frankly speculative. What he must not do is present his speculative untested ideas in a manner and style of dogmatic certainty that they are not entitled to claim. This is being pseudo-scientific.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 11, p. 271

“Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 10, p. 253

“It is, of course, men who are more likely to inhibit themselves for the sake of appearing to be sensible and dependable.[…] If pressed, I will agree that more women than men wish to appear wonderfully sensitive and intuitive, and may stop being realistic […] in order to deceive themselves and other people. On the other hand, women in general tend to be more realistic and yet in certain matters more open-minded than men, more ready to resist that pressure of opinion. They are less likely to be put into blinkers by ideas.
Moreover […] as a rule the average woman notices far more than the average man; she has a better eye for detail than he has; she makes a more alert witness.”

J.B. Priestley

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 8, p. 182