“…1660 virtually starts a new era - an era in which the old land-owning class sinks and the new middle-class rises, an era too in which the English character seems to have become subtly changed. A sense of guilt seems to permeate all pleasure, and this has continued to the present day…. the many living monuments to Puritan rule…. the Englishman’s peculiar restraint - the coldness that repels so many Africans and Asians, an unwillingness to ‘let oneself go’.”
Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)
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Anthony Burgess 297
English writer 1917–1993Related quotes

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 223

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 36

Quotes, IPI speech (2000)
Context: We are now in a new era. To label this time "the post-Cold War era" belies its uniqueness and its significance. We are now in a Global Age. Like it or not, we live in an age when our destinies and the destinies of billions of people around the globe are increasingly intertwined. When our grand domestic and international challenges are also intertwined. We should neither bemoan nor naively idealize this new reality. We should deal with it.
Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 446.

“Our characters change as world eras change, as our features change, slowly from day to day.”
Arthur's commentary
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Our characters change as world eras change, as our features change, slowly from day to day. Nothing is sudden in this world. Inch hy inch; drop by drop; line by line. Even when great convulsions shatter down whole nations, cities, monarchies, systems, human fortunes, still they are but the finish, the last act of the same long preparing, slowly devouring change, in which the tide of human affairs for ever ebbs and flows, without haste, and without rest.

The historical extempore speech at the Reserve Officers' College (1959)

Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: They call you "Little Man", "Common Man"; they say a new era has begun, the "Era of the Common Man". It isn't you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labour leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesman and philosophers. They give you your future but don't ask about your past.
Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter Ten, Emergent International Economic Order, p. 406