“I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.”

—  Malcolm Bradbury

Source: Eating People is Wrong (1959), Ch. 5

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world." by Malcolm Bradbury?
Malcolm Bradbury photo
Malcolm Bradbury25
English author and academic 1932–2000

Related quotes

Jerry Brown photo

“I'd shrink government in a minute, if I could shrink GM, Bank of America, and all these immoral corporations that operate by an undemocratic code, with no soul and no conscience.”

Jerry Brown (1938) American politician/lawyer and current governor of California

From an unspecified KPFA-FM radio show program.
[Peter, Waldman, Back to Earth: Jerry Brown, the Voice of New-Age Populism, Gets Down to Business, Wall Street Journal, 10 August 1999]
1999

Robert Peel photo

“I have endeavoured to steer a middle course between the general verbosity of our English statutes, and the extreme brevity of the French criminal code. ... In the bills I have the honour of submitting to the House, a middle course has been steered between the redundancy of our own legal enactments, and the conciseness of the French code.”

Robert Peel (1788–1850) British Conservative statesman

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1827/mar/13/criminal-laws-consolidation-bills#column_1156 in the House of Commons (13 March 1827) on the consolidation of the criminal law <br class="br">Home Secretary

Harper Lee photo

“I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Introduction to 'We're Losing Contact, Captain'" (p.353)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Richard Dawkins photo

“Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

On a hypothetical fetus with Down syndrome https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/statuses/502106262088466432 (20 August 2014) <br class="br">Twitter

“Talking about the particles, I know I don't have any special theory of particles. It's just the way it came out and that's the way I want to do it. Also, there are advantages to particles: you can't break them; they don't break apart. They don’t have any rigid connections; there are no rigid connections to break. The particles are always shifting around a little bit and you have to kick them back into shape. It's like tuning a piano every once in a while. I like the idea of something being permanent by being non-rigid, being absolutely non-rigid but not having a rigid form that can be broken. But a theory of particles, I don’t know. Maybe late one night after a few drinks I explained to Lucy Lippard a theory of particles. I'm sure I didn't remember the next day.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 30

“No progress, either moral or material, can be made in a world which is frozen, like ours, into a rigid mold of suppression of liberties.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 10 (p. 120)

Ezra Pound photo

“Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Dennis Prager photo

“I'm pro-choice, but I believe that most abortions are immoral. I take the nuanced middle ground.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

1990s

Benjamin Disraeli photo

“The English people are, without exception, the most enthusiastic people in the world. There are more excitable races. The French, the Italians, are much more excitable; but for deep and fervid feeling, there is no race in the world at all equal to the English. And what is the subject, of all others, upon which the English people have been most enthusiastic? Religion. The notes on the gamut of their feeling are few, but they are deep. Industry, Liberty, Religion, form the solemn scale. Industry, Liberty, Religion — that is the history of England.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in Wycombe (30 October 1862), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860&ndash;1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 98.

Related topics