
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 38
The Issue (1908)
Context: If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.
Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 38
Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures : My Life with Autism (Expanded Edition).Westminster, MD, USA: Knopf Publishing Group, 2006.
"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)
Theodore Dalrymple remembers Ken Saro-Wiwa - and asks, if unearned income from oil has done so much harm to Nigeria, will increased unearned aid flows not do similar harm to Africa as a whole? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000708.php (January 3, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)
“Had I been a dictator, I would still be governing.”
Speech (December 31, 1995), quoted in "Las frases para el bronce de Pinochet."
1990s
“I would have been happier had he also found a series of intelligent answers”
Conservative Political Centre Lecture (11 October 1968) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101632
Backbench MP
Context: One of the effects of the rapid spread of higher education has been to equip people to criticise and question almost everything. Some of them seem to have stopped there instead of going on to the next stage which is to arrive at new beliefs or to reaffirm old ones. You will perhaps remember seeing in the press the report that the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit has been awarded a degree on the result of his past work. His examiners said that he had posed a series of most intelligent questions. Significant? I would have been happier had he also found a series of intelligent answers.
Major Michael Hogan, commenting on Sharpe's apparent death, p. 179
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)