“They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted.”
The Drowning Pool (1952)
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Ross Macdonald 14
Novelist 1915–1983Related quotes
Prime Minister's Questions (19 April 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=105294. The use of 'frit', an unusual Lincolnshire dialect abbreviation of 'frightened' which Mrs Thatcher evidently recalled from childhood, was missed by MPs in a noisy chamber but heard very distinctly on the audio feed from the chamber.
First term as Prime Minister
As quoted in "‘Hanoi Hannah’ Fondly Remembers Her Role" in Los Angeles Times (4 April 1998) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-apr-04-mn-35911-story.html
Post war
Quoted in The Fine Art of Political Wit by Leon Harris (1964)
This is the voice of our conscience, telling us of the righteousness of God. And since conscience is the perfect interpreter of life, what it tells us is no question, no riddle, no problem, but a fact — the deepest, innermost, surest fact of life: God is righteous. Our only question is what attitude toward the fact we ought to take.
We shall hardly approach the fact with our critical reason. The reason sees the small and the larger but not the large. It sees the preliminary, but not the final, the derived but not the original, the complex but not the simple. It sees what is human but not what is divine.
We shall hardly be taught this fact by men.
"The Righteousness of God" (1916) in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928) as translated by Douglas Horton; this passage begins with a quote of Isaiah 40:3-5; often quoted alone has been the phrase following it: "Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life."