“Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.”

—  W.B. Yeats

Letter to Olivia Shakespear (24 March 1927)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought." by W.B. Yeats?
W.B. Yeats photo
W.B. Yeats 255
Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939

Related quotes

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just photo

“I am not of any faction, I will fight them all.”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) military and political leader

Je ne suis d'aucune faction, je les combattrai toutes.
Discours pour la défense de Robespierre http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/discours/stjust_defense_robespierre_27_07_94.htm, speech to the National Convention (July 27, 1794).

Socrates photo
Steven Wright photo
Denis Healey photo

“No. Absolutely not. I think that the Russians are praying for a Labour victory…praying is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. I think that they would much prefer a Labour government and that the idea that they would prefer a Tory government, I think is utter bunkum, and they [the Soviets] authorized me to say so.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Answering a suggestion that the Soviets would prefer a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher than a Labour government headed by Neil Kinnock at a press conference in Moscow after a meeting with Anatoly Dobrynin (11 May 1987), quoted in E. B. Geelhoed, Margaret Thatcher: In Victory and Downfall, 1987 and 1990 (Greenwood, 1992), pp. 120-1.
1980s

Herbert Marcuse photo
Ernest Gellner photo

“Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class in Mapping the Nation

Pope Gregory I photo
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo
W.B. Yeats photo

“The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.”

I, st. 4
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

Related topics