Interview with John Humphrys on The Today Program (23 December 2006)
“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”
Source: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 19
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J.M. Coetzee 61
South African writer 1940Related quotes
Source: Middlemarch (1871), Chapter 1 (misprinted as "Some people did" in some editions, such as Penguin Signet Classics).
On William Makepeace Thackeray Ch. II: The Great Victorian Novelists (p. 65)
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
“What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.”
Address at Princeton University, "The Educated Citizen" (22 March 1954) http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/stevenson/adlai1954.html
Context: What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws — all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages — are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all.
What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions — a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love — the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see.
Book Five : "Mundus Vult Decepi", Ch. XXIX : The Grumbler's Progress
The Silver Stallion (1926)