“I am late with the new Doris Lessing [The Golden Notebook]. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her…. This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment…. There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural … Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here. [Review in the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post, 1962]”

— Anthony Burgess

People, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing

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

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Anthony Burgess 297

English writer 1917–1993

Quintin Jardine (1945) Scottish writer

From Quintin Jardine’s blog, ‘The Kindle threat’, September 29, 2010.

“I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

China Mieville: "My job is not to try to give readers what they want..." http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2012/sep/20/china-mieville-interview, theguardian.com, Thursday 20 September, 2012.

“I expect that soon the failure of the attempts to transform Russia into a Socialist community by methods of dictatorship will become apparent to all. The failure of the Communist experiment in Russia, however, does not mean the downfall of the Bolshevik regime. The two things are not necessarily linked together. Nay, they are mutually exclusive. The same backwardness that makes Socialism in Russia at the present time impossible favors the strengthening of despotism once it has taken root.”

Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician

Chap. IV, Democracy and Dictatorship
“Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship,” (1934) http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1934/bolshevism/index.htm

“I must and will work to ensure that the new democratic South Africa has a fair chance to succeed economically as well as politically, and to try to assist in fulfilling at least a part of the dream of the oppressed and deprived when the new South Africa is born.”

Harry Schwarz (1924–2010) South African activist

Speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C, April 1991.
As ambassador to the United States
Source: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-05-16/news/1991136167_1_south-africa-schwarz-frances-academy

“I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Said to Sir Louis Mallet by Cobden on his death bed within two days before his death, quoted in Richard Gowing, Richard Cobden (London: Cassell, 1890), p. 130.
1860s

“But the South became a closed society on the eve of the Civil War, and it became a closed society after the end of Reconstruction. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute for some time circulated a book edited by my late friend Mel Bradford, The Essays of Andrew Litell; was one of the Southerners who took their stand in 1931, I think it was. And one of those essays, written in 1934, praised lynching as a legitimate exercise of the reserve powers of the states when the government didn't fulfill its duty to take care of racist agitators. So the South was a closed society on the subject of race right up until World War II.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

“The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”

John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women

Source: The Subjection of Women (1869), Ch. 1

“There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"The Plutonian Fire" http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/o_henry/243/
The Voice of the City (1908)

“My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

.
Letter to Thomas Leiper (11 January 1809). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 89
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

“It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings.”

Sheldon Kopp (1929–1999) American psychotherapist

Source: Even a stone can be a teacher (1985), p. 20

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