“Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own.”

—  Clive James

'Raymond Aron' p. 35
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

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

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whet…" by Clive James?
Clive James photo
Clive James151
Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019

Related quotes

Keir Hardie photo

“Almost without exception, the early Christian Fathers whose teachings have come down to us spoke out fearlessly against usury, which includes interest also, and on the side of Communism. They proclaimed that, inasmuch as nature had provided all things in common, it was sinful robbery for one man to own more than another, especially if that other was in want. The man who gathered much whilst others had not enough, was a murderer.”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 39

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 116)

“Since Stark had come back from the Otherworld, he'd been too weak and out of it to do much more than eat, sleep, and play computer games with Seoras, which was actually a super weird sight, it was like high school meets Braveheart meets Call of Duty.”

P. C. Cast book Awakened

Source: Awakened

Gerald Ford photo

“It is only as the temporary representatives and servants of the people that we meet here, we bring no hereditary status or gift of infallibility, and none follows us from this place.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

State of the Union Address (12 January 1977)
1970s

Leonard Cohen photo

“Well, I've been waiting, I was sure
we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for
I think it's time to board another
Please understand, I never had a secret chart
to get me to the heart of this
or any other matter”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Jack McDevitt photo

“Max was the exception. He had no taste for military life or for the prospect of getting shot at. His father, Colonel Maxwell E. Collingwood, USAF (retired), to his credit, tried to hide his disappointment in his only son. But it was there nonetheless, and Max had, on more than one occasion, overheard him wondering aloud to Max’s mother whether there was anything at all to genetics.”

Jack McDevitt book Ancient Shores

Source: Ancient Shores (1996), Chapter 2 (p. 17)

“It had not been precisely a fruitful meeting, but it had been a long one.”

Avram Davidson (1923–1993) novelist

Vergil in Averno (1987)

“It is hardly correct to speak of these meetings as ‘lectures’, although this is what Wittgenstein called them. For one thing, he was carrying on original research in these meetings. He was thinking about certain problems in a way that he could have done had he been alone. For another thing, the meetings were largely conversation.”

Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) American philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958

Samuel Butler photo

“We meet people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

David Attenborough photo

“An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras that we need to explore this miniature world. But when we meet its inhabitants face to face, we suddenly realise that their behaviour can be just as meaningful to us as the behaviour of many animals more our own size.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Opening narration
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

Related topics