Quotes from John Carey

Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt... reading releases you from the limits of yourself.

literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning.

The greatest hindrance to growth in faith is comfortable living.

Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge.

One of history's most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.

Dickens' hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius. The heroes and heroines have no imagination. We could scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs. Gamp or Pecksniff or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably.

Thomas Malthus (1766– 1834), mathematician and clergyman, published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 , arousing a storm of abuse and controversy. By applying scientific thought to the question of population, which no one had done before, he contrived to show that it was impossible – despite the dreams of Utopian philosophers – for the whole of mankind to live in happiness and plenty.

By 1853 New York alone had 86 studios. The enormous demand for family pictures was due partly to the high nineteenth-century mortality rates, especially among children. "Secure the shadow ere the substance fade, Let Nature imitate what Nature made," ran the advertising slogan.

For the primary function of culture in Gissing's scheme of things was to segregate him from other people. To qualify as culture, knowledge had to be abstruse.

Man's view of the gorilla illustrates in a dramatic way the change from slaughter to conservation that distinguishes modern attitudes to wildlife. To nineteenth-century explorers and naturalists gorillas were evil.

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. George Orwell, cited by John Carey

Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War 1. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry, which requires more than 10 bits of information to understand. Carl Sagan