Quotes from Nevil Shute

When things like this happen there's just nothing to be done about it; even suffering itself is a mere waste of time.

Many evils spring from power," he said. "Even from the power to do good. All power corrupts, and the intention to do good has little influence on the corruption. Either my words will last after me and be believed by men, or else they won't. Yet if one thing were required to kill them certainly, it is that my words should be spread after my death by the power of money. No teaching could survive a campaign of paid advertising.

I'd say the way to look at it is this. You took a lot of trouble answering letters from a stranger, and maybe some of them were rather stupid questions. I wouldn't know. The fact is that you made a friend, and now this friend's going to a little bit of trouble to help you. That's fair enough. Look at it that way.

You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.