Quotes from Iain Pears

Like many who have little to say, he said too much, interrupting without courtsey and favoring with the benefit of his wisdom those who did not desire it.

men had turned their minds to the passion of faction, and learned to despise the old wisdom because they could not read it afresh.

Comrade Kropotkin has argued in the past that Darwinism is but a reflection of capitalism because it emphasises competition and struggle over cooperation and coexistence. It justifies the exploitation of man by man, and strengthens the class ideology of the oppressors." "Excellent. So what will be new today?

and what are we all but information in peculiar packaging?)

I did very much hope that he wasn't frittering away his time on nonsense when he had a fantasy to dream about.

How do we justify calling ourselves civilised, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief ando of common values which strech back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilised if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbours ara massacred, your lanas laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?»

Mr. Milton set out in his great poem to justify the ways of God to men, as he says. He has not considered one question, however: perhaps God has forbidden men to know His ways, for if they did know the full extent of His goodness, and the magnitude of our rejection of it, they would be so disheartened they would abandon all hope of redemption, and die of grief. I

The rolling sound of a good hymn badly sung is particularly evocative.

I should explain how my device worked. It operated by manipulating the ether, that non-existent substance which physicists had rationalised out of their theories on the usual grounds that if it could not be converted into one of their little numbers it could not possibly be there. Einstein's biggest mistake.

An in experienced traveler would imagine that their land contains the finest buildings, the biggest towns, the richest, best-fed, happiest people in the world.

Politeness, I learned at her salon, is a demanding discipline; to convince others without recourse to the tricks of the demagogue or bully requires a high level of intelligence, especially when the audience is learned and intelligent.

Just because your choice is predetermined does not mean you do not have a free choice before you take it (516)

We had become inured to the most horrendous of sins, and thought of them as instruments of policy.

The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions, explain what they meant when they didn't know themselves, show their true place in the awesome progression of mankind.

The dance of capital, the harmony of a balance sheet, and the way these abstractions interact with people, their characters and desires, either as individuals or in a mass. Understand that one is the other, that they are two separate ways of expressing the same thing, and you understand the whole nature of business.

Like the aristocracy, you can tell a reporter's status by his clothes and manners. The worse they are, the higher up they are

I did not like Ravenscliff by instinct, but I was beginning to find him fascinating. A book-reading, socialist-sympathising, child-begetting capitalist fraud.

Yo tengo una teoría: el exceso de conocimiento desequilibra la mente. Se hace un esfuerzo tan grande para adquirir conocimientos que no queda espacio para el sentido común. De La cuarta verdad

The English can lose their friends.

The world was full of such madmen in those days. Imprisonment is not the way to deal with such people; half measures merely feed their pride. Leave 'em alone or hang 'em, in my opinion. Or better still, pack them off to the Americas, and let them starve.

I knew salesmen, they made good murderers.

We are the civilized world, you and I. A few dozen people, with our learning. As long as we continue to stroll through my garden arm in arm, civilization will continue.

For, in his opinion, to study nature was a form of worship.

A te trezi, în Roma ca È™i în oricare alt oraÈ™, e o treab? personal? È™i cel mai bine e s? o rezolvi în liniÈ™te.