Ann Bridge Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Shall I tell you what those words have really come to mean? 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Comfort.' But happiness has escaped their grasp, to judge by all the usual signs.

Ann Bridge
We should be careful not to let machinery swamp life. That we should be sure, when we are confronted with a fresh mechanical contrivance, that we are not losing more than we gain by adopting it.

Ann Bridge
The heights of granite and the grassy steep
My spirit in a magic fortrees keep
Where in the silence, singing waters start...

Ann Bridge
Do get over the idea that size has any value or merit. It is the enemy of most of the best things in the world — it is the enemy of the good life.

Ann Bridge
Americans... attach such a fantastic importance to their baths and plumbing and gadgets of all sorts. They talk as if people could hardly be human beings without all that; we in Europe are beginning to wonder if people can be human beings with it...

Ann Bridge
The full life depends, not on the range of experience but on the intensity of the interest, the emotion involved, and on its being a personal interest.

Ann Bridge
As soon as you start asking what education is for, what the use of it is, you're abandoning the basic assumption of any true culture, that education is worth while for its own sake.

Ann Bridge
The essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste.

Ann Bridge
I do disapprove of the modern attitude that you can't do the simplest thing, like dying or being born, in your own house.

Ann Bridge
There is that wish, in the name of democracy, to level down, because high cultural standards are despised and rejected, and even feared, in our Western Democracies. Don't let anyone else have what I've not got, or can't enjoy! - is the secret theory. A very large number of writers in the British and American popular press profess to be preaching democracy when in fact they are only trying to make envy respectable!

Ann Bridge
What I find most injurious to mankind in modern advertising is the constant appeal to material standards and values, the elevating of material things into an end in themselves, a virtue.

Ann Bridge
In Europe, a product must be good, or it will not sell in competition with other products; with you, it is enough to say that it is good, often enough and sufficiently loudly. The keenest competition is not in the making of things but in the advertising of them!

Ann Bridge