Beatrice Webb Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.

Beatrice Webb
Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.

Beatrice Webb
If a weakly mortal is to do anything in the world besides eat the bread thereof, there must be a determined subordination of the whole nature to the one aim no trifling with time, which is passing, with strength which is only too limited.

Beatrice Webb
.. if I had been a man, self-respect, family pressure and the public opinion of my class would have pushed me into a money-making profession; as a mere woman I could carve out a career of disinterested research.

Beatrice Webb
Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.

Beatrice Webb
Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people.

Beatrice Webb
The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal — a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.

Beatrice Webb
Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

Beatrice Webb
I never visualised labour as separate men and women of different sorts and kinds…labour was an abstraction, which seemed to denote an arithmetically calculable mass of human beings, each individual a repetition of the other.

Beatrice Webb
All along the line, physically, mentally, morally, alcohol is a weakening and deadening force.

Beatrice Webb
The middle man governs, however extreme may seem to be the men who sit on the Front Bench, in their reactionary or revolutionary opinions.

Beatrice Webb
Restless, almost intolerably so, without capacity for sustained and unexcited labour, egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality, not of intellect but of character.
Of Winston Churchill

Beatrice Webb
The possession of wealth, and especially the inheritance of wealth, seems almost invariably to sterilize genius.

Beatrice Webb
The religion of science was an implicit faith that by the methods of physical science, and by these methods alone, could be solved all the problems arising out of the relation of man to man and of man towards the universe.

Beatrice Webb
That part of the Englishman's nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.

Beatrice Webb
Are all Cabinets congeries of little autocrats with a super-autocrat presiding over them?

Beatrice Webb
If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room full of people, I would say to myself, 'You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world, why should you be frightened?'

Beatrice Webb