English Academic Quotes

Malcolm Bradbury
Richard G. Wilkinson
John Masterman
Philip Shuttleworth

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

Malcolm Bradbury
Malcolm Bradbury
Languages, like our bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply the place of those words that are continually falling off through disuse.

Only when people learn to converse will they begin to be equal.

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Philip Shuttleworth
Philip Shuttleworth
It was a great game, and exciting and dramatic and even at times tragic - but funny it emphatically was not.

John Masterman
John Masterman
A stage set should not make a pretty picture of its own. The empty stage should look formal and pleasing, but should seem to be waiting for the action to complete it; it should not hold definite significance in itself.

Here is Hey for Garsington! and Hey for Cuddesdon! and Hey Hockley! but here's nobody cries, Hey for God Almighty!

Instead of exposures to toxic materials and mechanical dangers, we are discovering the toxicity of social circumstances and patterns of social organization.

Richard G. Wilkinson
Richard G. Wilkinson
In science... law has to do not with what ought to be, but with what is; scientific laws are facts reduced to formulae, statements of the habits of things, so to speak.

Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.