P. D. James - People Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

P. D. James
That's another aspect of the revolutionary struggle, getting to know people's decencies and using them against them.

P. D. James
All these problems are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.

P. D. James
He was too reticent himself to have any stomach for the emotional prying which gives to many people the comforting illusion that they care.

P. D. James
I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

P. D. James
Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.

P. D. James
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

P. D. James
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

P. D. James
That was one of the things he deplored about the loss of religion, it meant that people elevated politics into a religious faith and that was dangerous.

P. D. James
Gabriel has a personality like a hexagon. People need touch only one side for an illusion of closeness.

P. D. James
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

P. D. James
I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.

P. D. James
Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not Governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future.

P. D. James
The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

P. D. James