Rebecca West - Human Quotes

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Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

Rebecca West
Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.

Rebecca West
Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

Rebecca West
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

Rebecca West
Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

Rebecca West
It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Rebecca West
I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.

Rebecca West
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: It seemed a good idea at the time.

Rebecca West
Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

Rebecca West
Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.

Rebecca West
Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

Rebecca West
He belonged to the vast order of human beings who cannot be loyal to their beloved if a stranger jeers.

Rebecca West
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

Rebecca West