“He sat looking at it with his eyes protruding in the manner popularized by snails, looking like something stuffed by a taxidermist who had learned his job from a correspondence course and had only got as far as lesson three.”
“Aunt Agatha’s demeanor now was rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.”
“She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.”
Lord Marshmoreton: “I wish I could get you see my point of view.”
George Bevan: “I do see your point of view. But dimly. You see, my own takes up such a lot of the foreground”
1644
John Milton publishes Areopagitica.
The English Civil War had put the Puritan party into power, a movement which had long advocated the end of certain restrictions on freedom of expression, such as the Court of Star Chamber. Once in power, however, the godly were less than eager to resist the powers of censorship. John Milton, himself a Puritan writer, advocated broader free speech in his pamphlet Areopagitica. It remains one of the most powerful pieces of advocacy for freedom of the press.
For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
… as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter.
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governours: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
“A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances.”
“I don’t know why it is, but women who have anything to do with Opera, even if they’re only studying for it, always appear to run to surplus poundage.”
It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.
She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.
Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.