Doris Lessing Quotes

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

There's a way that white people and black people spoke in the '70s that is nothing like how they speak now. They spoke from a soul, actually. There's a singsongy way of walking and talking that's just different now.

I have for a very long time dreamed of an association, in which the members, instead of preying on one another and seeking to put one another down, after the fashion of this world, should live together as brotherhood, seeking one another's elevation and spiritual growth. But the materials of such a community I have not seen.

The Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal despotism of China, were very fit instruments for carrying those nations up to the point of civilization which they attained. But having reached that point, they were brought to a permanent halt for want of mental liberty and individuality.

I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements, nor bigoted to the practices of our forefathers. It is that bigotry which keeps the Indians in a state of barbarism in the midst of the arts and would have kept us in the same state even now

Let the Anglo- Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the non- Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which has remained the most distinctively 'American,' the South. Let him ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how superior this native civilization is to the great 'alien' states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have self- consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how much wis more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fat is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas—but sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.

We need to provide an education which teaches crit­ical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.

The message that we must send to North Korea is twofold: If the North Korean regime believes that it can defend and protect itself through nuclear and missile programs, that is a misjudgment. But if North Korea gives up its nuclear program, we will help it secure and develop itself. We must consistently send these two messages.

A run has never returned me exactly the same. I go, I grow.

the moment you stop learning, you stop leading.

Growth today is an investment for tomorrow.

The connection between women's human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development and peace is increasingly apparent.

Evolution is the secret for the next step.

I'm good with dialect. Some actors do it immediately; other actors never quite get it. It's something I've always really enjoyed and something I've always been pretty fast with.

Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.

With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.

Invest in your brain, invest in your talents. Those things can appreciate and they get better as you get older.

America's development began with a large-scale ethnic cleansing, unprecedented in human history.