“For years, since the eighteenth century, and in each century since, we have said at home, in England, in Whitehall, that the day would come when our rule in India will end, not bloodily, but in peace, in—so we made… — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“She had devoted her life, in a practical and unimportant way, trying to prove that fear was evil because it promoted prejudice, that courage was good because it was a sign of selflessness, that ignorance was bad because fear sprang from it, that knowledge was good because the more you knew of the world’s complexity the more clearly you saw… — Paul Scott Copy Share
“Unfortunately, there is always an unmapped area of dangerous fallibility between a policy and its pursuit.” — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“a repository sounds like a place for storing furniture when you bash off to some other station. I suppose an Englishman could say that the whole of India is that sort of place. You all went, but left so much behind that you couldn’t carry with you wherever you were going, and these days those of you who come back… — Paul Scott Copy Share
“riot squads were ready to go into action. Although these young English boys (many of them civilians themselves little more than a year ago,… — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“There are images that stay vividly in your mind, even after many years: images coupled with the feeling that at the same time came… — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“There’s a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.” — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“She did not divide conduct into parts. She was attempting always a wholeness. When there is wholeness there are no causes. Only there is… — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next. — Paul Scott Copy Share
“I had that sensation which sometimes comes to us all, of returning to a situation that had already been resolved on some previous occasion,… — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“But it is not these things which most impress the stranger on his journey into the civil lines, into the old city itself (where he becomes lost and notes the passage of a woman dressed in the burkha in the street of the moneylenders) and then back past the secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and Government House, and on into the… — Paul Scott Copy Share
“wily minds and cold hearts were the combination Bronowsky found most common in English administrators.” — Paul Scott Copy Share Image
“Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake… — Paul Scott Copy Share