J.B. Priestley Quotes

Nowadays, it is true, we have mass media and expert propaganda to spread suspicion and fear. But the people I mean—and they form the great majority—are not suspicious and fearful, as many educated and more influential persons are. Propaganda has not made them accept the Bomb. We protesters, though we may have won over some of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, have not made them reject it. They remain profoundly, astonishingly, shockingly indifferent.

But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.

One of the delights known to age and beyond the grasp of youth is that of 'not going'!

What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them yet cannot make plain his difference.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.