Beatrice Webb Quotes

Are all Cabinets congeries of little autocrats with a super-autocrat presiding over them?

Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.

If a weakly mortal is to do anything in the world besides eat the bread thereof, there must be a determined subordination of the whole nature to the one aim no trifling with time, which is passing, with strength which is only too limited.

At present I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort and respectability of my position. I can't get the training that I want without neglecting my duty.

we have not been impressed with any attribute of the Senate other than its appearance and manners. We have heard the best speakers: they all fire off speeches which deal with the entire subject in general terms and which do not attempt to debate, to answer opponents' arguments or offer new points for discussion. And the speeches are constantly degenerating into empty rhetoric; they abound in quotations from well-known authors or from their own former speeches.

The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal - a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people.

The middle man governs, however extreme may seem to be the men who sit on the Front Bench, in their reactionary or revolutionary opinions.

. . . if I had been a man, self-respect, family pressure and the public opinion of my class would have pushed me into a money-making profession; as a mere woman I could carve out a career of disinterested research.

Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.

All along the line, physically, mentally, morally, alcohol is a weakening and deadening force.

That part of the Englishman's nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.

the possession of wealth, and especially the inheritance of wealth, seems almost invariably to sterilize genius.

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.