Beatrice Webb Quotes

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

Beatrice Webb

#2. 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.

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb

#7. 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.

Beatrice Webb

#8. If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room hill of people, I would say to myself, You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world-why should you be frightened?

Beatrice Webb

#9. 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.

Beatrice Webb

#10. 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.

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb

#12. It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.

Beatrice Webb

#13. 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.

Beatrice Webb

#14. Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb

#16. Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.

Beatrice Webb

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

Beatrice Webb