Richard Davenport-Hines Quotes

#1. At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#2. had gone to work in Worcester's famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#3. He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#4. He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#5. One of the library occupants was Lawrence Beesley, a Dulwich College science master seeking new chances in America (his small son grew up to marry Dodie Smith, the author of The 101 Dalmatians).

Richard Davenport-Hines

#6. The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That's nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably 'mouching' until he dies, and then we say, "Oh, he must have been bad after all."
Charles Lightoller

Richard Davenport-Hines

#7. The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#8. Although there is a human settlement at Jakobshavn, Greenland is an inhuman landscape of never-ending wastes.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#9. Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#10. Madness is not enlightenment, but the search for enlightenment is often mistaken for madness.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#11. Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Richard Davenport-Hines