26 Quotes by John Grierson

You know the programme which takes the sunlight out of the morning, the chlorophyll from the earth's green finger-tips and sweet song from the bellies of birds, regularly at 12.10 hours of the Sabbath day? They are yattering away about the Arts - and I was saying to myself: the more I hear of some folk the more deeply fascinated I am by hedging and ditching.

Political conflicts distort and disturb a people's sense of distinction between matters of importance and matters of urgency. What is vital is disguised by what is merely a matter of well being.

The life of the village became more and more affected by strikes and lock-outs.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums; are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploitation and cruelty.

Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.

The cultivation of sensibility on purely personal lines may, in fact, be the very worst training for a world where only the corporate and the cooperative will matter.

Such manifestations I account as representing the creative leadership of the new forces of thought and appreciation which attend changes in technological pattern and therefore of the pattern of human relationships in society.

My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a relative good... I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx - though this undoubtedly will be suggested - but from Fichte and Hegel.