190 Quotes by T.H. White

Might does not make right! Right makes right!

The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there, under the window in Arthur’s Gramarye, the sun’s rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in monasteries and convents, or danced from the pinnacle of cathedrals and castles, which their builders had actually loved. Architecture, in those dark ages of theirs, was such a light-giving passion of the heart that men gave love-names to their fortresses.

We are so numerous that we are starving. Therefore we must encourage still larger families so as to become yet more numerous and starving. When we are so numerous and starving as all that, obviously we shall have a right to take other people’s stores of seed. Besides, we shall by then have a numerous and starving army.

The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.

There is one fairly good reason for fighting – and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a great wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them.

When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long ’till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother’s curse?

A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men. They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origins.

The fisherman fishes as the urchin eats cream buns, from lust.

They did not look at these things as good or bad, exciting, rational or terrible. They did not look at them at all, but accepted them as Done.