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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
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It is the woman - nearly always - in spite of all the advances of modern feminism, who still takes responsibility for the bulk of the chores, as well as doing her paid job. This is true even in households where men try to be unselfish and to do their share.
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Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
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I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
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I've got nothing very original to say myself.
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The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
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Like many people in Britain, I have an affectionate respect for the Queen, and am surprised that I should be having such republican thoughts.
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Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.
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I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
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Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.
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On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.
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A busybody's work is never done.
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The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
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IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.
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I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
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The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.
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There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II - the first computer it produced for the mass market - many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen.
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It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
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It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
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In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.
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Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
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The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
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The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.