Robert Lynd Quotes

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.

Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.

A cat is only technically an animal, being divine.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.

The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.

There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer.

It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that one has never heard before.

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.

The man who will not defend the honour of his cat cannot be trusted to defend anything.

No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up.

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.

Most human beings are quite likable if you do not see too much of them.

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.

In order to see birds, you have to become part of the silence.

great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. The

History may be read as the story of the magnificent rearguard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.

Most Human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war’, wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, ‘appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

The crucial science of economics derives its data with the assumptions and concepts of a system conceived not in terms of such things as power but of blander processes such as the automatic balancing of the market

The malicious erasure of women’s names from the historical record began two or three thousand years ago and continues into our own period. Women take as great a risk of anonymity when they merge their names with men in literary collaboration as when they merge in matrimony. The Lynds, for example, devoted equal time, thought, and effort to the writing of Middletown, but today it is Robert Lynd’s book. Dr. Mary Leakey made the important paleontological discoveries in Africa, but Dr. Louis Leakey gets all the credit. Mary Beard did a large part of the work on America in Midpassage, yet Charles Beard is the great social historian. The insidious process is now at work on Eve Curie. A recent book written for young people states that radium was discovered by Pierre Curie with the help of his assistant, Eve, who later became his wife. Aspasia wrote the famous oration to the Athenians, as Socrates knew, but in all the history books it is Pericles’ oration. Corinna taught Pindar and polished his poems for posterity; but who ever heard of Corinna? Peter Abelard got his best ideas from Heloise, his acknowledged intellectual superior, yet Abelard is the great medieval scholar and philosopher. Mary Sidney probably wrote Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey, as Samuel Butler proves in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, at least to the satisfaction of this writer and of Robert Graves, who comment, “no other alternative makes much sense.

There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.’ ROBERT WILSON LYND

In order to see the birds it is necessary to be part of the silence. —Robert Lynd

Antipatriot sentiments were shared by a wide variety of people across a broad social spectrum. In New York, ironically, some of those who opposed the Revolution were poor tenant farmers from the 160,000-acre Livingston Manor in the Hudson Valley. Robert Livingston, Jr., lord of the manor, was a Whig Revolutionary—not because of deep philosophical convictions, but because his opponents in New York politics were all Tories. Livingston’s tenants, according to historian Staughton Lynd, saw in the Revolution a chance to oppose their Lord and possibly take possession of the land they worked.