Quotes about the books
DID YOU KNOW?
Bill Clinton turned to Marcus Aurelius and Thomas a Kempis for consolation during Monicagate?
'During the long year between the deposition in the Jones case and my acquittal in the Senate, most of the nights when I was home in the White House I spent two to three hours alone in my office, reading the Bible and books on faith and forgiveness and rereading the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and several of the most thoughtful letters I received …'
Joan Smith on Mary Wollstonecraft
'200 years ahead of her time, Wollstonecraft described the way women's characters were stunted by inequality. She saw their economic dependence on men as a moral canker, and looked forward to a new relation between the sexes, based on affection and respect, that is only now beginning to be achieved.'
George Monbiot on Thomas Paine
'Paine skewers his opponents with agile and often hilarious arguments, while, with tremendous energy and drive, laying out a fiercely convincing democratic philosophy.'
AC Grayling on Freud
'Of Freud's powers as a writer and advocate of ideas, and as a possessor of an extraordinary ability to weave together medical knowledge, some genuine in- sights into the human condition, and a powerful imagination, there can be no question. To read him is to be spellbound. He has the narrative skills of a first-rate novelist, and a knack for devising striking ways to describe the psychological phenomena he studied.'
Timothy Garton Ash on Orwell
'He was the writer who captured the essence of totalitarianism. All over communist-ruled Europe, people would show me their dog-eared, samizdat copies of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four and ask: "How did he know?"
He does not just equip us to detect semantic abuse. He also suggests how writers can fight back. For the abusers of power are, after all, using our weapons: words. In Politics and the English Language he even gives some simple stylistic rules for honest and effective political writing. He compares good English prose to a clean window pane. Through these windows, citizens can see what their rulers are really up to. So political writers should be the window cleaners of freedom.
Orwell both tells and shows us how to do it. That is why we need him still, because Orwell's work is never done.' |
