Richard Davenport-Hines Quotes & Sayings

Good work is not done by 'humble' men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking 'Is what I do worthwhile?' and 'Am I the right person to do it?' will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little, and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. G. H. Hardy — Richard Davenport-Hines

The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That's nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably 'mouching' until he dies, and then we say, "Oh, he must have been bad after all."
Charles Lightoller — Richard Davenport-Hines

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience. — Richard Davenport-Hines

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Men like Crawford mistrusted Keynes because his views were unconfused. Throughout his life Keynes produced unimpeachable facts and figures, clear analyses, direct solutions and trenchant practical advice all based on the nitty-gritty of his subject, which were discounted by officials, politicians and bankers who dismissed him as academic, theoretical, quixotic, impractical. To them his clarity seemed too good to be true. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Madness is not enlightenment, but the search for enlightenment is often mistaken for madness. — Richard Davenport-Hines

At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies. — Richard Davenport-Hines

The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Although there is a human settlement at Jakobshavn, Greenland is an inhuman landscape of never-ending wastes. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them. — Richard Davenport-Hines

had gone to work in Worcester's famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized. — Richard Davenport-Hines

One of the library occupants was Lawrence Beesley, a Dulwich College science master seeking new chances in America (his small son grew up to marry Dodie Smith, the author of The 101 Dalmatians). — Richard Davenport-Hines

He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it. — Richard Davenport-Hines