Reade Quotes & Sayings

I genuinely did not expect more than half our nation to choose to walk away from our long-term allies into the arms of our new friends Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump. Or that they would do so without an economic plan, a trading strategy, or a credible leader, making the average Briton's future more uncertain than any time since the Blitz. — Brian Reade

I figured that in the minute and a half they had been in the room, they were probably already halfway to oblivion. — P.T. Reade

It must be nice to work outdoors in solitude, I thought. Problems start when you have to deal with people. — Amy M. Reade

As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity. — William Winwood Reade

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness. — William Winwood Reade

Judicious absence is a weapon. — Charles Reade

To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall. — William Winwood Reade

All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe. — William Winwood Reade

Like God and Duane Reade drugstores, toxins are everywhere. — A. J. Jacobs

Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. — Arthur Conan Doyle

My favorite place to shop is: any Duane Reade. — Michael Bastian

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. — William Winwood Reade

It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm. — William Winwood Reade

The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal. — William Winwood Reade

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed. — William Winwood Reade

Christians believe themselves to be the aristocracy of heaven upon earth, they are admitted to the spiritual court, while millions of men in foreign lands have never been presented. They bow their knees and say they are 'miserable sinners,' and their hearts rankle with abominable pride. Poor infatuated fools! Their servility is real and their insolence is real but their king is a phantom and their palace is a dream. — William Winwood Reade

Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt. — George Bernard Shaw

I mean to take a good look at any man ere I leap into his arms.'
Then look your fill, and leap away. — Charles Reade

Nature does not contradict herself; the laws which govern the movements of society are as regular and unchangeable as those which govern the movements of the stars. — William Winwood Reade

The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be. — Charles Reade

A public school-educated stockbroker, who wants to shrink the state and let the markets rip, who reinvented himself as a man of the people and convinced millions of disillusioned working-class voters he was on a mission to smash the rich elite he belonged to. — Brian Reade

Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows. — Charles Reade

In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure. — William Winwood Reade

Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all. — William Winwood Reade

Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation. — William Winwood Reade

Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals. — William Winwood Reade

It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all. — William Winwood Reade

As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep. — William Winwood Reade

If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant. — William Winwood Reade

One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man ... It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process. — William Winwood Reade

Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait. — Charles Reade

Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in which there was no need for miracles. Even if he was wrong, he was grown-up. — William Winwood Reade

When historians get to write the truth about this completely unnecessary referendum [Brexit] they won't say it was a vote demanded by the British people to decide their national destiny. They will say it was the final battle in a decades-long Tory Civil War, at the heart of which was a fight to the death between two Old Etonians, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, for the hollow crown. A sort of Eton Wall Game. Where the poorest are put up against the wall and shot. — Brian Reade

Apply thy minde to be a vertuous man
Auoyd ill company (the spoyle of youth;)
To follow Vertues Lore doo what thou can,
(Whereby great profit vnto thee ensuth;)
Reade Bookes, hate Ignorance; (the Foe to Art,
The Damme of Errour, Enuy of the hart). — Richard Barnfield

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills. — George Orwell

Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes. — William Winwood Reade

A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile. — William Winwood Reade

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man. — William Winwood Reade

Example is contagious behavior. — Charles Reade

The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves. — Charles Reade

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality. — William Winwood Reade

What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin? — William Winwood Reade

Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for. — Brian Reade

And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. — William Winwood Reade

We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act. — William Winwood Reade