John, 1st Earl of Eldon Scott Quotes

John, 1st Earl of Eldon Scott offers plain-spoken counsel on law and judgment, useful for readers weighing decisions.

15 quotes

1. It is better that the law should be certain than that every judge should speculate upon improvements in it.

2. I always thought it better to allow myself to doubt before I decided, than to expose myself to the misery, after I had decided, of doubting whether I had decided rightly and justly.

3. I was with you, Mr. Scott-till I heard your argument.

4. Until you see the cross as that which is done _by_ you, you will never appreciate that it is done _for_ you.

5. It's always better if you're next door. Ideas come up at the oddest times. They don't always come up in a conference call.

6. When you commit a serious doping offence you are not eligible for lottery funding.

7. I got to see first hand what he has done to make this a reality. That has been real rewarding to watch him achieve his dream.

8. The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

9. People of this teenager's age are on the brink of adulthood and have to be allowed a greater degree of responsibility. A consequence of this is a decrease in parental responsibility. Therefore to have criminal responsibility for what you don't know about seems rather extreme.

10. If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

11. My work is known by too few people for me to be remembered as a writer - that is, beyond those dedicated souls (bless them) who have followed the oeuvre through its various stages. To be realistic, when they and the last of my friends have died, I doubt I shall be remembered at all.

12. We've invested millions of dollars in tourism. Now they're trying to industrialize and pollute the ocean. It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

13. It's basically a home-rule issue. I think the governing authority that appoints people as assessors certainly has reasons for doing it. ... And it certainly ought to be the board of assessors' right to say who is best qualified to serve as an appraiser.

14. I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

15. The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.