Joseph Conrad Quotes on Society
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As to honour - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
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Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.
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'God for men - religions for women,' he muttered sometimes.
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The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.
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Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
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All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity - it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production - by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the capitalist for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value. Leave that pastime to the moralists, my boy.
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All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen would call a crime. You have no force.
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A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
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Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.