Dorothy L. Sayers

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?

Dorothy L. Sayers

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?... Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?... And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?... Is not the great defect of our education today---a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned---that, although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!

Dorothy L. Sayers

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delaware had replied, somewhat daily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

Dorothy L. Sayers

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

Dorothy L. Sayers

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

Dorothy L. Sayers

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