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There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty — in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub — our immediate duty is to stop it.

— E. M. Forster

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Politics

More quotes by E. M. Forster

There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

A Room with a View (1908)

Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

Commonplace Book (1985)

A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong.

Selected Letters (1983)

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

Commonplace Book (1985)

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Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

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Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

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Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.

Benito Mussolini

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

Theodor Adorno The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: E. M. Forster (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.