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A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese.

— F. L. Lucas Style (1955)

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More quotes by F. L. Lucas

Tiresome as intellectuals can be, even they are probably much less menacing and pernicious to the world than anti-intellectuals.

The Search for Good Sense (1958)

Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm.

And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

Style (1955)

Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed.

Style (1955)

Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things.

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