We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have k… - Doris Lessing

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

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About Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing (22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British writer, born Doris May Tayler. In October 2007, Lessing became the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in its 106-year history, and its oldest ever recipient.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Pen Names: Jane Somers
Birth Name: Doris May Tayler
Native Name: Doris May Lessing

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Additional quotes by Doris Lessing

My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die — and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing.

We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it — us?

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Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

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