There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or fru… - Rebecca West

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There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or frustrate cruelty, and for that purpose we must hear the evidence of all persons affected by their operation and of all persons qualified by experience or learning or speculative gifts to form an interesting opinion on what those operations might be. It is therefore necessary that all classes of men should be given the fullest opportunity to express themselves without constraint, not only out of admiration for an abstraction , but as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist, of whatsoever kind, should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness, and what light may be, and darkness.

English
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About Rebecca West

Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield DBE (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Pen Names: Lynx
Birth Name: Cecily Isabel Fairfield
Alternative Names: West, Dame Rebecca Dame Rebecca West Cicely Fairchild Cicily Isabel Andrews Cicily Andrews Cicely Isabel Fairfield Cicily Isobel Fairfield Cicily Isabel Fairfield Cicily Fairfield Andrews Mrs H. M. Andrews Cicily Fairfield Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield Cicily Farifield
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Additional quotes by Rebecca West

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

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The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.

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