The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

‘Evergreen Review’ December 1964
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
‘New York Review of Books’ 18 April 1974
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual
citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to
use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify
ourselves as citizens of that other place.
‘New York Review of Books’ 26 January 1978
The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone—its ideologies
and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset
the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
‘Partisan Review’ Winter 1967, p. 57
It is the nature of the pornographic imagination to prefer ready-made conventions of character,
setting, and action. Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
‘The Pornographic Imagination’ (1967)
7.128 Donald Soper (Baron Soper) 1903—
It is, I think, good evidence of life after death.
On the quality of debate in the House of Lords, in ‘Listener’ 17 August 1978
7.129 Sophocles 496-406 B.C.
My son, may you be happier than your father.
‘Ajax’ l. 550
Enemies’ gifts are no gifts and do no good.
‘Ajax’ l. 665
His death concerns the gods, not those men, no!
‘Ajax’ l. 970 (referring to Ajax’s enemies, the Greek leaders)
There are many wonderful things, and nothing is more wonderful than man.
‘Antigone’ l. 333
Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.
‘Oedipus Coloneus’ l. 1224 (translation by R. W. Jebb)
Someone asked Sophocles, ‘How do you feel now about sex? Are you still able to have a
woman?’ He replied, ‘Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped
from a mad and savage master.’
In Plato ‘Republic’ bk. 1, 329b
7.130 Charles Hamilton Sorley 1895-1915
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,