Virginia Woolf Quotes
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press, 1927, p. 67.
He was one of the world’s greatest polymaths who among his other accomplishments was the “Father of Sociology” and was the leading Islamic intellectual of his era.
See {629123} for another of Emerson’s definitions of Civilization.
The conference to which he referred was the 1884 Berlin Conference where the European powers carved up Africa into colonial empires. He continued to attribute the difficulties of the African nations to the vestiges of colonialism over a century later. In addition to the effect of colonialism, however, it was he who after being elected popularly, established a one party autocracy, where there was never a chance thereafter to vote for anyone else. It was he who introduced Communist style socialism which ruined the Zambian economy. And it was he who tolerated the corruption that, after independence, spread throughout the country and plagues so much of Africa.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
