Meg Rosoff Quotes

When I was young I used to read about the decline of Western civilization, and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to.

The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

As the world gets dumber and dumber, I feel more and more at home.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages.

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves most foolish.

I shouldn't say bad things about the illiterate, though..I should write it. That way they won't find out.

I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

Ain't it funny what people say? Ain't it funny what people write?

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.

[Hawthorne''s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

For me, it's important to elevate the hypocrisy with humor. Then you really are using the humor to elevate the problem, saying this is why it matters, and then saying we can combine the work together with laughing and being around joyful people and helping out. So the comedy sometimes can actually full-on expose the issue, but also it's a gathering tool. It serves a lot of purposes.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

Well, my dear," said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note aloud, "if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness—if she should die, it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of Mr. Bingley, and under your orders.

K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.

Rough Johnson, the great moralist.