Rebecca West Quotes
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
West, Rebecca. A Train of Powder. Viking Press, 1955.
Generally we make laws to try and stop bad actions. Without the bad actions, there would generally be no laws.
When people see the process as unfair and insensitive to minority rights and issues— rammed through by one group which wants to dictate how the rest should live, they never even reach the point of considering carefully the actual language and making compromises with that. They just oppose the constitution in toto usually by finding the 2 or 3 most egregious clauses and harping on those with no attempt to improve them and rejecting the entire constitution.
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield DBE, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph, and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason (first published as a magazine article in 1945 and then expanded to the book in 1947), later The New Meaning of Treason (1964), a study of the trial of the British fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier (1918), a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night (published posthumously in 1984), and Cousin Rosamund (1985). Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal.
