Edward M Forster quotes

" Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. " # Education # Teachers and Teaching # Honor

" Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. " # Faith

" The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. " # History and Historians # Genius # Death and Dying

" Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. " # Democracy # Critics and Criticism # Variety

" Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle. " # Destiny # Failure # Success

" At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. " # Dignity # Books - Reading # Media

" As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider. " # Examinations # Education # Money

" The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. " # Fiction # Friends and Friendship # Writers and Writing

" We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. " # Freedom of Speech # Freedom # Power

" America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large. " # America # Freedom # Power