Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. ForsterRead
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
Interpretation
Democracy is celebrated for both its diversity and its allowance for critical discussion.
E. M. Forster's quote highlights two fundamental aspects of democracy: its ability to embrace a variety of perspectives and its openness to criticism. By admitting differing opinions and allowing for dissent, democracy not only fosters a rich tapestry of ideas but also strengthens itself by encouraging dialogue and accountability, essential for its health and growth.
In practice
During a political debate, one might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of diverse opinions in democratic discourse.
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
The shortening of devotions starves the soul, it grows lean and faint
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero.
You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.
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