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81 " Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalise so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth - that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every set-back insuperable? "
― Vera Brittain , Testament of Youth
82 " I had seen the poor, the meek and the modest, the young, the brave and the idealistic - all those, in fact, who always are too easily enchanted by high-sounding phrases - giving their lives and their futures in order that the powerful might have more power, the rich grow richer, the old remain in comparative security. "
83 " To extend love, to promote thought, to lighten suffering, to combat indifference, to inspire activity. To know everything of something and something of everything. "
84 " [Your letter] is a morass of confusion, wordiness, overloaded sentences and strained metaphors… [The greater part of it is incomprehensible], or else it is that I have neither the time nor the patience to dig the principle sentence out of the surrounding forests of subordinate clauses.” – Vera Brittain to her husband George Catlin, 1925. "
― Vera Brittain
85 " Few of humanity's characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to lie. "
86 " I do not believe that a League of Nations, or a Kellog Pact, or any Disarmamnt Conference, will ever rescue our poor remnant of civilisation from the threatening forces of destruction, until we can somehow impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through thunder-clouds, from time to time glorifies war. "