Unpopular Opinions Quotes

“In the image of his experience, we can recognise the image of some experience of our own—something that had happened to us, but which we had never understood, never formulated or expressed to ourselves, and therefore never known as a real experience. When we read the poem, or see the play or picture or hear the music, it is as though a light were turned on inside us. We say: 'Ah! I recognise that! That is something which I obscurely felt to be going on in and about me, but I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t express it. But now that the artist has made its image—imaged it forth—for me, I can possess and take hold of it and make it my own, and turn it into a source of knowledge and strength.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“Of all forms of modern fiction, the detective story alone makes virtue ex hypothesi more interesting than vice, the detective more beloved than the criminal.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“that school of thought for which the best kind of play or story is that in which nothing particular happens from beginning to end.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“interviewer’s playful habit of making statements himself and attributing them to his victim, make reported interviews singularly unreliable reading.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“unofficial censorship by a Press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“and that mechanically-minded persons should not issue booklets of bad verse.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“the sincerest efforts after virtue produce only chaos if they are directed by a ramshackle and incoherent philosophy.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“I have no use whatever for Enlightened Opinion, whose science is obsolete, its psychology superficial, its theology beneath contempt and its history nowhere”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“Because we tried to be good. We made no arms, because Enlightenment said it was naughty.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“A just war was as wicked as an unjust war. War itself must be outlawed and abolished.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“or abandon our beautiful and useful grammatical tools because these barbarians do not know how to handle them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“while it is childlike and charming in us to enjoy their sing-song speech and their quaint foreign barbarisms, to imitate these things is childishness and folly.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“these persons are foreigners; that the Scots and the Irish were so from the beginning and that the Americans have become so; that they speak our language as foreigners; and that while it is childlike and charming in us to enjoy their sing-song speech and their quaint foreign barbarisms, to imitate these things is childishness and folly.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions

“the semi-intellectuals recently, that curious little cosmopolitan crowd who have lost their English roots and wish to persuade us that Englishry is the last infirmity of Blimpish mind.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions