Sad Little Men Quotes

“I am all for the Public Schools but I do not want to go there again.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“The thread that unites the Britain of the 2020s with 1920 and 1820 is Orwell’s famous definition of the country as ‘a family with the wrong members in control’.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“In the 1930s, Stalin asked his mother why, as a child, he was beaten so frequently. She replied: ‘It didn’t do you any harm.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“When he was Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, for example, Johnson claimed he ‘was acting out of loyalty to an old friend’ when he agreed to help locate a fellow journalist so his pal could have him physically assaulted. The ‘old friend’ was from school, of course he was, and the targeted journalist was not one of them (‘these people are … it’s like they’re like dogs’).”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“Sally was told that the boys were ‘scared shitless, and would have the piss ripped out of them for evermore. Which explained everything.’ A natural introvert, after Christmas Sally approached boys at random and talked to them.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“The end was within sight, and for ten years the aim had been exit velocity with a built character, a traditionally constructed self.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“The ten-week campaign was more of an instinct than a war, a twitching phantom limb of Britain’s avenging empire.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“Unable to escape, we adapted. Back at school we killed one self and reanimated another, until we forgot which version, if either, was authentic.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“I’d have to learn to escape while staying where I was.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“At Pinewood we had two nurses with confusing motherly bosoms, and one term a young Australian intern with whom every boy fell in love.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“I once saw a small boy screaming while horizontal with his hands clamped to the driver’s door of a Volvo estate, while his father tried to pull him off by the legs. The mother sat in the passenger seat, and the next time she heard from her son it would be by post.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, engrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. I’m fine.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“hardness of heart of the educated”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“An enduring mystery of boarding schools, at least for the children, was why parents chose to make this decision. The experience was harrowing enough in 1975, but also in 1950 and 1930 and 1910. What was wrong with these people? Had they no heart? In most cases, their education was to blame. The majority of fathers had suffered the same type of schooling themselves, so didn’t know any better.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“I do know that they spent the formative years of their childhood in boarding schools being looked after by adults who didn’t love them, because I did too.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“It’s as much of a coincidence as when a man marries a woman with the same first name as his mother.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

“a defaulting not from prescribed activity but from prescribed being’.”
― Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England