We English are good at ...

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
 P. D. James

More phrases

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality.
 Susanne Katherina Langer
In that period, we had the Cold War mentality imbued through us - the Post-war [environment] and the Cold War. I think we were reflecting some of that. This was before the Wall collapsed, etc.
 Stephen Mallinder
The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.
 Nicolas Winding Refn
I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.
 Jules Feiffer

Quotes from the same author

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
 P. D. James
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
 P. D. James
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.
 P. D. James
A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.
 P. D. James
I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.
 P. D. James