William Golding Quotes

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. .... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head...

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?