David Kynaston > Quotes

“It's nice to watch television but it's even nicer when you've got a drink in your hand,' Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. 'Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you're in a posh cabaret.”
― David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59

“Although wealth, physical health and social equality may all make their contributions to human happiness, they can all do little and cannot themselves be secured, without health in the individual mind. We are our own kingdoms and make for ourselves, in large measure, the world in which we live. We may be rich, and healthy, and liberal; but unless we are free from secret guilt, the agonies of inferiority and frustration, and the fire of unexpressed aggression, all other things are added to our lives in vain. The cruelty and irrationality of human society spring from these secret sources. The savagery of a Hitler, the brutality of a Stalin, the ruthlessness and refined bestiality that is rampant in the world today – persecution, cruelty and war – are nothing but the external expression, the institutional and rationalized form, of these dark forces in the human heart.”
― David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945-51