Kate

“Once he wrote to a friend, “There are only two kinds of people in this world: Perpetual children, who are a terrible danger to civilization, and those who were born adult. When the ‘children’ take over this country and adults are in the minority, then it’s the end for this country. I have known adults who were chronologically only ten years old, and children who were seventy-seven. One of these”
― Taylor Caldwell, Ceremony of the Innocent

“And how,” asked the fiery Joshua-bar-Abbas, “do we know at what point the character of a people weakens? It is not like a man who deteriorates through his thoughts and actions before your very eyes.” “When they give over to government,” said Nicodemus, “those duties which they should be pleased to perform themselves. When they are told they will be fed and sheltered even when they won’t work, when they are promised security from the cradle to the grave, when they are told the state will take over the supervision of their children and say what schooling they should receive and where. When they are told all these”
― Taylor Caldwell, I, Judas

“How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm