We have become desensitized. Watching, night after night, day after day, year after year, the horrors going on all over the world have desensitized us exactly as those soldiers have been deliberately brutalized. No one set out to brutalize us, to make us callous; but that is what we increasingly are.

— Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Quotes

Women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create a man.

— Doris Lessing

Half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

— Doris Lessing

Emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that’s why people are measuring it out.

— Doris Lessing

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective.’ Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

— Doris Lessing

We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.

— Doris Lessing

While the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are amoung the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, color predjudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.

— Doris Lessing

We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.

— Doris Lessing

Nearly all the pressures from outside are in terms of group beliefs, group needs, national needs, patriotism and the demands of local loyalties, such as to your city and local groups of all kinds. But more subtle and more demanding – more dangerous – are the pressures from inside, which demand that you should conform, and it is these that are the hardest to watch and to control.

— Doris Lessing

We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.

— Doris Lessing

I don’t think there’s a pattern anywhere – you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren’t good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

— Doris Lessing

That’s what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable.

— Doris Lessing

We have almost reached a point where if one values democracy, one is denounced as reactionary. I think that this will be one of the attitudes that will be found most fascinating to historians of the future. For one thing, the young people who cultivate this attitude towards democracy are usually those who have never experienced its opposite: people who’ve lived under tyranny, value democracy.

— Doris Lessing

My brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable.

— Doris Lessing

A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own.

— Doris Lessing

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.

— Doris Lessing

There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

— Doris Lessing

It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing – I mean, it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning, to do without something one wants. It’s not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I’m capable of doing something bigger. Or I’m a person who needs love, and I’m doing without it. What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.

— Doris Lessing

Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

— Doris Lessing

Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions – and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas – can’t be yours alone.

— Doris Lessing

We have become desensitized. Watching, night after night, day after day, year after year, the horrors going on all over the world have desensitized us exactly as those soldiers have been deliberately brutalized. No one set out to brutalize us, to make us callous; but that is what we increasingly are.

— Doris Lessing
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