We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.
J. B. PriestleyRead
The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.
Interpretation
We must prioritize improving our own planet before exploring others.
J. B. Priestley emphasizes the importance of taking care of our own world before reaching out to others. He argues that with courage and skill, humanity can address the issues we face on Earth to create a more civilized and harmonious existence, suggesting that interplanetary exploration should come after we have resolved our terrestrial challenges.
In practice
During an environmental conference, to encourage action on local challenges.
We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.
But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.
A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.
There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.
Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.
The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.
A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — what gospel is that?
Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant.
Fur is not luxury: it is an industry of death and suffering.
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
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