Blake, Nicholas: The Smiler with the Knife

Cecil Day-Lewis was Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. He was also the father of Daniel Day-Lewis. I knew him best as Nicholas Blake, his pseudonym for mysteries and thrillers. The following quotes (among others) from The Smiler with the Knife remain as chilling in the US today as they were in England in 1939 (when the book was published).

1) There is nothing easier than turning a personal grievance the other way and calling it patriotism.

2) Georgia was inclined to under-estimate the enormous potential strength of stupidity. Like herself, millions of men and women in England were still saying ‘That sort of thing cannot happen here.’ Even Georgia, who was seeing it begin to happen, could not quite believe her eyes—so difficult was it for English people of her class to shake from their eyes the scales which long security had grown there.

3) His belief in himself was so implicit that he could never doubt, at the moment, the truth of his own words. He was a self-deceiver on a heroic scale, and of that stuff dictators are made.