English Prose

Famous quotes containing the words english and/or prose:

    The mob has many heads but no brains.
    —17th-century English proverb, collected in Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)

    Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
    Victor Hugo (1802–1885)