Leonard Woolf

Leonard Sidney Woolf (25 November 1880 – 14 August 1969) was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels.

Quotes

There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.
- Letter to John Lehmann, 1937, on the death of Woolf's nephew Julian Bell, who "had gone out to Spain to drive an ambulance". John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs (New York: Holy, Rinehart and Winston, 1979) pp. 58-59

Nothing matters, and everything matters.
- Personal mantra, "much-repeated" according to Claire Tomalin, "'Nothing matters, and everything matters'" [Review of Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victoria Glendinning], The Guardian (16 September 2006)

Barbarians Within and Without (1939)

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to be or remain a civilized man.
- Ch. 2 (p. 65)

The more complicated the life of a community or the more "advanced" the civilization, the more complicated, incessant, and severe becomes the control of instincts which is demanded from the individual.
- Ch. 2 (p. 65)

The barbarian is...not only at our gates; he is always within the walls of our civilization, inside our minds and our hearts. In times of storm and stress within any society, his appeal is very strong. He offers immediate satisfaction of the simple instincts, love, hatred, and anger. He offers to help us to forget our own unhappiness by making other people still more unhappy. He shows us how we may forget our sense of frustration and the intolerable burden of responsibility in blind obedience, the beating of tom-toms, and the shouting of slogans. He gives us the simple satisfaction of violence and destruction, the destruction of society, of the complicated network of rules and regulations, standards and morality which constitute civilization and which all of us feel entangling, frustrating, choking our animal instincts and desires.
- Ch. 2 (pp. 65-66)

Downhill All the Way (1967)

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.
- pp. 158-9

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler, the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, 'come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty'. Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting room window: 'Hitler is making a speech.' I shouted back, 'I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.' Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.
- p. 254

External links

Encyclopedic article on Leonard Woolf on Wikipedia