Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock

Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, CH, DBE, FBA, FMedSci (née Wilson; 14 April 1924 – 20 March 2019) was British philosopher of morality, education and mind, and writer on existentialism.

Quotes

• I knew of myself, from the age of about fifteen, that I was a natural Tory. All my instincts and all my loves were Trollopian. I loved the thought of a landed aristocracy, though I would never be a member of one (I did not, even in my fantasies, believe that I should marry a duke). I loved hunting; I loved time-honoured hierarchies; I loved cathedrals. I wanted to become an old-fashioned scholar. Above all, perhaps, I loved the idea of accumulating, inheriting and passing on wealth to my family. Nothing could be further from the politics of the Left. Yet increasingly during the war I felt that to indulge my instincts was wrong. I must pull myself together, recognise the unfairness of my privileged and comfortable way of life, begin properly to aim for a classless society, think about politics, become someone who would go to what I vaguely thought of as Meetings. By 1945, I had talked myself pretty thoroughly round to the Left.
  • A Memoir: People and Places (2000)

• Oxford is, and always has been, full of cliques, full of factions, and full of a particular non-social snobbiness.
  • The Observer, 2 November 1980. Bloomsbury Thematic Dictionary of Quotations. Bloomsbury Publishing. 1997. online