Vera Brittain quotes

Vera Brittain was an English writer, feminist, and pacifist, celebrated for her memoir "Testament of Youth." Her experiences as a nurse during World War I deeply influenced her literary work and advocacy for peace. She became a prominent voice for women's rights and pacifism in the twentieth century. Here are 18 of her quotes:

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Vera Brittain

Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.

Vera Brittain

All that a pacifist can undertake -- but it is a very great deal -- is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.

Vera Brittain

There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.

Vera Brittain

We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.

Vera Brittain

It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men's attitude to women, and in women's attitude to themselves.

Vera Brittain

For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.

Vera Brittain

I don't think victory over death... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.

Vera Brittain

How futile it had all been, that superhuman gallantry! It had amounted, in the end, to nothing but a passionate gesture of negation-the negation of all that the centuries had taught themselves through long eons of pain.

Vera Brittain

The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer . . . is one of those phantasies that surround authorship.

Vera Brittain

I thought that spring must last forevermore; For I was young and loved, and it was May.

Vera Brittain

The pacifists, task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.

Vera Brittain

I have tried to write the exact truth as I saw and see it about both myself and other people, since a book of this kind has no value unless it is honest... It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes, in effect, the indictment of a civilisation.

Vera Brittain

The fact that his highly respected old friend regarded the presence of women at Oxford as in no way remarkable undoubtedly caused him to revise his opinion on the whole subject of the higher education of daughters.

Vera Brittain

Sometimes... I've wished I'd never met you - that you hadn't come to take away my impersonal attitude towards the War and make it a cause of suffering to me as it is to thousands of others. But if I could choose not to have met you, I wouldn't do it - even though my future had always to be darkened by the shadow of death....[He asked me] "Would you like me any less if I was, say, minus an arm?..." My reply need not be recorded. It brought the tears so near to the surface again that I picked up the coat which I had thrown off, and abruptly said I would lake it upstairs which I did the more promptly when I suddenly realised that he was nearly crying too.

Vera Brittain

When I think how suddenly, instantly, a chance bullet may put an end to that brilliant life, may cut it off in its youth and mighty promise, faith in the ‘increasing purpose' of the ages grows dim.

Vera Brittain