Quoted By:
On Lovecraft reconsidering his political allegiances in his 40s
>"In the summer of 1936 Lovecraft made an interesting admission: "I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons - and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression - and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial and governmental problems - jolted me out my lethargy and led me to reexamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right [...] At last I began to recognise something of the way in which capitalism works - always piling up concentrated wealth and impoverishing the bulk of the population until the strain becomes so intolerable as to force artificial reform."
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On Lovecraft's and the qualities of the ideal man
>"what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system [...] a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position"
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On Lovecraft distinguishing aristocrats from the masses
>"We cannot [...] afford to base a civilisation on the low cultural standards of an undeveloped majority. Such a civilisation of mere working, eating, drinking, breeding, and vacantly loafing or childishly playing isn't worth maintaining. None of the members of it are really better of than as if they didn't exist at all [...] No settled, civilised group has any reason to exist unless it can develop a decently high degree of intellectual and artistic cultivation."
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