Charles Dickens — "I am not a believer in the perfectibility of human nature."
I am not a believer in the perfectibility of human nature.
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More from Charles Dickens
"There are some things in the world that a man cannot know, and ought not to know, if he could."
"I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time."
"I hope that real love and affection are long-lived. I hope that real love and affection are not easily chilled by absence, or killed by separation."
"I have a great deal of the child in me, and that is why I love children."
"I am a man who has always been very much in the habit of doing what he likes, and of not doing what he doesn't like."
About Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
English novelist whose Oliver Twist (1838), A Christmas Carol (1843), and Bleak House (1852) made Victorian poverty inescapable for the British middle class. Closely associated with William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair rival and contemporary serial novelist) and George Eliot (later Victorian giant who built on Dickens's social-realism foundation). For an intellectual contrast, see Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism (1748-1832) — Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854) is a direct caricature of Bentham-style social calculation — 'Facts, sir, nothing but Facts!' is the most-cited literary attack on utilitarianism's reduction of human life to measurable units. Dickens's serialized social-novel form is itself a rebuke of utilitarian abstraction.