Goodness Doesn't Just Happen
"What’s good on this earth does not happen as a matter of course. It has to be created and maintained by the effort of love and by submission to the rule of law."
Rebecca West 1892-1983
Rebecca West was an amazing writer and social commentator. Her experiences through both world wars gave colorful life to the ink which she left on paper. She was a popular essayist to many news magazines in her lifetime.
The above quote came from an essay which she actually recorded in her own voice, entitled Goodness Doesn't Just Happen.
An avowed feminist, she is best remembered for her reflections on the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremburg for which the President of the United States (Harry Truman) called her “the world’s best reporter." Born Cecily Isabel Fairfield, she used the pen name Rebecca West.
She dated the famous novelist H. G. Wells from whom she had her only son. She also dated Charlie Chaplin but married Henry Andrews in 1930. Ms West played herself in the 1981 film Reds.
In 1947, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine with the caption "In the 20th century, treason is a vocation", a reference to her 1949 bestseller The Meaning of Treason.
In 1959, the British government appointed her a Dame Commander of the British Empire.
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Comments
Well there might be a few good thing, like the grand canyon, etc, but by and large, if she is referring to man made things, then she is absolutely right. I think in physics they call it entropy, where there must be certain amount of energy to keep something going. Without people putting effort into the system there would only be chaos and random disorder. William A. Kennedy - Las Vegas Lawyer