Top 180 William Golding Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.”

— William Golding

2. “The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes, Quotes About Ideas

3. “I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Human Nature Quotes, Evil Quotes

4. “The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.”

— William Golding

5. “Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her.”

— William Golding

6. “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”

— William Golding

7. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

— William Golding

8. “Sucks to your ass-mar!”

— William Golding

9. “At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.”

— William Golding

10. “He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.”

— William Golding

11. “We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”

— William Golding

12. “We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.”

— William Golding

13. “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

— William Golding

14. “The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.”

— William Golding

15. “The Navy’s a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap.’”

— William Golding

16. “I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”

— William Golding

17. “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!”

— William Golding

18. “Worse than madness. Sanity.”

— William Golding

19. “He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.”

— William Golding

20. “There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.”

— William Golding

21. “You’ll get back to where you came from.”

— William Golding

22. “I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”

— William Golding

23. “It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.”

— William Golding

24. “Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better – to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?”

— William Golding

25. “They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.”

— William Golding

26. “Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.”

— William Golding

27. “How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?”

— William Golding

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

28. “Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.”

— William Golding

29. “I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. Oh God, I want to go home.”

— William Golding

30. “There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.”

— William Golding

31. “People don’t help much.”

— William Golding

32. “The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.”

— William Golding

33. “Heaven lies around us in our infancy.”

— William Golding

34. “We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.”

— William Golding

35. “I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “Are we savages or what?”

— William Golding

37. “I only wanted to keep up a fire!”

— William Golding

38. “I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.”

— William Golding

39. “If faces were different when lit from above or below – what was a face? What was anything?”

— William Golding

40. “Which is better – to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?”

— William Golding

41. “Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.”

— William Golding

42. “Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.”

— William Golding

43. “This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Fun Quotes

44. “They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood – and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. In Simon’s right temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain.”

— William Golding

45. “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

— William Golding

46. “Here at last was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life.”

— William Golding

47. “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

— William Golding

48. “The rules!” shouted Ralph. “You’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?” Ralph summoned his wits. “Because the rules are the only thing we’ve got!”

— William Golding

49. “They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned.”

— William Golding

50. “We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.”

— William Golding