C. E. M. Joad

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (12 August 1891 – 9 April 1953) was an English philosopher and broadcasting personality. During the 1940s, he was a participant in The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio discussion programme. He popularised philosophy and became a celebrity, before his downfall in a scandal over an unpaid train fare in 1948.

Joad with the psychic researcher Harry Price in an alleged haunted bed in 1932.

Quotes

• "If it is, then the sooner they give up the pretence of playing with public affairs and return to private life the better. If they cannot make a job of the House of Commons, let them at least make something of their own houses. If they cannot learn to save men from the destruction which incurable male mischievousness bids fair to bring upon them, let women at least learn to feed them, before they destroy themselves."
  • As quoted in Virginia Woolf Three Guineas (1938)

• The thought of the Upanishads is bold and free, and their general conclusion is that mystical experience is the pathway to reality.
  • Quoted in Salil Gewali Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House (2013).

• The civilizations of the East are very old; their roots stretch back into the past to a time when Europe was still a cockpit of fighting savages.
• The thought of the Upanishads is bold and free, and their general conclusion is that mystical experience is the pathway to reality.
• Thus, the doctrines of Hinduism were never reduced to a set of formal creeds and Hindu religion has always been willing to receive new experiences and to incorporate new knowledge.
  • Quoted from Sushama Londhe A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture, New Delhi: Pragun Publications (2008), p. 49 ff.