The Last Word

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
—Harold Rosenberg

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
—Donald H. Rumsfeld

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
—Voltaire

Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
—Heywood Broun

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
—Oscar Wilde

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
—William Blake

To be mature means to face, and not evade, every fresh crisis that comes.
—Fritz Kunkel

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.
—Ulysses S. Grant

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.
—Edgar Alan Poe

Rest assured that there is nothing which wounds the heart of a noble man more deeply than the thought his honour is assailed.
—Moliere

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
—Lenin

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
—G.K. Chesterton

The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
—Daniel Webster

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
—Robert Frost

Learn as much by writing as by reading.
—Lord Acton

Hell is other people.
—Jean-Paul Sartre

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.
—Frank Lloyd Wright

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
—George Washington

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt

Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve. Run around with decent folk and your own decent instincts will be strengthened.
—Stanley Walker

Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
—Fran Lebowitz

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
—Voltaire

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.
—Henry J. Kaiser

I believe that the power to make money is a gift from God.
—John D. Rockefeller

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
—Alfred Hitchcock

Fortune is always on the side of the biggest battalions.
—Marquise de Sevigne

Hanover winters can be as capricious as a Smith girl on a Dartmouth sleigh ride.
—Holiday Magazine, 1948

The Last Word

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