Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/05/09/the_last_word.php
Monday, May 9, 2005
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all.
—Samuel Beckett
I've set myself against being concerned with any more worldly success than I need to function with. That's an honest statement and not a piece of attitudinizing. Up to a point, I have to be successful in order to operate. But I think it's corrupting to care about success; and nothing could be more vulgar than to worry about posterity.
—Orson Welles
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, / And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
—W. H. Auden
Social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these two causes united; but when once established, it may justly be considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas which regulate the conduct of nations; whatever it does not produce, it modifies.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Laws can be precise, but a legal system with no vague laws is impossible. The reason is that any legal system needs to regulate a variety of human activity in a general way. No decent traffic scheme can stop with blood-alcohol limits and traffic lights: it also needs prohibitions on dangerous driving.
—Timothy Endicott
[T]here exists a very dangerous tendency to identify the good man with the good sport, the cooperative fellow, the 'regular guy,' i.e., an overemphasis on a certain part of social virtue and a corresponding neglect of those virtues which mature, if they do not flourish, in privacy, not to say in solitude: by educating people to cooperate with each other in a friendly spirit, one does not yet educate nonconformists, people who are prepared to stand alone, to fight alone.... Democracy has not yet found a defense against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy which it fosters.
—Leo Strauss
Finally, although a naïve optimism may have celebrated science—that is, the technique of the mastery of life founded on science—as the path which would lead to happiness. . . . Who, then, still believes in this, with the exception of a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices?
—Max Weber
Everybody outside thinks it's so glamorous. But there's nothing glamorous about it. Hollywood's a factory town, only instead of motor cars or steel, we turn out cans of film.
—Budd Schulberg '36
Perhaps [George W. Bush] should now devote himself to the study of other great historic piss-artists. Winston Churchill was half in the bag for the whole of the Finest Hour, if not longer. General Ulysses Grant managed to stay in the saddle only by means unknown. Richard Nixon, according to the latest release of the Kissinger tapes, was too "loaded" to talk to the British prime minister during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Boris Yeltsin was too plastered to get off his plane during a stopover at Shanon Airport, with the Irish government waiting on the tarmac. Not all these examples are encouraging. But, then, neither is the idea of a man who doesn't trust himself, and isn't trusted by those who know him, to take even a sip. Nobody likes a quitter.
—Christopher Hitchens
Woody Allen's comedy is nothing but a set of variations on the theme of the man who does not have a real 'self' or 'identity,' and feels superior to the inauthentically self-satisfied people because he conscious of his situation and at the same time inferior to them because they are 'adjusted'.... [He] helps to make us feel comfortable with nihilism, to Americanize it. I'm O.K., thou art O.K. too, if we agree to be a bit haunted together.
—Allan Bloom
The Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask [John the Baptist], Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No. Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
—John 1:19-23