Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/06/02/the_last_word.php
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
—Leo Strauss
The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little meritocrats.
—David Brooks
The best education for the best is the best education for all.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins
Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
—Isaiah Berlin
A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.
—M. F. K. Fisher
That no free Government, or the blessing of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
—Virginia Declaration of Rights
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three.
—Philip Larkin
You have not experienced real loathing and contempt until you have been through a schism among rival Marxists.
—Christopher Hitchens
Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.
—Robert Conquest
I readily concede that here and there I am probably hard to read, and I am likely to become harder as the illiteracy of the public increases.
—Saul Bellow
Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians.
—W. H. Auden
When rent-a-quote senators claim to be pro-U.N. or multilateralist, the tsunami operation is what they have in mind — that when something bad happens the United States should commit to working through the approved transnational bureaucracies and throw even more 'resources' at them, even though nothing will happen (Sri Lanka), millions will be stolen (Oil for Food), children will get raped (U.N. peacekeeping operations) and hundreds of thousands will die (Sudan).
—Mark Steyn
There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one's while.
—Marcel Proust
I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Evelyn Waugh was a man.
—Sofia Coppola
A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight.
—Annie Dillard
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
—Gore Vidal
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
—Cyril Connolly
Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.
—Evelyn Waugh
If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black.
—Bob Dylan
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
—John Webster
Nothing is so poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
—George Santayana
War is a necessary part of God's arrangement of the world...without war, the world would slide dissolutely into materialism.
—Helmuth von Moltke
Thou lookst like the Antichrist in that lewd hat.
—Ben Jonson