The Last Word

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.
—Charles Péguy

The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.
—Sigmund Freud

Art renders accessible to men of the latest generations all the feelings experienced by their predecessors and also those felt by their best and foremost contemporaries.
—Leo Tolstoy

Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings.
—Joseph Epstein

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
—Henry Kissenger

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.
—Evelyn Waugh

We ought to depoliticize our lives, free them from politics as from some contagious infection. We ought to free our simple everyday affairs from considerations of politics.
—Gyorgy Konrad

Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
—Samuel

Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of.
—Camille Paglia

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
—Margaret Atwood

Remarks are not literature.
—Gertrude Stein

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
—George Orwell

For what shall it profit an intellectual if he acknowledge a simple truth and lose his Weltanschauung?
—Theodore Dalrymple

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words, writing prose. Anything goes.
—Cole Porter

All fortune can be mastered by endurance.
—Vergil

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
—Flannery O'Connor

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
—Philip Larkin

Joyce Carol Oates invented this Jewish mother's wet dream in a Princeton laboratory, and now we have to live in a world where eager-to-please frauds like Foer receive unearned comparisons to geniuses like Burgess and Joyce. Continuing a disturbing recent literary trend, his overhyped, cutesy first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, features a fictional protagonist whose name is Jonathan Safran Foer. Incidentally, most of us get along just fine with a mere two names, dick.
—New York Press

Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
—Ernest Hemingway

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
—Orson Welles

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
—Mark Twain

The Last Word

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