Gordon Haff's Last Word

By Nicholas Desai | Friday, March 3, 2006

The cold of the northern parts is that which, without aid of discipline, doth make the bodies hardest, and the courage warmest.
—Francis Bacon

As reason destroys, the poet must create.
—Wallace Stevens

If you can’t have a sense of policy, you should at least try to have a sense of history.
—Christopher Hitchens

Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest. In society, there are protections against the weak. Society is our frail barrier against nature.
—Camille Paglia

What characterizes the dilettante is his delight in the always preliminary nature of his never-to-be-culminated understanding.
—Heinrich Zimmer

We can easily broaden and not deepen. We should do both.
—William Jewett Tucker

Unless philosophers rule as kings, or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, there is no rest from ills for the cities.
—Socrates

There is nothing so useless as a general maxim.
—Thomas Macaulay

Facts are ventriloquists’ dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
—Aldous Huxley

Strong decoction of flesh for the table.
—Dr. Johnson’s definition of “soup”

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want you to win the foreign film award.
—Billy Wilder

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
—James Joyce

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
—Mark Twain

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Dr. Johnson

When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.
—George Orwell

This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power.
—Philip Larkin

All nations have agreed in the necessity of a strict education, which consisted in the observance of moral duties.
—Jonathan Swift

“Willing too is merely an experience,” one would like to say… It comes when it comes, and I cannot bring it about.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all thing would pass away.
—Heracleitus of Ephesus

Heroin was our badge. Hipsters used heroin. Squares didn’t.
—Red Rodney

No, thanks.
—Gyorgy Konrad, upon being offered the ’presidency of liberated Hungary

I am not one of the people who believes that oppression imbues a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity.
—James Baldwin

A martyr’s disciples suffer more than the martyr.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Gordon Haff's Last Word

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