gordon haff's last word

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Friday, April 21, 2006

My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth century cathedral.

—Henry James

Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.

—Gore Vidal

It isn’t writing at all — it’s typing.

—Truman Capote

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

—Montesquieu

[Evelyn Waugh] was an antique in search of a period, a snob in search of a class.

—Malcom Muggeridge

When a Manic Depressive escapes from his Furies, he’s irresistible. He captures History.

—Saul Bellow

You never really know a woman until you meet her in court.

—Norman Mailer

Thou has committed—

Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

—Christopher Marlowe

Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments, try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Know thyself.

—Oracle of Delphi

‘I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all.’

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises; for never intending to go beyond promises; it costs nothing.

—Edmund Burke

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

—William F Buckley Jr.

Everybody’s got plans...until they get hit.

—Mike Tyson

The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contagious impressions that composed our life at the time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive alas! as the years.

—Marcel Proust

O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.

—Voltaire

Fighting with The Dartmouth Review is much like wrestling with a pig-— everyone gets muddy, and the pig likes it.

—Dinesh D’Souza

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep—herding.

—Ezra Pound

Ever heard of Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Morons.

—Vicini

I’m seeking the high seas rather than a safe harbor. If I sink, you’re excused from mourning me.

—Gustave Flaubert, on Madame Bovary

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

—Charles Bukowski

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

—Doris Lessing

The Review is dangerously affecting, indeed poisoning, the intellectual environment of our campus.

—James O. Freedman, President Emeritus

The battle-line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

—C. S. Lewis

O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.

—Voltaire

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

—Ringo Starr

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

—Camille Paglia

‘History,’ Stephen said, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’

—James Joyce

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

—T. S. Eliot

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of the will, intelligence, spirit.

—Whittaker Chambers

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the single-handed defiance of the world.

—Eric Hoffer

Now is the time—Oop Bop Schbam!!

—Charlie Parker

gordon haff's last word

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