The Last Word

By Kevin C. Hudak | Sunday, October 1, 2006

If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.
– Kingsley Amis

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
– GK Chesterton

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
– William F. Buckley, Jr

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
– Soren Kierkegaard

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
– Jean Kerr

Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.
– Fran Lebowitz

The friendship of students and of beauties is for the most part equally sincere, and equally durable: as both depend for happiness on the regard of others, on that which the value arises merely from comparison, they are both exposed to perpetual jealousies, and both incessantly employed in schemes to intercept the praises of each other.
– Samuel Johnson
If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.
– Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

Last summer in Saint-Tropez I was appalled by the way groupies genuflected before people like Jack Nicholson, with his big belly, and George Clooney. There is no discernment between people with fame and people of genuine achievement. Americans have been anesthetized by TV.
– Taki Theodoracopulos

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
– James Fenimore Cooper

If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?
– Saddam Hussein

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.
– William Penn

No sane man will dance.
– Cicero

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
– Al Capone

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.
– Tallulah Bankhead

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

No party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
– Erasmus

I only drink to make other people seem more interesting.
– George Jean Nathan

I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
– Sir Max Beerbohm

If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.
– Sojourner Truth

Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.
– Abbott Lawrence Lowell

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
– Eric Hoffer

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

Abroad is bloody.
– George VI

The Last Word

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