Gordon Haff's The Last Word

By Christine S. Tian | Sunday, May 4, 2008

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
—John Maynard Keynes

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.
—Charles Lindbergh

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
—Henry Ward Beecher

Music has charms to soothe the savage breast
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
—William Congreve

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
—Albert Schweitzer

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...
—Jack Kerouac

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air...
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
—Robert Ingersoll
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
—Samuel Butler

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
—D. H. Lawrence

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
—Mark Twain

Drinking without being thirsty and making love at any time, Madame, are the only things that distinguish us from other animals.
—Pierre Beaumarchais

All good things are wild, and free.
—Henry David Thoreau

We are all travelers in the wilderness of the World, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is the cruelest animal.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!
—Herman Melville

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero

Come away,O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand
—William Butler Yeats

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.
—Buddha

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.
—Voltaire

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
—Ayn Rand

No beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage.
—Plutarch

…The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
—Thomas Hobbes

He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.
—Hunter S. Thompson

Gordon Haff's The Last Word

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