Last Word

By Nicholas S. Desai | Sunday, June 8, 2008

All Germans are liars. They lie, they lie, they lie.
—V. S. Naipaul

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.
—Anthony Powell

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
—George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron

Fathers and teachers, I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love.’
—The Elder Zosima

I can imagine that an ugly woman who looks in the mirror is convinced that it is her mirror image, and not she, that is ugly. Thus society sees the mirror image of its meanness and is stupid enough to believe that I am the mean fellow.
—Karl Kraus

If this is the world, I live somewhere else.
—Ian Robinson

Calculation and justice tell me that electricity and steam show more love for humanity than chastity and vegetarianism.
—Anton Chekhov

The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: the pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Women should be obscene and not heard.
—Groucho Marx
The world in which youth culture predominates and precocity is the highest achievement is one in which all tenderness is absent.
—Theodore Dalrymple

Man differs more from man, than man from beast.
—John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester

‘Meretritious?’ Meretritious to you, and a happy new year.
—Gore Vidal

If you can deploy the term ‘working class’ to your own career advantage, you are no longer covered by the term.
—John Dolan

Anyone who has stammered will know what agony it is, especially at school. It means you never take the lead in anything or do anything but try to efface yourself. I often wonder if I was shy because I stammered, or vice versa.
—Philip Larkin

Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke...
—Norman Mailer

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people.
—G. K. Chesterton

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
—Ezra Pound

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
—Stefan Zweig

At the same moment he suddenly remembered being asked once before, at some point: ‘Why do you hate so-and-so so much?’ And he had replied then, in a fit of buffoonish impudence: ‘I’ll tell you why: he never did anything to me, it’s true, but I once played a most shameless nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.’
—Fyodor Dostoevsky

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