Favorite Quotes

2008-12-12T16:46:14Z

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Samuel P. Huntington

Byron

2008-10-12T18:19:50Z

Alas! could [England] fully, truly, know

How her great name is now throughout abhorred;

How eager all the earth is for the blow

Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword;

How all the nations deem her their worst foe,

That worse than worst of foes, the once adored

False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,

And now would chain them, to the very mind ...

Byron, Don Juan, Canto X

Montherlant

2008-05-11T18:50:13Z

One immediately recognises a man of judgment by the use he makes of the semicolon.

Henri de Montherlant

Thoreau

2008-05-08T16:55:28Z

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living.

Thoreau

James

2008-05-05T02:07:48Z

He was intelligent enough to feel quite humble, to wish not to be in the least hard or voracious, not to insist on his own side of the bargain, to warn himself in short against arrogance and greed. ... Personally, he considered, he hadn't the vices in question -- and that was so much to the good. His race, on the other hand, had them handsomely enough, and he was somehow full of his race. Its presence in him was like the consciousness of some inexpugnable scent in which his clothes, his whole person, his hands and the hair of his head, might have been steeped as in some chemical bath: the effect was nowhere in particular, yet he constantly felt himself at the mercy of the cause.

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, chapter 1.

James

2008-05-05T02:02:53Z

"Oh, you deep old Italians!"

"There you are," he returned. ... "That's the responsible note."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Of my real, honest fear of being 'off' some day, of being wrong, without knowing it. That's what I shall always trust you for -- to tell me when I am. No --with you people it's a sense. We haven't got it -- not as you have."

"I should be interested," she presently remarked, "to see some sense you don't possess."

Well, he produced one on the spot. "The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I've of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase -- half-ruined into the bargain! -- in some castle of our quattrocento is like the 'lightning elevator' in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam -- it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that -- well, that it's as short, in almost any case, to turn around and come down again."

"Trusting," Mrs. Assingham smiled, "to get up some other way?"

"Yes -- or not to have to get up at all."

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, chapter 2.

Nietzsche

2008-05-01T04:45:47Z

To refrain from wounding, violating, and exploiting one another, to acknowledge another's will as equal to one's own: this can become proper behavior, in a certain rough sense, between individuals when the conditions for making it possible obtain, ie, the actual similarity of the individuals in power and values and their coexistence in one greater body or class. But as soon as one wants to extend this principle, to make it the basic principle of society, it shows itself for what it is: the will to negate life, the principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think radically, to the very roots of things, and resist all sentimental weakness. Life itself is essentially assimilation, injury, violation of the foreign and weaker, suppression, hardness, the forcing of one's own forms upon something else, ingestion and -- at least in its mildest form -- exploitation. ... Even that body to which we referred above, the body within which individuals may treat each other with equality, as in a healthy aristocracy -- even this body itself, if it is alive and not dying off, must do to all other bodies those things which its members refrain from doing to one another: it will have to be the will to power incarnate; it will have to want to grow, to branch out, to draw others into itself, to gain supremacy. And not because it is moral or immoral in any sense but because it is alive, and because life simply is will to power. But there is nothing that ordinary Europeans today are less willing to learn than this; everywhere today, and even in the guise of science, there is grandiose talk about future social conditions where there is to be no more "exploitation." To my ears that sounds as though they had promised to invent a kind of life that would refrain from all the organic functions. "Exploitation" is not a relic of primitive or defective societies; it belongs to the nature of living things, it is a basic organic function, a consequence of the will to power, which is the will to life. This may be a novel theory, but it is the basic fact underlying all history. Let us be honest with ourselves at least this far!

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 259.

Charnwood

2008-04-01T04:12:52Z

The true obligation of impartiality is that a man should conceal no fact which, in his own mind, tells against his views.

Lord Charnwood

Trollope

2008-03-29T02:27:54Z

"I hate a stupid man who can't talk to me, and I hate a clever man who talks me down. I don't like a man who is too lazy to make any effort to shine; but I particularly dislike the man who is always striving for effect. I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth, and all that kind of thing. ... A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can't show me that he thinks so without saying a word about it, is a lout."

Violet Effingham in Phineas Finn by Trollope

Chekhov

2008-03-25T14:46:48Z

Give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.

Chekhov

Lincoln

2008-03-14T18:34:03Z

English visitor (after Lincoln apologizes for the condition of his boots): "Why, sir, in England a gentleman never blacks his own boots."

Lincoln: "Indeed. Whose does he black?"

Borges

2008-03-14T02:54:55Z

My father showed me his library, which was very large, and told me to read whatever I wanted, but that if something bored me, I should immediately put it down.

Borges

Karl Kraus

2008-03-07T17:00:45Z

If those who are obliged to look after commas had made sure they are always in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.

Karl Kraus (during the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai)

Wilson

2007-12-24T21:34:34Z

Interviewer: To what do you attribute your success as a writer?

Wilson: To the use of the periodic sentence.

Interviewer: Surely that is not the whole story.

Wilson: And to my use of the colon and the semi-colon. Writing so long for the New Yorker may have led me a little to overdo the comma.

Interviewer: What else?

Wilson: My invariable habit of writing in pencil on those "legal-size" yellow pads -- the kind that are ruled with blue lines. I believe that composing on the typewriter has probably done more than anything else to deteriorate English prose.

"An Interview with Edmund Wilson" (1962)

Kaiser Wilhelm II

2007-12-20T06:21:30Z

Morality is all right, but what about dividends?

Kaiser Wilhelm II