Quotes

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

Follow your bliss.

And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.”

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler .

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

I speak and speak, but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. . . . It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

[ Proverb quoted by Caesar as he crossed the Rubicon River in defiance of restrictions on his army :] The die is cast.

You too, my son?

I had rather be the first man among those fellows than the second man in Rome.

I wished my wife to be not so much as suspected.

The tribe of Barabbas was unquestionably a bookseller.

John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique, Just as he really promis’d something great . . .’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

Such writing [John Keats’s] is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always f—gg—g his imagination .—I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.

“Who killed John Keats?”

But who, alas! can love, and then be wise?

I have been more ravished myself than any body since the Trojan war.

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumbered with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation—I wish he would explain his explanation.

There were his young barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday.

I wonder how the deuce any body could make such a world; for what purpose dandies, for instance, were ordained—and kings—and fellows of colleges—and women of “a certain age”—and many men of any age—and myself, most of all!

Here, where the sword united nations drew, Our countrymen were warring on that day!

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation),—sleep, eating, and swilling—buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.

[ Of Annabella Milbanke, Byron’s future wife and an amateur mathematician :] My Princess of Parallelograms.

A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born.

God is Love—I dare say! But what a mischievous devil Love is!

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime. A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

The family is a survival of the principle which is more logically embodied in the compound animal. . . . I would do with the family among mankind what nature has done with the compound animal, and confine it to the lower and less progressive races.

Some boys are born stupid; some achieve stupidity; and some have stupidity thrust upon them.

Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall;

For Justice, though she’s painted blind, Is to the weaker side inclined.

[ Explaining why he did not consult his father, former President George H. W. Bush, on the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003 :] There is a higher father that I appeal to.

[ Of requests to give Iraq more time to disarm :] This looks like a rerun of a bad movie and I’m not interested in watching it.

When I take action, I’m not going to fire a two-million-dollar missile at a ten-dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.

I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.

[ Of his youthful indiscretions :] When I was young and irresponsible I was young and irresponsible.

I’m the decider.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

[ On Iraqi militants attacking U.S. forces :] My answer is bring them on.

I’m the master of low expectations.

My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?

States like these [Iraq, Iran, and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.

We have seen their kind before. They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

It is time for us to win the first war of the 21st century.

I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, that I recall, that said, “Wanted, Dead or Alive.”