BARTLETT'S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS @bartlettsfamiliarquotations - Tumblr Blog

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Two million deaths is pretty sad, and three deaths is a tragedy again. Chopping off someone’s leg isn’t the end of the world; it’s equal to about five million deaths, statistics-wise. 50,000 deaths will definitely ruin your day, and 200 deaths will make you go “oh, my God—that’s insane! What happened?!” I don’t know what branch of mathematics you’d apply to those weird cases where a guy everyone thought was dead wakes up in the morgue like a day later. Also, I’d just as soon steer clear of quantifying rape.

Josef Stalin [Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili], Attributed (via bartlettsfamiliarquotations)

Writers are always selling somebody out. My brother cheated on his income tax return last year; he's been claiming a lot of personal expenses for his 'home office.' See? I just did that for the hell of it.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem [1968], preface

A whale-ship was my Yale College, and my Harvard. A crows-nest was my Vanderbilt, and a foredeck my Oberlin. Didn't learn too much from a scullery; that was like my Arizona State, or maybe my Syracuse. A helm, though—that was my University of Michigan. A good, solid liberal arts education, that.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 24

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Except with waaaaaay bigger dicks. If we're going to become men anyway, might as well have the biggest frickin' ding-dongs possible. Am I right, ladies?

Gloria Steinem, Speech at Yale University [September 1981]

A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery, and deceit as the perpetration of a crime. Paint falsely, and then add the accent of nature. So, if you ever enjoy one of my paintings in a museum, guess what? That’s me shitting right in your fucking face and laughing so hard about it that champagne and caviar shoot out of my nose all over my piles of money.

Edgar Degas, Attributed

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent, you dumbfuck.

[Anna] Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story [1937]

'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her. BAM! First rock hits her right between the eyes—great shot. SMASH! Second rock knocks a couple of her teeth out. The third rock whiffs and flies over her shoulder, but then WHAMMO—the fourth rock gets her right in the gut, and she's like, 'hurrggh…hurrrrrrgh…' 'cause the wind's knocked out of her; looks like she might even puke. The end.

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery [1948]

Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. Actually, she may have died over the weekend—certainly no later than last Friday. Unless...okay, no. So, last Friday I remember I went to lunch with this guy Erik, and I think Mother had already died, so sometime prior to that. Now I'm thinking Wednesday, for some reason? I'm like 85-percent sure she died within the month.

Albert Camus, The Stranger (L'Étranger) [1942], I

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. Excepting, of course, monsters. Should one expect us to legislate and deliberate away some unholy abomination, either cobbled together by a madman in defiance of God's Will inside his storm-lit mountain keep, or having otherwise issued forth from the bowels of Hell?! No! The cleansing fire of a bloodthirsty, frothing-insane mob is the only answer! And to any man who would say otherwise, let him know we are coming with pitchfork, cudgel, and torch in hand to burn his homestead to cinders and beat his children to death in front of his very eyes!

Abraham Lincoln, Address at the Young Men's Lyceum, Springfield, Illinois [January 27, 1838]

I am the Love that dare not speak its name. But it rhymes with 'domosexual.' Also, 'homoblexual.'

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, Two Loves [1894]

Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also. Unless the enemy should go into a very spooky forest, with cobwebs, shadows, dead branches and the like. I would ask no man under my command to unduly suffer the willies at my behest.

Ulysses S[impson] Grant, Dispatch to General Henry W. Halleck from City Point, Virginia [August 1, 1864]

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. Like the time I tried to climb a ladder while eating a hot dog and fell, and I smashed up some of my favorite porcelain figurines, and also this really nice globe I got as a gift. I blamed that on just about everybody but myself. That wasn’t right.

Stendhal [Marie-Henri Beyle], Journal [December 10, 1801]

Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed; before the eagle landed, the eagle’s skull caved in, and then ballooned outward to many times its original size, sending the eagle’s beak and eyeballs out of the range of our instruments in the resulting cranial explosion. So, the conclusion of the experiment is no, a bald eagle cannot survive on the surface of the moon. Now we’re gonna see what happens when we chuck a bunch of cans of corn out there.

Neil [Alden] Armstrong, On reaching the moon [July 20, 1969]

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence shovel should contain no unnecessary doorknob words, a paragraph no unnecessary—inexplicably, I am now reminded of a slice of incredible rhubarb pie I had the occasion to eat some 20 years ago. Perhaps it was the golden-dappled, late-afternoon sun streaming through the windows of that that dusty roadside luncheonette, or the electric newness of a now long-forgotten love seated across from me, but the intervening decades have done nothing to dull the sensation of the pastry’s fresh, bracing tartness on my tongue—lines, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. Tugboat.

William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style [1918], ch. 2, sec. 13

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced. I would like to encourage future historians to keep that in mind when revisiting the woman-drawn stagecoach from my time.

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance [1873]

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Two million deaths is pretty sad, and three deaths is a tragedy again. Chopping off someone’s leg isn’t the end of the world; it’s equal to about five million deaths, statistics-wise. 50,000 deaths will definitely ruin your day, and 200 deaths will make you go “oh, my God—that’s insane! What happened?!” I don’t know what branch of mathematics you’d apply to those weird cases where a guy everyone thought was dead wakes up in the morgue like a day later. Also, I’d just as soon steer clear of quantifying rape.

Josef Stalin [Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili], Attributed

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. For example, eradicating an entire other species from the face of the Earth, such as the passenger pigeon, or perhaps the Caribbean monk seal. Doing something like that would really give mankind a leg up.

Horace Mann, Commencement Address, Antioch College [1859]

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BARTLETT'S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS