John Leonard

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

Richard Ellman

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

The Devil's Dictionary

History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Table-Talk

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.

A Certain World

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

The Dyer's Hand

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

The History of Herodotus

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Good as Gold

History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

Notes of a Native Son

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

African Proverb

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

Die philosophischen Schriften

If we examine a beautiful picture, obscuring all but a tiny patch of it, more will appear in it, but the more we focus on that small patch the more it appears to be but a confused combination of colors lacking true beauty or artistic conception. Let us then remove the cover and examine the picture from a distance appropriate to its appreciation, and then what seemed but a meaningless blotch upon the canvas is revealed to be a stroke of great artistry done by the work’s author. And as the eyes experience a graphic work, so the ears appreciate a work of music. A great composer may incorporate a dissonant chord with his harmonies with the purpose of stimulating his listener, in a matter of speaking to sting him, so that he becomes engaged with the work and concerned about its resolution to proper order. In a like manner we may appreciate perils or even the experience of evil because of the very fact that they give us a sense of empowerment or indeed ostentation…

Precursors

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Translation

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Love

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Scylla and Charybdis

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

Blood Meridian

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Famous Last Words

I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.

It seems absurd

Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.

Famous Last Words

I am ready.

Famous Last Words

Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

Lionel Herrera executed May 12, 1993

I am innocent, innocent, innocent. Make no mistake about this. I owe society nothing. I am an innocent man and something very wrong is taking place tonight.

More Light

Mehr Licht.

Crawford Goldsby (aka Cherokee Bill) asked if he had last words

No! I didn't come here to make a speech. I came here to die.

Thomas J. Grasso, executed March 20, 1995

I did not get my Spaghetti-O's, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.

James French, executed August 10, 1966

Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? 'French Fries'!

Robert Drew, executed August 2, 1994

Remember, the death penalty is murder.

Famous Last Words

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

Famous Last Words

Does nobody understand?

Finnegan's Wake

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Ulysses

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

A Joyce or a Flaubert in Reverse

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.

Infinite Jest

After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines.

Hamlet: Act 1, Scene 2, Polonius

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.

Wage Labor & Capital

But the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work – is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on – is this 12 hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker.

Pnin

He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.

Poems and Problems

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity.

If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses — you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.