Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

George Santayana on Advertising

Posted on July 11, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

George Santayana

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged ,

Rotten Review: Death on the Installment Plan

Posted on July 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Its effect is to make sympathy, then to put sympathy to sleep, then to exacerbate the nerves of the reader, until, having decided he has as much as he wants to stomach, he throws the book away.”

Times Literary Supplement

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged ,

Wise Words from Africa on Willful Ignorance

Posted on July 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.”

African Proverb

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

Rotten Reviews: Chaucer

Posted on July 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Chaucer, not withstanding [sic] the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible: he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Piers Plowman or Thomas Erceldoune.”

Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron 1835

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , ,

Cyril Connolly on Youth

Posted on July 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

(“Youth is wasted on the young,” as the old saying goes. So is college. Cyril Connolly puts this a bit more gently here.)

“Youth is a period of missed opportunities.”

Cyril Connolly

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Rotten Reviews: Anton Chekhov

Posted on July 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

“If you were to ask me what Uncle Vanya is about, I would say about as much as I can take.”

Robert Garland, Journal American

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , ,

Rotten Reviews: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Posted on July 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

“We cannot name one considerable poem that is likely to remain upon the thresh-floor of fame…We fear we shall seem to our children to have been pigmies [sic], indeed, in intellect, since a man as Coleridge would appear great to us.”

London Weekly Review 1828

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged ,

Edward C. Banfield on Intellectual Independence

Posted on July 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

“A good professor is a bastard perverse enough to think what he thinks is important, not what the government thinks is important.”

Edward C. Banfield, as Quoted in Life (1967)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged

William James on Cognition

Posted on July 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

William James

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged ,

Rotten Reviews: Journey to The End of The Night

Posted on July 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Most readers will find Journey to The End of  The Night a revolting book; its vision of human life will seem to them a hideous nightmare. It does not carry within itself adequate compensation for the bruising and battering of the spirit with which one reads it: there is no purgative effect from all these disgusts. If this is life, then it is better not to live.”

J.D. Adams, New York Times Book Review

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged